I said indeed there must be papers – things were far wrong if there weren’t – but if she was Guthrie’s right ward and a minor, and if he was that eccentric he would say or show nothing, it was hard for me to tell whether she had a right to see them or no. She might send her Neil to see Stewart, the lawyer lad in Dunwinnie, if she wanted, but it was an old man’s advice to bide her time: when the laird got accustomed to the way things had fallen out he’d see that both Guthries and Lindsays should have more sense than to be playing Montagues and Capulets. And she would do well, I said, to din the same thing into her Neil; after all, when a crofter loon with nothing but remote hopes in Canada came courting the ward of a rich laird he must expect a rebuff or two before he got his way.
But Christine shook her head. ‘It’s all very different from that.’ And she picked up a bit leather and fell to tracing little waves on it with her finger, like as if she was copying the furrows that had gathered on her pretty brow. ‘Have you seen my uncle lately?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘I haven’t seen him, my dear, this year past.’
‘But you’ll have heard talk?’
‘I haven’t lost my hearing yet, Christine.’
She smiled at this. ‘Yes, there’s always talk in Kinkeig, I’m sure.’ She hesitated. ‘But you may have heard that – that he’s gone mad?’
She was that anxious-looking that I left my last and gave her a bit hug – a thing I hadn’t done for many a long year. ‘Don’t fash yourself over that,’ I said; ‘they were saying no less of him before you were born. It’s what Kinkeig would say of any laird that didn’t talk grouse and oats and pretend to be right kirkgreedy on Sundays. And the Guthries have had the name of it since the days of Malcolm Canmore.’
She gave a bit laugh, and fine I thought I’d comforted her until my old ear caught the note of it. Then I walked to the window and had a look out myself.
Behind me Christine said in a new hard way: ‘He’s mad.’
10
Christine had a loyalty to the laird, and she was the kind that would strive to keep her loyalty while tholing much, or even right through a strait fight. So it was a scunner to hear her say that of Guthrie – and to hear the unco paradox she backed her speak with forbye. For what made her right sure that the man was truly skite at last was that he was spending a bit silver like a rational being. ‘He’s violating himself,’ Christine said.
It was only one had lived long at Erchany, I thought, could estimate the force of her evidence. The first thing was the putting away of the Gamleys: some sort of quarterly or yearly agreement Gamley had from the laird in writing, and to get them away he had paid out a little hantle of gold – real gold that Christine had seen him taking from his bureau, and that was the only ready coin at Erchany might serve in an emergency. Fell strange it was, Christine said, for the gold was her uncle’s plaything.
I opened my eyes at that. Well I knew Guthrie’s near-going ways, his sad dealings with the bogles and all, but I had never thought of him somehow as the simple picturesque miser you might meet in with in a book. ‘You mean,’ I cried, ‘he sits thumbing the stuff over?’
‘Yes. He calls it numismatics, and he’s even taught me a little. Have you ever seen a Spanish gold quadruple of Philip V, Mr Bell – or a genovine twenty-three carats fine, or a bonnet piece of James V, or the coinage of the Great Mogul? I think I could be a miser myself easy as easy when I look at them. But uncle likes to be thumbing little piles of guineas and sovereigns as well, the same that he must have paid Gamley with. And doesn’t that show?’
It showed, I thought, that the laird had been unco eager to rid himself of those at the home farm, for if he had the disease of gold as bad as that it must have been a fair violation, like Christine said, to hand a pile to his grieve. And for a minute I had a picture in my mind, almost as vivid maybe as the vision of Mistress McLaren I’ve told you about, of Guthrie sitting in his dark tower, with no more than the bit candle that was another right miser’s touch to him, thumbing and thumbing at the gold, a symbol no doubt of something we could have no knowledge of, and whiles calling on the quean to watch and admire numismatic-like, that he might have some feeling of a rational basis to the irrational lust was driving him. And little as I knew of Neil Lindsay I was glad Christine had found him; the glint of that gold, like the glint of gold some folk thought to see in Guthrie’s eye, had somehow made the whole picture of the man and his castle darker for me.
‘Doesn’t that show?’ Christine repeated. And then she added: ‘But he doesn’t play with the gold so much now; he’s got the puzzles instead.’
I looked at her fair startled – not by the words, which I didn’t understand, but by the tone of them and the growing strain on her face. It was plain there was an atmosphere about events at Erchany that was working on the quean and that she found it hard to express the force of. ‘Puzzles?’ I said, fair puzzled myself.
‘Uncle has been ordering all sorts of things from Edinburgh – that’s another strange spending. There have been provisions as if we were going to be besieged at Erchany, expensive things some of them I’ve never seen or heard of! And a big crate of books.’
‘Surely the laird has ever been a great reader, Christine.’
‘Yes – but he doesn’t buy books! And these are a kind he’s never heeded before: medical books. Up there in the tower he’s poring over them night after night.’
I thought for a minute I saw a right horrible light here. Was Guthrie really going skite – as Christine thought and as the Harley Street sumph had said might happen – and, feeling it come on him, was he reading desperately to get light on himself and cure? ‘Christine,’ I asked gently, ‘would they be books about the mind?’
Fine she understood me as she shook her head. ‘The ones I’ve seen are not. There’s one by a man Osler on General Medicine, and one by Flinders on Radiology, and one by Richards on Cardiac Disease–’ She broke off with a frown, and her noting and remembering the hard words brought home to me right vividly the effort she had been making to plumb things at the meikle house.
Myself, I could make nothing of this fancy of Guthrie’s, so I harked back to something else. ‘What of the puzzles, Christine?’
‘Jigsaw puzzles they’re called – you know them? I think he got them cheap from a catalogue. Spirited war scenes, Mr Bell. You’re awfully puzzled for a time about the German soldier’s head, and then you find it’s been blown right from his body and fits snug in the top left-hand corner. The whole thing will be called the Battle of the Marne, maybe – and Uncle likes me to help him. There’s little I have to learn about tanks and hand-grenades and the sinking of the Lusitania. Perhaps it’s Uncle’s idea of a finishing school for me.’
There was a spark of fun in Christine’s voice; nevertheless, she’d spoken the first bitter words I’d ever heard from her. I said: Well it seemed a foolish ploy enough but with no vice in it, so need she worry?
Christine gave a half-impatient, half-despairing toss to the lovely hair of her. ‘It’s taken the place of the gold!’ she said. ‘So don’t you see?’
For a minute I must have stared at her like an owl. And then, uncertainly enough, I did see. For had I not been saying to myself that the gold was a symbol that answered to something deep in the man?