The Silver Darlings (7 page)

“No,” she answered, still conscious of his explosive strength, for he was not heavily built.

They crossed the tributary by stepping-stones and
proceeded
up its right bank through a wide display of wild roses, from snow-white to deep crimson. She exclaimed at the unexpectedness of the pretty sight. There were two long pools beyond, and then the land narrowed upon the small stream in an intimate way that touched her fancy. The banks rose steeply, with faces of rock, grey salleys, small vivid green birches, the drooping fronds of large ferns, foxgloves and other wild flowers, all in a tangle, while the water dropped from little pool to little pool or slid in cool glissades down sloping rocks, slippery with clean green summer slime.

“That’s your place now,” he said, coming to a stop and pointing to a long low house, thatched with rushes, its head much higher than its tail as it lay into the slope of the ground. “And if I’m not mistaken,” he added, “that’s Kirsty herself wondering who in all the world I have with me now.”

His quiet assessing humour brought from Catrine a quick glance and smile. She thanked him and took her bundle. “I go this way,” he said, “and I have to hurry, as I’m late for the sea. Good-bye.” Giving her an easy,
friendly
smile, he turned and crossed the burn, having asked in all their talk neither her name nor her business. This
complete
and natural lack of interest in her affairs was so
refreshing
an experience that she went up the slope towards Kirsty with a deepening smile of expectancy and the stranger’s turmoil in her breast.

And then Kirsty saw her, and exclaimed, and shook her by the hand, and said that she couldn’t believe her eyes. They were grey, keen, and searching, for Kirsty was a practical woman, given indeed at times to a precision of manner that many thought hard and unsympathetic. Catrine felt the penetration and knew Kirsty was wondering what trouble had brought a young wife, barely four months married, on so long a journey from her husband, and was suddenly disconcerted and touched with dismay. But she smiled and said simply, “I had a longing to come and see you.”

“Indeed, and why wouldn’t you? Come you away in now. And did you walk all the way?”

“Yes.”

Kirsty exclaimed again, and looked more shrewdly than ever at Catrine’s face, then paused near the door to say “There’s the old man himself taking the peats home.”

Catrine saw Kirsty’s father, walking beside a small horse that was dragging a sledge of peats from the moor.

“He’s failing on me,” said Kirsty. “But that’s the way of things. He’s never got used to this place. Sometimes I tell him I think he’s going dottled. Come in. It’s tired you must be. Sit there. And how did you fall in with Roddie Sinclair?”

Catrine explained, and conveyed at the same time Granny Gordon’s greetings.

“You’re making friends early. And there’s nothing wrong with that young man until he takes drink. Well! well! so here you are. And how’s Tormad himself?”

Catrine did not answer.

Kirsty came to a standstill.

“He’s been taken from me,” said Catrine, not looking up.

“From you? Do you mean he’s dead?”

“He was out fishing in a boat and a ship of war caught them and took them away.”

“A ship of war?”

“The press-gang.”

“The press-gang!” Kirsty sat down abruptly. She stared at Catrine piercingly. Then she said with great force, “The dirty brutes, the coarse, dirty brutes. How long ago?”

Catrine told her. There was something tonic in Kirsty’s wrath. “The place was getting the better of me, so I
remembered
how you’d asked me to come, and so I thought I’d come for a change.”

“You were right, and I’m glad to see you. We may not have much here, but you’re welcome to what there is. My poor girl, you have had a hard time.” She got up. “It’s terrible news indeed. I wondered when I saw you coming what it was. I thought maybe it was no more than some small trouble that we could put right. You would think poor folk hadn’t enough misery and worry already. If only we could have the law on them! Wait now, till I bring you a little of this night’s milking,” and she left the kitchen.

Catrine got up and looked out of the small window. Dismay came back and quietened her to the stillness of the evening outside. Had she made a mistake in coming, been wrong in thinking there was anywhere in the world she could go or anyone in whom she could find solace? Kirsty seemed harder than she had been, was not so tidy in her person, and somehow there was a faint gloom or misery of poor living in the air.

As she looked out the small window, she had a quite vivid memory of herself as a little girl, being taken by her mother to call on Kirsty or of Kirsty’s coming to their home, and of the invariable question, “Now, are you
wondering
what it is I have got for you?” Kirsty always had something for her, some little present or maybe just a round hard white sweet from her hidden hoard. But the memory of it was bright and young.

Suddenly Catrine knew that an end had come to the vision of her running childhood that she now saw in her mind as if it were far outside.

Was this the vision she had been hunting, without
knowing
it, when she had left Dale? The question hardly formed, for the vision passed like a glimmer of light and, turning, she looked about the kitchen with cold, alien eyes. Age touched her features with a drawn fear and, in the gloom of the interior, her pale face seemed straining upward for flight. Her eardrums became intensely acute and all in a moment she had a wild terror of hearing Kirsty’s footsteps return. Then she heard them coming; footsteps, blind
footsteps
. Her heart stopped and she all but cried aloud.

She was sitting on a three-legged stool as Kirsty came in. The porridge-pot was bubbling over the fire, suspended from the roof-tree by a heather rope coated round with soot to the thickness of a man’s wrist, and here and there glistening like ebony. The fire stood in the middle of the floor, hedged about with flat stone. The chimney was a hole in the roof, square-boxed with wood. But in the dim light, with the yellow tongues of flame idly flapping over the black peat, the fine display of blue-patterned plates and dishes on Kirsty’s large dresser glimmered cosily enough. Kirsty had many and special household gods, for her father had had a comfortable holding in Sutherland, which he had rented, not like the numerous cottars from year to year, but on lease. When the lease had fallen in, the landlord had refused to renew it. And that was the beginning of the evictions.

The news of what had happened to Catrine had now had time to take complete possession of Kirsty’s mind and gave her an added energy. She spoke continuously, as she moved about getting the simple supper ready, and the drive of her voice and her questions brought Catrine to herself.

Presently Kirsty’s father came in. He was a tall man of seventy with a slight stoop and grey steady eyes. “Look whom I’ve here for you!” called Kirsty. He paused and looked for some time, and then in a voice quietened by
surprise
, said, “Is it yourself, Catrine?”

“Yes,” she answered, smiling and shaking hands.

He kept looking at her in wonder as if she were herself
and something more. “You have grown a big girl,” he said and becoming fully conscious of her hand, gave it a firm shake.

Catrine felt embarrassed and a small lump rose into her throat as she kept glancing from side to side, smiling.

“And have you come on a visit to see us?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Very good, very good. And how is your father and mother and all of you?”

“They’re all fine, thank you.”

“They’re not all fine,” said Kirsty, putting swirls of air through the peat smoke. “A terrible thing has happened to her. They have taken her man.” Her voice rose, as if her father were dull of hearing. “Tormad, her man. You’ll have forgotten she was married. The press-gang came and took him away. She has no man now. They have taken him away, the coarse, dirty brutes.” She laid a horn spoon on the small deal table with a bang that rattled the four knives in its little drawer. She went on talking while her father regarded Catrine.

“I forgot for the moment you were married,” he said. “Forgive me; you look so young. I’m sorry to hear this.”

“Sit in,” interrupted Kirsty, “and take your porridge. Folk have to eat though the heavens fall. Sit in, I say. This is your place, Catrine. And this table, drat it, if you move it off the one spot you’ll never get it steady.” The floor was of clay and Kirsty had upset the under-pinning of the table’s unsteady leg. But she soon had it fixed firmly again.

“When did this happen?” he asked.

“Be saying the grace,” interrupted Kirsty. “There’s plenty of time for talk. The child is starving.”

He raised his hand to his forehead and reverently
repeated
the “Grace before Meat” that is to be found in the Shorter Catechism.

When they had eaten and he had got all the news, he fell into an abstraction by the fire. Kirsty gave a sideways, knowing nod to Catrine. “He’s getting like that,” she said,
in a private voice with a nonchalant humour. “Never mind him. You must be feeling tired, and it’s your bed you need. We’ll get him to take the Books, and then we’ll pack him off to his own bed. He sleeps next door. The bed here is big enough for both of us and it’s cosy—if you don’t mind sleeping with me, eh?”

“No,” said Catrine.

“You
are
tired, lassie,” said Kirsty with one of her shrewd looks.

“Yes,” said Catrine, turning away, a strangling in her throat. She did her utmost to fight it down, afraid the terror of the bed would overcome her. She knew that she was
unreasonable
, that this was her inevitable destiny. She fought hard. “I am—this is—foolish——” The sob came.

“My poor bairn,” said Kirsty, patting her firmly on the back. “There now—don’t give in. You must get used to it.”

From his abstraction, Kirsty’s father roused himself and looked at Catrine.

“We’ll be taking the Books at once,” said Kirsty before he could speak. “The bairn is tired after the long journey.” The peats that stood on
edge she shoved closer together, and at once bright flames sprang up, lighting the dying day in the kitchen. The old man took the Gaelic bible and, stooping a little towards the fire said, “We will read in the twenty-third chapter of the Book of Psalms.” He knew it by heart.

At once Catrine lowered her head and in her lap her small hands clenched.

Catrine could listen no more. It was a cruel irony that had made the old man choose this chapter to read, for it was
the last that Tormad and herself had read together, the night before he had gone to sea.

There had been something very intimate in this reading of a chapter of the Bible after they had got married. They had been shy about it at first, smiling like embarrassed children who were playing at the game of being responsible and grown-up, Tormad clearing his throat and being solemn, while she sat upright and still, like the mother of a family of sons. Tormad hadn’t read very loud, as if folk outside might hear, yet had kept his voice steady and had even raised it a bit towards the end. What a lovely
experience
it had been, warm with the very breath of their love, bringing them together in the ways and traditions of their folk, shyly establishing them in manhood and womanhood, encircling them about with strength and assurance. They thought of the words he read with a certain wonder, as belonging to remote places and remote times, and they hardly dared think of God at all, putting between them and Him the dark veil, with a little fear, a natural humility, thus reserving for themselves the brightness of their human lives, its moments of love and mirth and rapture, this side the veil.

But there was one chapter that all the children knew, and, in its metrical form, a verse or two of it were often recited by them as their private prayer before jumping into bed; for it was familiar in its cadence and full of
pleasantness
, A curious thing about it, too, was that the words were always drowned in memory except those picturing the green pastures and the still waters. But they remained, shining and green-cool, like a memory of a summer day, spent perhaps up the glen, where no houses are, at a
distance
from home.

And on that last night, with the childhood cadence in his voice, Tormad had read of the green pastures and the still waters.

Old David and Kirsty got to their knees, and Catrine, following them, buried her face in her palms. She did not
hear one word of his prayer, her mind and body blinded, and when they were shuffling to their feet, she had to keep to her knees. They looked at her and turned away, saying no word, and in a few seconds she got up.

At once Kirsty spoke loudly to her father. “Now you’ll away to bed. It’s late it is.”

“Very good,” he said mildly, and turned to Catrine. There was that steady look for a moment, his eyes clear open and yet faintly veiled, almost as if he were looking at her from a distance with the unearthly calm and
consideration
there might be in the eyes of God.