The Silver Darlings (10 page)

“Think of Wick and Fraserburgh and Helmsdale and all the other places on the Moray Firth—it beats me where the money can come from.”

“It’s enough almost to frighten a man. Do you think it can last?”

“I have a misgiving myself. It seems hardly right.”

“Even my feet are astonished,” said Donald.

“Let us take it easy,” said Lachie, whose own feet were a trifle wayward.

The two old men sat down and looked back towards the inn and caught a distant glimpse of the high sea. They spoke of the harshness of landlords and of the ills that had befallen their folk. They recalled pleasant days of their
distant
youth. Perhaps happiness would come to the folk again and more money than ever they had known. For the sea was free to all. They looked upon it, bright still in the darkling night.

“Do you know, man, Lachie, when I saw that lad Roddie, tall and fair, with his blue eyes and his quiet ways, I had the sort of feeling that he had come himself up out of the sea like—like one sent to deliver us.”

“Had you now?” asked Lachie, with a glance at Donald.

“I just saw him like that.”

“Who knows? Perhaps you’re right. It felt to me myself like the beginning of strange and wonderful things. But maybe we’d better be going, or they will be saying stranger things to us when we get home.”

Donald’s blue eyes glimmered like a boy’s as he stared away at the sea. Then his grey beard doubled on his chest as he got carefully to his feet.

CHAPTER V

FINN AND THE BUTTERFLY

T
he first day he had seen the two white butterflies flitting about the cabbages, little Finn had stared with great astonishment, but after a time had
summoned
courage to approach them, whereupon they had risen high over his head and got tossed away on the air like flakes of snow. This had excited him keenly, and when he asked his mother in the evening, as she tucked him into bed, what they were, she said they were called “grey fools”.

“But they’re not grey, Mama.”

“What colour, then?”

“White.”

“That’s right. You’re Mama’s clever boy, aren’t you? And when you grow up to be a big man …”

But he was not interested in her words and words
to-night
. “Where do they come from, Mama?”

“Oh, well, you see, they come from—from many places.”

“Do they? What places?”

“Many and many a place.”

“Do they come from Helmsdale?”

“Yes.”

“And do they come from Canada?”

“Well, I don’t know if they come from Canada. They would have to cross the sea.”

“What’s the sea, Mama? Is it a big, big place full of water?”

“Yes.”

“How big is it?”

“It’s very, very big. It’s bigger than all the moor at the back, away, away to Morven, and farther than that.”

“Is it? It must be awful big.”

“Yes. Now, come, say your prayer and go to sleep, for if little boys don’t sleep they won’t grow into big men, and what——”

“Mama? Couldn’t the grey fools cross above the sea in the air?”

“They might. But it would be such a long, long way that they would grow tired and then what would happen to them?”

“What?”

“What do you think?”

“Would they fall into the sea and be drowned?”

“Yes. Just as little boys will be drowned if they fall into the river. And that’s why I have told you never to——”

“Did you ever know anyone who was drowned, Mama? Did you, Mama?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Now go to your sleep. I can’t stay here with you all night. Come.
To-night
as
I
lie
down
——”

“Mama, tell me, where do the grey fools go when they fly away from the garden?”

But altogether his mother had been very unsatisfactory, and her final admission that it was God who made grey fools was nothing new, for God made everything. You can always tell when an old person is going to say it is God.

But the butterflies excited him in a way nothing had ever excited him before. They appeared suddenly out of
nowhere
, like magic, and were white, white. They would wait on a cabbage leaf until you almost had them and then—they were off, not like a bird, but drifting up and down in the strangest way.

Until one day he so nearly caught one that he leapt after it in the air and fell. This time the butterfly merely flitted
to another young cabbage, and being angry against it for making him fall, he stalked it with a stone in his hand.

But once again the butterfly eluded him, and he threw the stone at it The butterfly drifted over the low wall, and he ran after it and saw it meet another butterfly. Together they danced in the air, until one slanted away and alighted on a green leaf. Finn was so eager now that, once over the wall, he rushed up to the butterfly as if he might be swift enough to stamp on it with his foot.

The butterfly arose and, drifting on in its careless, aggravating way, drew Finn after it. When it had passed from view over a bank, he ran his hardest to surprise it on the other side.

And he so very nearly did that both his excitement and his anger increased.

It was at that moment that death entered into his heart. He would kill the butterfly.

His hair was dark and his eyes brown—if not so brown as his mother’s, and on his child’s skin—he was four and a half years of age—there was a faint flush of blood and guilt. So he had to keep going after the butterfly and away from home.

He went on and on, round little bushes and under big boulders, and sometimes the grassy bank was so steep that he slid on his bottom and then his kilt came away up and he was all bare from the waist down. His kilt was
crotal-brown
for his mother had made it out of her old skirt, and his jersey, which Granny Kirsty had knitted, was brown, too. His feet and his legs were a delicate tan, and his head was bare. He had lost the butterfly altogether and here he was at the stream clawing his thigh where a flat prickly plant had stung him. He would have waited to attack the plant for stinging him if it hadn’t been for the butterfly and the guilt in his mind. He looked back up the slope to make sure that his mother wasn’t after him. She would be very angry. She said last time that she wouldn’t spank him that time, but that she would next time. This was next time.

The butterfly wouldn’t wait when he cried “Wait” to it, and then it had made him fall, though he had meant no harm to it, and then it had run away. His expression
became
all the more sober for a queer self-conscious smile in it, and, standing still, picking at a bush, he looked up the brae again. When the wordless inner argument was
concluded
, he felt anger against his mother as well as against the butterfly. Whereupon he moved along the bank
looking
, with moody right, into the little pools.

He saw a brown trout. He saw two, he saw three, and as he couldn’t count beyond three the next number he saw was eighteen. One big fellow went under a flat stone quite close to the edge on the other side, and where he went in the water was dirtied with brown stuff that rose up in a tiny cloud, so that you knew exactly where he was.

It was a difficult business, crossing the burn, because of the jumps between the boulders, but by wading through the stream where it ran out of the pool, and hanging on to a boulder at the same time, he needn’t jump at all and the only real difficulty was keeping his feet on the slimy stones, they were so slippery. The water didn’t come right up his legs and he could lift his kilt with one hand. In the middle, however, when he let go the boulder behind him, he found he could neither go forward nor back, and stood swaying and slightly stooped. The small round stones under his feet wanted to slip away. If he moved, he would fall. The only thing left in the world to do was to cry for his mother, to cry loud, loud. But even while he was beginning to cry he took the step forward. The water came to his knees, he let go his kilt, and with a mighty effort lunged for the next boulder a whole foot away. His courage was rewarded and, hardly having cried to his mother at all, he drew himself out of that desperate spot, with its treacherous footing, and very soon was wading across the last shallow, with such carefree ease that he slipped and fell as neat as a penny on his bottom.

At this, having run the gamut of the emotions in so short
a time, he had full right to weep bitterly and angrily, but the flop had been so sudden and complete that its
astonishment
also made him want to laugh, and by the time he climbed on to the bank and found that no irreparable damage had been done, the uncertain sounds faded out altogether and he glanced around not displeased to find that his misadventure had passed unobserved.

Now for that trout!

He discovered, however, when he carefully surveyed the position, several natural obstacles of considerable, if not unsurmountable, difficulty. From the other side, the water above the stone had looked little more than up to the ankle, whereas now it was up to the knee. The ground sloped down into the centre of the pool, and though it was a little pool, it was deep as a bowl. Accordingly, if he slipped, he would surely be drowned. So he proceeded into the water with the utmost care, leaning sideways towards the bank as he tested each foothold. His kilt, which was sopping wet, became a great embarrassment, because he wanted to keep it from getting wet again. Holding the front part of it high up, he lowered himself slowly into a sitting-down posture. He began to wobble, and thus compelled to let the front of his kilt join the rest of it in the water, he was at once denied all further view of the stone.

On the bank he stood squeezing the water from his kilt but looking at the stone. To tell the truth, he was also just a little afraid of the trout, for it was a monster of four inches and darted with a yellow gleam like lightning. Roddie had told him that a trout did not bite anything except worms, but that an eel would bite your finger as fast as look at you. Besides, to get his hand right down to the stone, he would wet all his jersey, and it was perhaps a little wet as it was.

He would like to do something to that trout for wetting all his kilt on him. He would like to hit it a good hard wallop whatever. Casting around him (with a first glance in the direction of home), he saw a bunch of hazel trees
growing nearby, with the young shoots, twice as long as himself, coming straight up out of the ground. If he got a stick and gave it one sharp prog under the stone! What a fright the trout would get, and maybe it would kill him! And then he would catch the trout and take it home and his mother … He glanced up, not too sure that his mother would forgive him even then, though he was taking food to the house.

As he rounded the hazel trees a butterfly rose from his feet. He knew at once it was the same butterfly, by the way it flew, side to side and up and down, laughing at him. It was like a fool, the way it went. It settled; and slowly, without looking at it (except out of the very corner of his eye), he moved towards it, but not directly. He got within a few feet, but then could not restrain himself from rushing. The butterfly rose and danced on through the air, down the burnside.

He followed it at once, without thought, because he had had by the pool for a moment a queer dread that his mother’s head and shoulders would rise large and menacing over the edge of the brae. If he went farther on then he would be hidden from that near horizon.

The burn wound its way down between the steep braes, and sometimes he had to climb and sometimes to slide, but soon he came to a part he had never seen before, and then he knew he was safe from his mother’s eye.

The uneasy, half-smiling expression on his face, he stopped to pick a grass and to chew it, looking cautiously around him at the same time. He had lost the butterfly and was not thinking about it. He was thinking of his mother and what she might do to him. She had no right to do that to him. She had not.

He began to go on, away from home, away, away from that place where his mother was, in a strange mood that was near to tears and yet far from them.

But the world itself was strange, too. There were grey rocks and great, green ferns, and in time he came to another
little burn, and these two joined into one. He crossed it at a very shallow place because beyond it was the biggest wood he had ever seen, on a steep hillside, and no one would ever find him in that wood, though he himself could lie and watch and see who was coming. Perhaps his mother would come and she would be crying and crying, thinking he was drowned.

The thought of her crying made him feel sorry for her, but it also did him a lot of good. He would be greatly missed.

At that moment his eye landed on a tiny blue object poised on a primrose leaf. He was bending down to touch it when it took to the air. It was a small blue butterfly, the bonniest thing he had ever seen, and his eyes grew round in brightness and wonder. He ran after it in a rapture, but when he got up from his second fall it had vanished. Where did you go? Where? Where? He followed into the wood.

Though the trees and bushes were not high, still they seemed high to him, and being in full foliage, he found that they shut out a view of the ground down by the stream. It was a bit frightening in the wood, too, because the trees were still and had queer twisted shapes often. When he listened and tried to see past the trees, he could hear little birds singing, and once a rabbit gave him a fright.

He could hardly have climbed up through the wood were it not for a narrow, slanting path used by sheep and cattle. This invited him on, and every step he took made it more difficult for him to go back; and though the going on
terrified
him under his heart, yet it also gave him the feeling of one fated to go away. Not that he was going away, away, yet, but—but near it; so near it that anyone else would think he was.

Every few yards he stopped and nibbled and gazed about him, and occasionally his expression grew so self-conscious that someone might have been watching him; and once his face for a moment grew shyly merry in the most engaging way. Then he came back to thought of the blue butterfly, and craned round trunks, and stared at unusual shapes for a
long time. Sometimes when he stared like that his round, shining-clear eyes would lift to a disturbed leaf without movement of his head, and when he went on a few paces he would slowly turn his head and look back as if he weren’t looking at the thing he had been staring at.

There was something in this wood a little bit like what there was in the butterfly, only it was very much stronger than he was, just as he was stronger than the butterfly. Now and then the wood was like a thing whose heart had stopped, watching.