LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

passed slowly between two green-stained pillars each of which was topped by a round stone marked to represent a crude face, two circles doing duty for eyes and a curved stroke forming the mouth. The avenue approached the dwelling from the side so that much of the house’s effect was lost. It is a curious thing that, although in the days to come I often visited and even lived there for some weeks, I have no picture in my mind of the house as a whole. I can remember parts of it as vividly as though I had seen it only yesterday, yet I have no recollection whatsoever of its outline.

      It had been built less than a century ago. Mr Strathern was the heir of a long line of merchants who had imported tobacco from America, the trade that made Glasgow. He often wearied of his home in Virginia Place and so some years ago had bought Gel Lodge where he and his family could spend their long and frequent holidays.

      If I had no impression of the house from without, I, who was easily awed, had a distinct impression of richness and grandeur whenever I entered. We were taken into the drawing-room where the view was hidden from us by heavy curtains. Mr Strathern was a widower and I was introduced to his sister who had looked after his household since his wife’s death many years ago. Two other people stood there: Nicholas, the elder son, a handsome, angry-looking man with slightly distended nostrils like those of a rocking- horse, and Martin, who was too stout for his twenty-three years and who looked as though, in convivial company, he might become ribald.

      Tea was brought in and Aunt Bertha, who was clad in what Julia called ‘Biblical Purple,’ presided with the pompousness of one performing familiar rites. I felt she was hostile to us all although, to do her justice, she tried valiantly to make herself agreeable. I knew Emmy, who sat beside her, was disliking her intensely and she in her turn was not drawn to this aloof girl whom she longed to patronise but could not. I could tell, however, from the manner in which her attention constantly strayed to where Julia sat, that it was with my elder sister she was chiefly concerned. Julia had been papa’s most constant companion and ever since she had been small he had been accustomed to treat her as though she were his contemporary. At home we all took her power of conversation for granted, but that afternoon I saw Christine’s two brothers looked admiring yet askance as she sat disputing most charmingly with their father. As for Aunt Bertha, she was suspicious, on principle, of Julia’s charm, for she belonged to that school which considered only the disagreeable could be sincere.

      After tea we went outside and saw enough of the gardens, sloping to the south within high walls, to visualise how beautiful they would be in mid-summer. The gardens and well-kept lawns clustered round the house. Beyond them the ground was uncultivated, as though the gardeners had grown discouraged and been content to plant rhododendron bushes on either side of the avenue to screen from view the barren land which gave the place an uninhabited appearance.

      They asked us if we would care to play a game of croquet; this would be the first time they had played this year, they told us. Edwin Strathern partnered Julia and I was coupled with Nicholas. He was rather quelling to look at and I expected him to be impatient or angry if I played a poor shot and felt inordinately grateful when I found he was neither. Emmy played with Martin, whose eye glittered when it fell on her, as it always did when it rested on any pretty thing.

      We were all laughing and Emmy was clapping her hands when I noticed, striding towards us, a tall young man, his fair hair shining yellow in the sun. Christine dropped her mallet when she saw him and ran over the lawn.

      ‘Why, Stephen,’ she said reproachfully, ‘you never told me you were coming to-day. The Misses Lockhart met you at my ball, didn’t they? This is their youngest sister, Miss Lisbet. And now you must come and partner me, for I am being disgracefully beaten.’

      He joined in the game and play grew most exciting. Julia was very poor at it and a serious handicap to Mr Strathern, but Emmy was winning until Stephen Wingate suddenly knocked her ball out of bounds.

      BOOK ONE. CHAPTER FIVE

      It was a day in late spring and we all sat round the table at our evening meal, while papa’s hand beat on the cloth, a sign that he was upset. The letter, handed in by young Malcolm Gow, from the new dominie of Barnfingal school, lay in front of him. It was written in a uniformly sloping hand and was an invitation asking the minister if he would attend a demonstration of the dominie’s scholars. Papa, who enjoyed the company of his contemporaries, was uncomfortable with children, but he felt duty-bound to accept the invitation, and, as he always liked his discomforts to be shared, said Julia must accompany him.

      ‘You had better come too,’ he remarked, as though recollecting something when his glance fell on me.

      ‘Why, dear?’ asked mamma. She had to repeat her question for lately papa had grown somewhat deaf, as though to cut himself off still further from disturbing influences. ‘Why do you want Lisbet to go with you and Julia?’ she repeated in a slightly louder voice.

      ‘He is a very good Latin scholar, I believe,’ papa informed her, ‘and I want to arrange for Lisbet to have lessons from him twice a week. It would absorb too much of my time to teach her myself. And she must go to him as he won’t be able to charge so much then. The whole morning’s going to be most inconvenient. Dominie Naughton never had any of this demonstration nonsense.’

      ‘No, papa,’ Julia reminded him, wearying of his impatience, ‘and you were always saying the loch trout received more attention from Dominie Naughton than the children ever did.’

      Papa performed his duties amongst his dispersed congregation with the undeviating punctiliousness that was characteristic of him, but as the years passed the less he had to do the more disinclined he seemed to do it. He liked each day to pass the same as the one before and became easily irritated when shaken out of his groove. He was learned but had neither the patience nor understanding to make a sympathetic teacher, so that I was relieved when I heard him announce I was to receive my finishing lessons from the dominie.

      Neither Emmy nor I had ever very much to say to papa, but Julia, who could read him like a book, never had any difficulty in making him discourse on whatever subject she happened to be interested in. She could not be called studious, but her imagination coloured and her receptive thoughts enlivened what he told her, while her restless questing mind found food amongst his books.

      We left the manse about eleven on the morning of the demonstration. By the time we were half-way to Barnfingal, papa, under Julia’s influence, was talking with animation about the tribes of ancient Scotland, the ‘smeared people’ of the far north, the ‘hunters’ of Galloway, the Caledonians of our own and neighbouring shires, the ‘horsemen’ of Arygll, and the squat, dark, ‘unbekent’ people found sometimes in the Hebrides who are believed to be either relics of the Lost Ten Tribes or descendants of sailors wrecked from the Spanish Armada.

      Barnfingal was two miles from the manse and one came upon it suddenly, with its few white-washed, thatched cottages scattered up the hillside and its graveyard walled in by a round, low, grass-topped dyke and warded by the gable- end of a ruined church.

      When we reached the crest of the steep winding brae leading into it, the smoke from the straw chimneys was the only visible sign of life. Otherwise one might have imagined that some terrible scourge had made an end to all the inhabitants and no one had come near the clachan since from a superstitious dread.

      Green hill rising behind green hill—they raised in me a brooding, inherent melancholy. I felt this place had lived through everything, had seen everything, that it was saturated with memories and legends. I thought of it submerged under the sea, of the ocean receding farther and farther from it; of glaciers creeping down the mountains, forming the glens and ravines; of the mountains as spent volcanoes covered by the impenetrable Caledonian forest. And now there was nothing more for it to know and it was waiting for the clap of doom.

      The schoolhouse stood back from the road, its three- cornered playground surrounded by ploughed fields as though they would fain encroach upon it. When we arrived at the gate, we heard through the wide-open door the loud chattering of children, but as we walked across the playground, a sudden silence fell, as if the noise had dropped through the floor.

      The dominie came forward to greet us. His broad shoulders wore a deprecating stoop

Скачать книгу