She was soaked to the skin despite the fine mackintosh she had, and going to the far end of the dim-lit loft she started to get out of her clothes. She was near stripped, she says – and you’ll notice there must always be a bit nakedness in Kinkeig gossip – she was near stripped when suddenly it darkened in the loft. The door must have blown right to, she thought, and she turned to keek at it and what did she see but the figure of a man in horrid silhouette against the waning daylight. More, she recognized that spare figure. It was Ranald Guthrie himself.
So you see the schoolmistress had got herself into a situation not unlike wee Isa Murdoch’s: I don’t know but what the author lad will scent some danger of monotony here. But certain Miss Strachan was far from feeling the position monotonous; she gave a yelp that would have startled the laird as much as he had startled her if he hadn’t at that moment banged to the door and thrust home a great bolt on the outside. For fient the thing had he seen of the dripping Bethsabe at the far end of the loft, nor maybe would his reactions have been much like King David’s if he had; he was only concerned to make the place fast against the storm, and a minute later the schoolmistress heard his feet going slush-slush down the stair again.
Syne when she’d recovered a bit from her start she saw the position wasn’t so bad if only Guthrie would go away. She wasn’t hopelessly a prisoner; there was a trapdoor down from the loft to the house, only never used and with no loft ladder to it, forbye she had her clothes and the pallets and she could still maybe swarm down an improvised rope-ladder like she had used to do at the training college when they were dinging the Athletic Ideal into her. And once down she could surely get out by one window or another when she wanted to. Meantime she huddled on her wet clothes again, there seemed nothing else to do with a man about the place.
And certain enough Guthrie was still about; she could hear him through the thin flooring of the loft pacing about the one storey house much as he must have paced about his gallery. She wondered what the laird was doing out from the castle in the storm, almost it seemed he must be waiting for someone, and that thought was no sooner in her head than as if in answer to it Guthrie cried out in a loud voice: ‘Come in!’
There was silence on that, as if he had cried out to the air or as if the words had startled him they were spoken to into a momentary stillness. Then again came the laird’s voice, and Miss Strachan swore there was something mocking to it.
‘Come in, man!’
Again there was a pause, and then the sound of a door thrown open with a strong thrust that might have been a reply to that mockery in Guthrie’s voice. Then another pause and Guthrie’s voice again, so quiet and different this time that it scarce came up through the old cracked flooring.
‘So it’s you.’
The schoolmistress, whether because of the wringing clouts on her or because of something in the way the words were spoken, shivered in her soggy shoes. But you may be sure her long nose was twitching by now, and her sharp eye searching in the gloom for a good crack to lay her ugly lug to. And syne came the voice of Guthrie’s unknown visitor, young and strong and defiant, a voice that the schoolmistress couldn’t put a name to.
‘Where’s Christine?’
‘It’s not Christine you’re seeing today, Neil Lindsay. Nor any day henceforth, now I’ve found you out, the two of you.’
So that was who. Neil Lindsay was little more than a name to Miss Strachan, half-English from Edinburgh as she was, but she knew enough of the lads about to understand there would be fur flying if a Lindsay had been thinking to court Christine Mathers. It was like to be flying now in the long farm kitchen below her.
‘Where is she, Guthrie?’
Defiant the repeated question and the calling Guthrie so, Lindsay but a crofter chiel as he was; fine he knew, though, he had history to license him, as you’ll hear. And now the schoolmistress heard Guthrie answer, right dry and quiet: ‘I chanced to follow Christine and found her finding your message. I sent her back to the house and waited here myself. Was I wrong? Do you complain?’
‘She’s her own mistress.’
‘Not if you’re seeking to make her yours.’
The schoolmistress liked this fine; she strained her ears and heard what might have been Lindsay taking a swift step towards the laird. Then he seemed to check himself and his voice came, carefully controlled, desperately earnest: ‘I want to marry her, Guthrie.’
The laird said: ‘It can’t be.’
‘She wants to marry me.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘We’re marrying, Guthrie, and it’s not you can stop us.’
‘That I can, Neil Lindsay.’
‘For how?’
‘Christine is under age, and you know it.’
‘That will mend. And there’s another question.’
‘Indeed?’
‘What is Christine to you?’
They were wasting no words, the two of them, in hammering out what lay between them. And the schoolmistress was in an ecstasy; snug and unsuspected in her loft, she was hearing what would make Isa Murdoch’s story pale round every teapot in Kinkeig. So she reached for a bittock chocolate and only wished she could risk lighting a cigarette: a right coarse habit in a woman. Then she put her lug to the floor again to hear what Guthrie should find to reply.
But she was reckoning without the winter ways of Glen Erchany. The storm, that had been but spitting and girning till now, burst all in a moment into its full fury, the wind howling – a thing it does less often in nature than in books – and the sleet, now turned to rain, dashed in gusts against the slates like bursts of machine-gun fire. Guthrie and young Lindsay might be singing Auld Lang Syne together for all she could hear, or – what was more like – they might be fair murdering each other. She was right anxious, she said, for both of them: real solicitous-like is Miss Strachan.
Faith, though, her fears were justified. For in two-three minutes came a bit lull in the elements and she heard Lindsay’s voice harsh with anger. ‘Say that again–’
And Guthrie said: ‘Married or unmarried, I say, and if it’s not too late, she’ll never be bairned by you.’
And at that there was the sound of an open-handed blow, and then Lindsay, low and shocked. ‘Christ forgive me – you that might be my grandfather! I’m sorry, Guthrie; not all the bad blood that is between our folk–’
Guthrie said: ‘You’ll pay.’
And these words, as melodramatic as an old play in a barn, were the last the schoolmistress heard. For at that moment the first blast after the lull blew open some door in the biggins and she, that must have been more scared than she’d allow, took it for a pistol shot and started up in the loft scraiching murder.
A fair scunner it must have been for them below. Lindsay took himself off straightways and Guthrie turned at once, cool enough, to deal with the surprise. Straight out and up the outside stair he must have gone, for before the schoolmistress had so much time as to fall into a tremble at the fool she’d made of herself he was through the loft door and gowking at her. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘am I to understand you are in some distress?’