No sign of life or breakfast – so I add a few further notes on last night. The schoolroom where Christine had her learning – she has seldom if ever been away from Erchany, I gather – is now a pleasant, rather bare, species of den – Miranda’s corner of the cave, furnished with a few elegant mementoes of Milan: in this case a really beautiful Flemish cabinet and some Indian bird-paintings that deserve a better light than the couple of candles that seem the standard illumination in public rooms in Erchany. When Guthrie and I entered we found Christine and Sybil sitting side by side on a low stool beside the fire, apparently on the way to becoming friends. They both got up: Sybil’s glance, I noticed, came straight to Guthrie; Christine’s was lingering with something like puzzlement on Sybil. I remember wondering how we were all going to get on together without the help of eating and drinking.
Formality was our refuge. I was handed, more or less on a plate, to Christine, and presently found myself conscientiously developing a vein of subdued gaiety – embodied earlier in this budget, my dear – on my day’s adventures. I don’t think Christine is normally the sort that wouldn’t relish a young man abruptly pitched out of the world into Erchany on a winter’s night, or that she hasn’t the wit and will to prick and quicken the gaiety of such a one with mockery. I am a sociable person; I meet dozens of young women in a year; and half a dozen, perhaps, are right for something like interesting personal relations. One knows at once, does one not? And Christine is right: very shy though she is, we ought to have been reacting to each other in from eight to ten minutes. Do you observe, Diana, the note of pique creeping in? She was quite charming, but if you imagine a political duchess thinking out a difficult manoeuvre at a party while being quite charming meantime to a stray young man who may be of middling importance in thirty years’ time, you will get the effect almost exactly. Exactly – because Christine, though a slip of a rural lass, has an old-fashioned poise that is very engaging: I am consumed with curiosity as to how she has been brought up here. Point is, though, that there we sat, and there I went through my tricks, and that she registered just the right interest and amusement, and put in just the necessary number of words of her own – and that all the time she was profoundly unaware of me. Occasion, as I say, for slight pique.
Christine – I perhaps wearisomely reiterate – is waiting: waiting as brides must have waited when the world was younger. Undoubtedly, it is a lover!
And Guthrie is waiting too: only his waiting I just can’t guess at – perhaps he has a date with the ghosts of Clerk of Tranent and Sir Mungo Lockhart of the Lea. But, in a way, he was putting up even a better show than the competent Christine; his taciturnity was gone, he was leading the conversation with Sybil and doing her really proud in point of courteous attention. I suppose his craziness to go with a great sense of what is owing in a laird of Erchany. When my attention drifted to them he was showing Sybil a case of curios – gold coins and medals mostly – which he had fetched from another room. Christine made an excuse of my momentarily drifting eye to move me across the room; I’m terribly afraid that – tête à tête – she’d had enough of me.
Guthrie was handing a little medallion affair to Sybil. ‘You recognize,’ he said, ‘the device?’
I recognized it at once from the creatures on the staircase. It was Guthrie’s crest. Sybil took it, handled it delicately, and said nothing.
‘The family crest,’ said Guthrie. ‘It has occurred to me, my dear young lady, to wonder if we may be related?’
Guthrie, of course, is the sort of old person who can say my dear young lady: nevertheless, I obscurely felt the bland phrase give – paradoxically – edge to the question.
Rather unexpectedly, Sybil gushed. ‘Mr Guthrie, wouldn’t that be just wonderful! I know my father was terribly proud of his Scotch connections. And I’d just love to think I was related to a romantic old place like your castle. It must be terribly old?’
You mustn’t think Christine has extinguished my admiration for Sybiclass="underline" I think Sybil quite remarkable, will-o’-the-wisp though she has been to me. And now I opened my eyes rather wide, for her reaction to Guthrie’s polite suggestion was just a little too good to be true. But if my eyes opened I believe Guthrie’s narrowed. Punctiliously, he answered his guest’s question. ‘It is old. There are thirteenth-century foundations.’ And then he went on carefully: ‘We have connections, I know, in the United States. Families like ours do not care to lose sight even of distant branches.’
‘Mr Guthrie – how exciting! And I am sure they love to come and visit Erchany.’
‘They have not visited me.’ And I think Guthrie smiled. ‘Not, that is, as far as I know.’ There was a pause. ‘But a year or two ago they sent – friends.’
Christine was not rubbing shoulders with me; I must have sensed, rather than felt, her shiver. I know I glanced round at her quickly. And I believe I caught on her face what I had already caught on her uncle’s: fear.
Guthrie waiting and Christine waiting – but not perhaps for the same thing. Guthrie afraid and Christine afraid – again not perhaps of the same thing. Here, in a word, is my preoccupation – almost my anxiety – of the moment; here – Diana – is the Mystery of Castle Erchany!
Sybil was not very oncoming about her family and Guthrie did not press her beyond his first polite suggestion of relationship. Instead his conversation drifted to his childhood, oddly, I thought – for though the picture of the elderly laird entertaining his guests with the golden memories of an Erchany infancy was pretty enough, it yet seemed false to the basic reserve of the man. Presently he was inviting Sybil’s memories in exchange and it occurred to me rather sleepily that he was going after her family again in a ferreting way. But his interest seemed actually to be more general; he might have been a student of American social history, interested in the trend and tone of American life some twenty years ago. Sybil comes from Cincinnati, Ohio – I gathered that much – and I’m not sure there isn’t something peculiarly hypnoidal about the words. Cincinnati, Ohio…Cincinnati, Ohio: beautiful, sleepy cadences I found myself drifting away on. And then I woke up with a jerk.
Guthrie had moved over to the dying fire and was standing before it with a small log in his hands: I think he didn’t want to provide more firing than need be. And as he hesitated Christine said: ‘You seem to be in two minds.’