These were the events of the day before Isa Murdoch left the meikle house. But the events of the night – which was when things went clean over the quean – are yet to come. And then I’ll be telling you something of Christine Mathers, and something of how I came myself to have part in what befell at Erchany.
6
Either the sore clout he gave his head on the stairs or the unco conduct of the laird fair upset the daftie Tammas. At the best of times he was an unchancy chiel, whiles almost sensible-like and whiles clean skite; whiles right sweet and gentle so that you were real sorry for him, not all there that he was, and whiles girning and glowering as malicious as the foul fiend. Always though he had kept from troubling the queans, he seemed to know nothing of the purpose of them any more than some neuter thing. Isa had never been feared of him, ever she gave him out his meals at the back-kitchen door with no more thought than if she had been meating the hens. But maybe the fall he had gave the daftie’s system a jolt the Harley Street slummock could put a learned name to, for that night the way of nature came to him and he decided to make try for Isa. Late in the night a rustling that was more than the capers of the Erchany rats awoke the quean, she opened her eyes in a full moonlight and saw Tammas just louping in at the window. One keek at the face of him was enough for her, she was out of bed and through the door while her legs had still strength to carry her. Tammas gave a sort of slavering yammer horrid to hear and was across the room in pursuit.
Isa’s first thought was to run to Christine, but even the two of them might be helpless against the frenzy of the creature and anyway it seemed not right to lead him that way. She wavered a minute at the corridor’s end, where she might get either through to the wing the Hardcastles had or, turning the other way, reach the tower and seek the laird. And right feared as she was of Guthrie she knew that he was more to trust in this than the factor Hardcastle, who had ever a lurking lechery in his look and was a craven, it might be, forbye. So she kilted her bit shift about her and made for the tower, she was half-way before it came to her like a clutch at the heart that the laird double-locked himself in his fastness of a night and there would be no getting into the tower and up to him. She stopped at that, the daftie still not far behind her, and looked round despairing-like for a place to hide. Then her glance went out through one of the great windows that look on the court and across the court, high up, she spied a moving light. Guthrie was not shut away in his tower but up in his new-opened gallery. And at that Isa made up the main staircase, never listening now to hear if the demented Tammas was following still, but taking the uneven stone treads as if she was running for a prize at the Sabbath School picnic.
Not until she was more than half-way up did she think to cry out and then she had no breath for it, fient the thing but a bit sob and hoast would come from her thrapple. So she stumbled to the top and through the broken door and then a real cry broke from her, for there was Guthrie in a kilt, awful pale, and with a great battle axe in his hand. Then she saw it was nothing but a likeness, an old painted thing gleaming from its tarnished frame in the moonlight, and but one of a row of paintings down the gallery. Guthrie himself was to seek, he would be somewhere round a corner – the gallery, you remember, having three turns to it in all.
She ran down the long dim-lit room and sudden she heard a breathing sound close behind her. It must be the daftie, she thought, and still no sign of the laird, and at that she juiked into a bit alcove, nigh ready to cast herself from a window. And certain a window was there, one that looked not to the court but out behind the castle. The glass was half gone and sudden she heard a bit song drifting up in the stillness, it was The craw kill’t the pussy-oh, Tammas’ song:
The craw kill’t the pussy-oh,
The craw kill’t the pussy-oh,
The muckle cat
Sat doon and grat
At the back o’ Meggie’s hoosie-oh…
Fair thrilling and gracious the daft old words floated up to Isa, she herself near grat for joy. Looking out, she saw Tammas in the moonlight holding for his own biggin and singing full blithe to the moon, the moon might have waned of a sudden and taken his madness clean from him, he looked up at the moon and Isa saw his face calm and gentle as he made for his bed.
And then Isa heard the breathing sound behind her again.
She knew at once it was the laird; as she turned in at the gallery she must have turned away from him and now he was coming up behind her. When she realized that she was alone with Guthrie in this uncanny long-deserted place she was nearer ready to die of fright than ever. For the danger of being couched and maybe bairned by Tammas was a horror she knew the measure of, many a tale of the sort she’d heard that she shouldn’t, but the dark power of Guthrie was a thing unguessed, its outlines overran the boundaries of the quean’s knowledge. A danger is ever the worst that has no shape to it, and there’s a straight difference between instinctive and imaginative terror.
So Isa held her whisht and cowered down in her bit hidyhole; when Guthrie went by she would slip to the door and away back to her room, where she could bar door and window against another fit of the daftie’s. And now Guthrie was coming close up, the queer breathing of him was nearer and she was fell certain his awful eye must light on her. But she was well hid behind two great magical contraptions she could make nothing of: big terrestrial and celestial globes they turned out to be. The gallery had been a library place at one time with all the gear of a gentleman’s library about it, only Guthrie had caused the most of the books to be carted to the tower before he shut down on it, great scholar that he was. Little remained on the shelves but tall and mouldering folios, and squat quartos in their heavy Continental gilding, Protestant theology for the most part brought from Geneva, the metropolis of orthodoxy in the olden time. Perished entirely they were, the musty smell of perished leather heavy in the place, for of such godly matter Guthrie – God help him – had little thought.
All this was nothing to Isa. She minded only that the laird was up and past her and that now maybe she might slip unseen to the door. But half a keek showed her she was fast prisoner still; Guthrie was standing not five feet away, wrapped in an old torn dressing-gown and in his hand his bedroom candle that made a warmer wavering circle of light amid the chill moonbeams. It was cold in the gallery; Isa shivered – maybe at the bite of it, crouching in her shift as she was, and maybe at the look of the laird. Guthrie, she said, might have been the Guthrie carven in stone on the great tomb in the kirk. Right pale he was, transfixed it might have been in some deep and murky thought; and on his high lined brow, there in the nip of a November night, there glistened beads of sweat. Like a statue he stood, only his breath coming fast and deep and a glint to his eye more lowering than the common told of some inner stour that had grip of him.
It might have been half an hour, Isa said, he stood there unmoving, and if one remembers the strain on the nerves of the quean one may think perhaps that he stood three minutes so, or four. And then he strode straight towards her.
Isa said she gave a little cry at that and Guthrie’s hand came out to drag her, as she thought, from hiding. At that she shut her eyes and tried to think of a bit prayer. But no prayer came – nor yet the touch she had expected on the shoulder. Instead, the great globe she was crouching by stirred at her side, its cold smooth surface brushed eerily over her naked arm, she took another keek and saw that the laird was like in a trance still, refusing to see the quean that cowered right under his neb. Idly, and now murmuring some unintelligible words, he was turning on its rusted axis the dust-encrusted miniature world that lay beneath his hand. It creaked and grated, the wee world with its faded sprawl of oceans and continents, much as the moon might do if made to quicken on its poles again. Then above the little strident noise of the turning world, hoarse and piercing came Guthrie’s voice, his words now clear to Isa, all in a blur of fear though she was.