The Silver Darlings

by Neil M. Gunn

  “Take purse, too.”

  It was a large, heavy purse, the home-cured leather darkened and shiny. Kirsty motioned Catrine to put letter and purse beside her and sit down.

  She groped for the letter and purse with her left hand and tried to lift them towards Catrine. “Take them—from me.” Catrine at once took them. “Yours now. That will save trouble. What I give, I give. You need mention purse to no one. Refuse. It’s yours. Understand?”

  Catrine understood. Kirsty could do what she liked with her own before her death. Afterwards—it would have been a different matter.

  “Count,” ordered Kirsty.

  Catrine counted forty-one golden sovereigns.

  Kirsty nodded. “You will pay funeral expenses. No debts.” Then she made a special effort with her articulation: “Always keep a little in the shottle of your kist, so that you may die decently, and be beholden to no one.”

  “Yes,” answered Catrine, troubled with her emotion. “Thank you.” She bit her quivering lip.

  Kirsty closed her eyes. Her mouth fell open, emitting a sobbing moan and then, after a long interval, another. But presently her eyes opened and her expression seemed to lighten. “If He gave you a soft heart, He gave you willing hands. You have always been a brave, good girl.”

  Catrine strove her utmost, but it was no use. The sobs came and she got up and turned away, muttering, “I’m sorry.”

  While she was composing herself, Kirsty had another spasm, but it was not violent, and after it she seemed a little easier.

  “Have you thought what you’ll do with letter and purse if you get plague yourself?”

  There was silence.

  “I could,” said Catrine, “talk to Finn, when I felt it coming on me. I could—I could put it in a hole in the wall of the little bam. There is one thing of my own I would like him to have.” Her voice quickened, almost eagerly. “I could do that I could easily do that.”

  Kirsty nodded. “Now my mind is at rest.”

  After a little she said, “You’ll never keep that boy from the sea. If you wish him well, don’t try.”

  Catrine was silent.

  Kirsty turned her eyes. “You are still against him?”

  “I do not want him to go to sea.”

  “More ugly deaths on this land now than ever on sea. If you put boy against his nature, you’ll warp him. Remember that.”

  Catrine bowed her head.

  “Remember that,” muttered Kirsty in a little while. “I know.”

  The last two words came from a distance in thought, and Catrine saw that Kirsty’s mind had gone back to the young man who, against his wishes, had been sent to a lucrative position in the West Indies. His mother had high notions of her social position, and Kirsty was not the daughter-in-law she envisaged. The lad’s private idea was to save money and return. But the generous hand was native to Hugh. There was high social scandal, and a rumour of Hugh’s bitter words on presumably the woman in the case, the last words he uttered: “That scheming bitch”, as he went out on the ebb of dysentery, following a drunken orgy.

  Catrine had learned all this only a few nights ago; in fact, after she had told Kirsty that a certain Captain Mackay had been asking for her in Helmsdale. The Captain, it turned out, was Hugh’s first cousin.

  That fairly long, lucid spell was Kirsty’s last. Presently her whole body shivered so violently that her lower jaw shook and chittered, and the bed itself trembled. In addition to the warming-pan and the earthenware bottle, Catrine heated two stones, wrapped them in flannel, and put them to the soles of Kirsty’s feet. As the shivering subsided, her mouth opened, but her throat, as if plugged, held even her breath back. Her body slowly writhed, the breath came in choking gasps, and she moaned from the pains of cramp.

  Catrine massaged the lower part of die shrunken body as best she could. When she felt the rigor relaxing, she withdrew the cloths from under the abdomen and went outside, turning her face away, until she got the sweet air. She felt dizzy for a moment and breathed deeply. It was now almost quite dark.

  Life was so strong in Catrine, she had so healthy and vigorous a body, that fear for the moment touched her and she leaned against the door-jamb, breathing the cool air off the heather. Two peewits started crying up towards the edge of the moor, a restless, anxious crying, urgent with life. They drew near and she heard the silken beat of the wings. They filled her with inexpressible sadness, a sense of beauty for ever lost; their wings beat in her breast. They passed over her, and fell away towards the moor.

  She leaned the back of her head against the jamb and closed her eyes. Opening them, she felt cool again, as if the wings had fanned her face.

  She lit a tallow candle (Kirsty had her own mould for making candles) and went into the sick room. In the indifferent light Kirsty’s face was all protuberant bone and sagging wrinkled skin. Her breathing was slow and very laboured, Catrine put her hand on the brow and found it icy cold and clammy with sweat. The lids of the half-closed eyes lifted slightly, and Catrine, inclining her ear, divined rather than heard in a gust of breath, “The Books”.

  The Holy Bible lay on the little rounded table, and as Catrine set down the candle and lifted the book, she wondered what she would read.

  But there was only one thing she could read that would be real to her heart now, that did not frighten her, that had peace in it.

  “The Lord is my shepberd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

  Catrine had not much of a high-singing voice, but, as Finn knew, she could croon away at one of the old child lullabies in a way that turned the heart to water and all rebellions to peace. Her soft voice caught the very core of the lullaby’s intention and bore it in a rhythm as natural as the rhythm of a long sea wave. At such times there was an ancient innocence in her voice that was almost too much for the humours of ordinary flesh; in a sense, hardly fair, as of something that could take advantage too easily.

  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me …”

  Kirsty heard the words and knew them. Catrine’s voice was the stream in Kildonan, a burn in some far comforting paradise. No minister of the gospel could have borne her on the flood of death so softly.

  Looking up from her reading, Catrine thought that Kirsty had fallen asleep, for the eyes were closed and the body at rest. She lifted the candle and went into the kitchen. She was beginning to feel an insidious weakness in her flesh, and assured herself it was due to lack of sleep. I am terribly tired, she thought, wanting to throw herself down and let sleep have its way. She had not the energy to wash.

  Kirsty’s quiet body remained with her, and in a little while she went in again, leaving the candle outside the door so that the light would not fall on Kirsty’s eyes and awake her. Kirsty was exactly as she had left her. Catrine did not know whether to take the candle in or not, and retreated again to the kitchen. But now she had no peace, seeing the body stretched out, and soon was stealing into Kirsty’s room once more. She listened for breathing but heard none. “Kirsty!” she whispered. Then she brought the candle in.

  She’s dead! thought Catrine. But how could she be sure? “Kirsty!” She did not know what to do, and her head turned as if she were trapped. “Kirsty!” She put her hand on the bedclothes over Kirsty’s chest and pressed the breast-bone. Kirsty emitted a heavy, sobbing breath. It seemed to be her last, for now her breathing completely stopped. Her skin was shrivelled in a livid purple, and the face was so unlike that of the woman she had long known, that Catrine’s fear was touched with horror. A deep, shuddering sob broke from Kirsty again. Catrine gave a small choked cry. Kirsty’s half-closed lids slowly lifted and the pupils lowered to look at Catrine. There was now such clear intelligence in the eyes, such sane consciousness, that Catrine’s fist gripped against her heart. “Oh, Kirsty, I thought …” Was that understanding a gleam of the old grim humour? “Kirsty!” called Catrine. The
lids fell and a shuddering breath came from the livid lips. There was a long pause, then a final deep convulsive sob.

  There was no doubt about death, now that Catrine looked down upon it.

  All at once, outside, several peewits began to cry. Disembodied cries, anxious, frightening cries. Catrine tried to open the little window. It was stuck. She tugged fiercely, desperately. It gave—to let the spirit out. She hurried to the outside door and pulled it open. She hardly knew what she was doing. What had made the birds cry? In a quiet, ghost voice from a little distance came the word, “Mother.”

  CHAPTER XII

  FINN’S JOURNEY FOR A DOCTOR

  The resolution to set out to find the new doctor had come upon Finn quite suddenly. He could not have spent the night with Roddie, and wanted to be away before he could return to stop him. So he had gone, and because of his need to be alone, the half-dark of the moor did not at first distress him. The haunted stone quarry—it was a lonely spot—set the hairs apart on his head, but he saw nothing, though a curlew gave him such a fright that his knees doubled in weakness and he felt sickish for a little distance.

  As it grew darker, however, he slanted down to the outlying barn of a croft he knew. It was smaller than the one at home, and when he was sure he had it all to himself, he sat down, his back against the wall and his eyes to the door. At first, he lived entirely in his ears, but soon he grew assured, and presently experienced such a strange content in the heart of his misery that his head drooped.

  The night was short, and in the new world upon which the dawn came he found a stillness that sometimes enchanted him and sometimes made him a little afraid. He came in time to croft houses strung at a short distance from one another along a road, and they were all so extraordinarily still that they might have contained the dead. Once or twice a dog barked, and he trod the grass on the side of the road very quietly, though his bare feet could have made little enough sound anywhere, and hurried past.

  He was now on the road that ran right across the county of Caithness, from Latheron on the Moray Firth to Thurso on the Pentland, and the great inland moors seemed without end, except far to the west where the Scarabens and Morven marched northward in blue ramparts against the county of Sutherland. As he looked at them, he could see their tops take the light from a sun that he had often watched rise out of the ocean in golden and silver spangles. They had never looked so vast and impressive before, with something foreign about them, as if they were “a mountain range” in Spain or Africa, from one of Mr. Gordon’s geography lessons. Such immense vistas as he could now cover quickened all his senses, keeping his head up, alert and questing, and he felt an adventurous traveller.

  Now and then he drank out of a burn, and wiped the water from his nose and hair, and looked about him. But at such a time he took only two bites of his bread, and chewed with slow relish. He had never realized before how delicious and fragrant was well-chewed oat-bread with new butter. He had always thought Roddie’s mother’s oat-bread was thick and tough compared with his own mother’s. He had hardly been fair to it; he could see that.

  The sound of the little burns in the early morning, overhanging tongues of peat-bank, sailing bubbles and foam-flakes, all were strange, a little unfriendly, as if brown figures had passed here; yet for moments they were very friendly, too, and the tall rushes with their hairy brown buttons moved suddenly in the air as they did at home. And constantly, never leaving his mind at rest, was the anxiety to be on, to arrive.

  He knew the road from hearsay, and began wondering if he would recognize the bridge before Halsary, because it was the most haunted spot in Caithness, with real bloodcurdling stories about it. He could go to Mybster and then strike east on the road to Watten, or he could cut in over the moor at Halsary, fetch the Acharole Burn, and follow it to Watten.

  But though all this had been clear enough in the talk of people who had been this way, now in fact everything was on so vast a scale, the road seemed so without end, for ever stretching to far horizons, with lochs bigger than he had ever seen before, and in one place standing-stones, that when at last he came, while it was yet early, within sight of what might be the haunted bridge, and saw furtive human heads bobbing out of sight, his heart began to beat painfully and, almost without stopping, as if he had not seen the heads, he turned to his right and stepped off the road into the pathless moor.

  A bridge, to Finn, was a high arch spanning a river, like the one at home. If there was a bridge down there it could be no more than a flat thing of a few feet over the little burn. But he had seen the heads, and not until the spot had fallen from sight behind him did he feel in any way at ease. They might have been poachers, but they looked brown, like heads out of the heather. He was lucky to have seen them in time.

  Then he got lost. No matter where he gazed, there was nothing but moor, with lochans here and there. If he kept going straight across country from the Latheron-Georgemas road he was bound in time to strike the Thurso-Wick road somewhere in the Watten district. But such acquired knowledge seemed to have little relation to this vast world of reality. He grew very tired and, sitting down in a sheltered spot, with the sun’s warmth on him, he took out his food and ate a third of it. When he lay on his side to rest, his back curved, his knees drew up, and he fell asleep.

  Hours later, as he was following a burn blindly, he at last saw a cottage with blue smoke rising from its thatch. Two dogs came barking furiously at him and then a man stood in the door. “Can you tell me,” Finn asked him, “the way to Watten?”

  “Yes,” said the man, astonished; then he stared at Finn closely. He was a big man with a black beard. “Where are you from?” “Dunster.” A woman appeared behind his shoulder, and three children peered round their legs.

  “Dunster! That’s a far road,” said the man. “When did you leave?”

  “Late last night.”

  They stared at Finn. “If you tell me the house you are wanting in Watten, perhaps we could put you on your way,” said the man.

  “I’m wanting to see the new doctor who has come to Caithness about the trouble.”

  Finn read the fear of the plague in their faces far more easily than he could any story in Mr. Gordon’s English Reader. The man’s eyes hardened like Roddie’s, as he said, “If you keep going down the burn it will take you to Watten at last.”

  “Thank you,” said Finn, and started off. He hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when the man shouted and came towards him. “If you wait a minute, we’ll get some food for you.”

  “I have plenty, thank you,” cried Finn.

  Then he heard the woman’s voice. They would be distressed because a stranger—a boy at that—had passed their door without receiving hospitality! He felt sorry for the struggle in their minds, particularly for the red-headed woman, she had such compassionate blue eyes. When he came at a short distance to the bend that would take him out of sight, he turned. They were all standing together looking after him. Finn waved, and at once the man and woman waved back, as if he were their son leaving them on a far journey.

  Finn smiled to himself as he went on, heartened by the sadness that would haunt the woman’s mind for many a day. And the man would feel the more futile because of his strength. There were kind people everywhere.

  The loch at Watten was so big it was like a small sea. Finn had many queer adventures in that district, before he found himself on the road to Wick. He was getting more cunning now in talking to people. This was rich farming land, not like the little crofts dug out of the Dunster moor. More than once he heard persons crying out to each other in English. They didn’t speak a bit like Mr. Gordon. He could not understand them, though he knew a word here and there. What if he could not speak to the doctor? His brow went cold with fear, and he started practising aloud on himself. “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever. The word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him. The S
criptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man. God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”

  They were not the words that one ploughman threw to another. So he tried to think of other English Lessons and repeated a little poem to a star. “How are you?” he asked himself. “I am well, thank you. How are you yourself? I come from Dunster …”

  He got so interested in this, in having English words to tell the doctor exactly what he wanted, that he forgot he was practising aloud, and when the head of a man pushed up behind a dry-stone dyke and stared with round eyes and a silly open mouth, Finn blushed hotly, but kept walking on, gaze front. When well out of sight he could not help laughing, and the laughter grew so catching that he stopped and turned his face to the side of the road to have it out, not loudly, but in soft billows from the chest.

  When it’s that way with him, a man will go out of his path to find bad luck, as Finn should have remembered, for now, like weasels, young heads popped up behind the grassy bank and stared at him through a fringe of bramble. They were tinker children, of the wandering clan Macafee.

  Finn went on, consumed with shame. The children were soon running behind him, laughing mockingly. At first Finn was afraid, but soon his anger began to rise, and when he was sure there were no men with them, he turned and faced the four members of the clan, ranging from his own age downward, one of them a girl. He could see they thought he was silly, and therefore wanted to torment him. But when he had spoken, and picked up two stones from the road, they suddenly broke and ran back, laughing in shrill neighings. Whether it was he who frightened them or the man who came riding on a horse, he never found out.

  The number of houses in Wick astonished him, and yet did not much astonish him either. He knew the old joke: you won’t be able to see the town for the houses. In his mind Finn could make a famous thing so big that the reality, when he saw it, rarely measured up to his expectations. In any case, the real movement in Finn’s mind now was one of fear against so many houses gathered in one place, as if the roofs, huddling together, had a sinister defensive purpose. The fear had in it, however, the tentative smile of shyness, and Finn waited until he saw a small, grey-bearded man in front of a cottage on the outskirts of the town before asking for the doctor’s house in his best English.