The Weatherhouse. Nan Shepherd
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morning, with the old mare harnessed to the farm cart.
‘Take her on the hin step o’ yer bike, Francie, man,’ cried one of the bystanders. ‘That would be mair gallivantin’ like than the cairt.’
‘There’s her bits o’ things to fesh,’ Francie answered.
‘She’ll hae some chairs an’ thingies,’ said the neighbours. ‘The hoosie’ll nae be oot o’ the need o’ them. It’s terrible bare.’
Francie had not dreamed of a reception; but when, late in the evening, the bridal journey ended and the cart turned soberly up the cart-road to the croft, he found a crowd about his doors.
Francie bartered words with no man. He handed out his bride, and after her one bairn, and then another; and then a bundle tied up in a Turkey counterpane. The bride and the bairns went in, and Francie shut the door on them; and turned back to tend his mare.
‘She’ll hae been a weeda, Francie?’ said Jonathan Bannochie. A titter ran round the company.
Francie unharnessed the mare.
‘Weel, nae exactly a weeda,’ he said in his slow way; and led the mare to stable.
Next morning he harnessed her again and jogged in the old cart to town. All Fetter-Rothnie watched him come home with a brand-new iron bedstead in the cart. ‘For the bairns,’ they said. ‘He might have made less do with them.’ But the bed was not for the bairns.
‘Aunt Tris was the first of us to see her,’ Kate told Lindsay. ‘She invented an errand over. Aunt Tris would invent an errand to the deil himself, Granny says, if she wanted something from him. She came home and sat down and took off all her outdoor things before she would say a word. And then she said, “He was fond of fish before he fried the scrubber.” She told us about the bed. “She won’t even sleep with him,” she told us. “Him and the laddie sleeps in the kitchen, and her and the lassie’s got the room. It’s six and sax, I’m thinking, for Francie, between the Journeyman and the wife.” And she told us the bairns’ names.’
The bairns’ names were a diversion to Fetter-Rothnie. In a community that had hardly a dozen names amongst its folk, Francie’s betrothed had been known as Peter’s Sandy’s Bell; but she was determined that her children should have individual names, and called the girl Stella Dagmar and the boy Sidney Archibald Eric. Bargie treated the names after its fashion. The children became Stellicky Dagmaricky and Peter’s Sandy’s Bellie’s Sid.
‘Granny sat and listened to Aunt Tris,’ Kate continued. ‘Licked her lips over it. Granny loves a tale. Particularly with a wicked streak. “A spectacle,” she said, “a second Katherine Bran.” Katherine Bran was somebody in a tale, I believe. And then she said, “You have your theatres and your picture palaces, you folk. You make a grand mistake.” And she told us there was no spectacle like what’s at our own doors. “Set her in the jougs and up on the faulters’ stool with her, for fourteen Sabbaths, as they did with Katherine, and where’s your picture palace then?” A merry prank, she called it. Well!— “The faulter’s stool and a penny bridal,” she said, “and you’ve spectacle to last you, I’se warren.” Granny’s very amusing when she begins with old tales.’
Lindsay’s attention was flagging. ‘Besides,’ she thought, ‘I don’t like old tales. Nor this new one either.’ They had come out of the wood on to a crossroad and the country was open for miles ahead.
‘And that’s Knapperley, is it, Katie?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Kate. ‘But we don’t go near it to get to Mrs Hunter’s.’
Snow fell that night, and the night following, and the frost set harder than before. The guests were stamping at the doorstep, knocking off the snow that had frozen in translucent domes upon their heels, shaking their garments free from the glittering particles of ice that hung in them. The children eyed the house with awe, mingled in Stella Dagmar with disdain. ‘It’s a terrible slippery floor, I canna get traivelled,’ she objected in the long, polished lobby. But the glories of the Christmas tree silenced criticism for awhile. Lindsay had made a very pretty thing of it; and when by and by she slipped from the room and Miss Theresa said ostentatiously, ‘She’s away to take a rest—she’s been ill, you see,’ the girl herself was as deliciously excited as any bairn. She giggled with pleasure as she draped an old crimson curtain round her and adjusted her Father Christmas beard. ‘Now what all nonsense shall I say?’ And she said it very well, disguising her voice and playing silly antics.
‘My very toes is laughin’,’ Mrs Hunter declared.
The room grew hot, and Lindsay in her wrappings choked for air. She slid her hand behind the curtain that covered the glass door to the garden. But the door blew open at her touch. The wind and a woman entered together: a woman in the fifties, weathered and sinewy, clad in a rough, patched Lovat tweed and leggings caked with mud and battered snow. On her head sat a piece of curious finery that had been once a hat and from it dangled a trallop of dingy veiling.
‘Bawbie Paterson,’ cried Miss Theresa. ‘Who would have expected that?’
Miss Paterson marched across the room.
‘It’s you I’m seekin’, Barbara Hunter,’ she announced. ‘Will you send for Maggie? There’s my lassie up and left me. The third one running. Will you send for Maggie? Maggie’s the lass for me.’
‘Barbara Paterson,’ said Mrs Hunter, ‘that I will not. Maggie’s in a good place. I’d be black affronted to bid her up and awa’. And mair than that, Miss Barbara, nae lass o’ mine’ll ever be at your beck and ca’. Ye dinna feed your folk, Miss Barbara. I’ve seen my chickens hanging in to the bare wa’s o’ a cabbage as though they hadna seen meat this month an’ mair, and your kitchen deemie, Barbara Paterson, had the same hungry e’e. Ye’ll nae get Maggie.’
‘And what am I to do wanting a kitchen lass?’
‘Ye can tak the road an’ run bits, Miss Barbara.’
‘Since you are in my house, Bawbie Paterson,’ said Miss Theresa, ‘you’d better take a seat.’
‘I’ll not do that, Tris Craigmyle. You’d have me plotted with heat, would you? But I’ll wait a whilie or I go in a lowe. And who might this be?’ And she wheeled round to stare at Lindsay, who had dropped the curtain and was staring hard at her.
‘A likely lass,’ said Miss Barbara; and she clutched at Lindsay, who did not resist, but allowed herself to be drawn closer. ‘And are you seeking a place? Can you cook a tattie? A’ to dross?’
‘Hoots, Miss Barbara,’ cried Mrs Hunter, scandalised. ‘That’s nae a servant lass. That’s Miss Lorimer—Andrew Lorimer the solicitor’s daughter. Ye’re nae at yersel.’
Lindsay’s heart was beating fast. She said nothing, but stared at the great rough face above her. She had a feeling as though some huge elemental mass were towering over her, rock and earth, earthen smelling. Miss Barbara’s tweeds had been sodden so long with the rains and matted with the dusts of her land, that they too seemed elemental. Her face was tufted with coarse black hairs, her naked hands that clutched the fabric of Lindsay’s dress were hard, ingrained with black from wet wood and earth. ‘She’s not like a person, she’s a thing,’ Lindsay thought. The girl felt puny in her grasp, yet quite without fear, possessed instead by a strange exhilaration.
Held thus against Miss Barbara’s person and clothes, the outdoor smell of which came strongly to the heat of the parlour, Lindsay, her senses sharpened by excitement, was keenly aware of an antagonism in the room: as though the fine self-respecting solidity of generations of