enough braid to finish. More material had to be written for and mamma said the tunic was working out much dearer than it was worth.
The patter of rain on the skylights, the drippings from the trees outside, were a ceaseless accompaniment throughout the days and nights. The rain-streaked windows darkened the already dark house. In the bedrooms the massive dressing-tables were placed at the windows, blocking the little light that managed to slip between the branches of the trees. The long rolls made out of padded blue cloth, now faded to a hyacinth purple, which lay along the window-sills to dry up any damp, were wet when we turned them each morning.
Emmy grew restless and Julia, as the mist stole nearer and nearer the manse, became more remote and silent and inaccessible, as though wrapt in another world. She had received a letter from the dominie, enclosing the verses of the lullaby she liked. I was untutored in the ways of men but I knew he had pretended to forget to give her them on Tuesday that he could have an excuse to write.
I was troubled at the rain because it prevented my walking to Barnfingal on Friday for my lesson. Julia wanted me to go despite it, and said she would come with me, but as the steady downpour made no signs of abatement, mamma would not hear of it and asked Julia what she could be thinking of.
At last, late on the Saturday afternoon, the rain began to lessen. Light broke palely from the reaches of sky, then the sun burst through gloriously, like a guest who knows well his visit is long overdue. We ate supper hurriedly, so anxious were we to be out, and even Emmy, after we had finished, was ready quickly. She might be going only as far as the manse gate, but always she dressed herself as carefully as though she were bound to meet the Laird.
The mud sucked at our shoes as we ran, laughing, up the path, through the wood, with its glistening wet trees, to the gate where raindrops swung from the bars. We were all feeling a little fey after being confined for so long to the house. Julia was singing ‘Caller Herrin’’ in a pensive voice, as though experimenting with her notes and the clear, cool air, Emmy had her hands full of dripping red mosses she intended to plant in the garden because she liked their colour, and I had on a very old straw hat with a broken cone-shaped crown and must have looked wild for I felt my hair pushing through it. We were walking towards Barnfingal—Julia said she liked it better than Auchendee—and had reached the sand-pit, with its exposed knotted roots of trees, when Emmy said suddenly:
‘Who’s that over there?’
‘Where?’ asked Julia, looking round. ‘Oh, why, that must be Mr MacDonald, the dominie.’
He was standing with his back towards us, beside a tree some yards from the road, watching something so intently that he did not hear us.
‘Let’s go and see what he’s looking at,’ Julia proposed.
Emmy was as interested as she and we crossed the sodden grass. He looked round sharply at our approach and his eyes lit up as he recognised us. Now that we were beside him, we saw that what he had been looking at with such absorption was a gipsy encampment in a small clearing amongst the trees. There were three or four tents, all dirty and so low they could hardly be dignified by the name of tent. They were sopping wet and every now and then flapped heavily, with a sound like a slap, in the slight breeze. A cart rested on its shafts and beside it grazed a tethered, lean-flanked horse.
‘There’s something happened here,’ the dominie said in a lowered voice, ‘but I can’t make out what it is. No one seems to be about.’
‘There’s some one in there,’ said Emmy, pointing to the largest of the tents.
From underneath the flap a fierce little child looked out, watching us blackly. I could not have told whether it were male or female, for it had the face of a boy but was dressed in tattered skirts. Julia advanced towards it and spoke to it softly but it would answer her nothing.
Suddenly we were surrounded by a group of staring children of varying ages and sizes. So quickly did they appear around us that they seemed to have sprung from the ground like enchanted mushrooms.
‘Where are all your fathers and mothers?’ Julia asked them laughingly.
They gathered round us closer. ‘They’ were burying Hester’s boy, they told us and their dark eyes watched us fearfully as though the properties of life and death lay in our hands. He had died last night. ‘They’ had asked several of the crofters’ wives to come and see him to tell them what was the matter with him, but none of them would come. We were not surprised, for well we knew the fear with which the crofters and farmers regarded those dusky aliens who kept to themselves with the aloofness of royalty. The pig-wife who came round every year with her heavy burden of china was sure of a seat and something to eat in any of the cottages, the gangrel tinkers who mended pots and pans were always asked for news, as were the other itinerants who walked over the hills peddling tapes and buttons from village to clachan. But gipsies were a different race altogether from tinkers and tramps.
‘We had better go,’ said Emmy.
The dominie gave Julia a coin which she slipped into the palm of the little lowering gipsy, but he was not expecting it and let it fall from his hand.
‘He is like a little fate,’ she said, looking down at him wistfully.
‘A little fate that won’t be bribed,’ smiled the dominie.
We were turning away when I felt Emmy’s hand on my arm.
‘There,’ she whispered, ‘they’re coming back.’
We stood close to the tree, at some distance from the tents, and watched. A silent, secretive procession was returning to the encampment. A rough-haired pony, drawing an empty cart, was followed by the gipsies in an uneven file. I knew that the cart’s last burden had been the boy’s dead body. They had buried him somewhere and his relations had followed him to his grave in strict precedence of next of kin. They would have buried his stick with him so that it could be of aid to him in the next world. Poor gipsy boy! We watched them move about the encampment, burning the tent in which he had lain and with it all his few belongings. Then we saw them gather their things together, harness the lean horse, and depart.
‘I recognised those gipsies,’ Emmy said as we walked back to the road, ‘they come round every year with the May-gobs’ (cold weather about the second week of May).
‘They won’t return,’ the dominie told her, ‘for gipsies never camp again where one of them has died.’
We stood talking with him for some ten minutes before we went on our different ways. He was the only person I have ever met who was able to smile with his eyes while his lips remained grave; I think that was what gave him so kindly an expression and led people to confide in him. He looked smilingly from one to the other of us now, as though he were so glad he had met us, tracing resemblances and differences in our three faces.
BOOK ONE. CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Do you like him?’ Julia asked anxiously when we had turned the corner.
‘He’s very nice,’ Emmy murmured indifferently; ‘he looks an ideal dominie from the children’s point of view.’
‘Papa says,’ Julia said, almost resentfully, ‘that he was one of the most brilliant scholars of his year at Glasgow College. He won everything he could for mathematics.’
‘I wonder what he’s doing buried up here then,’ observed Emmy; ‘that’s Highland, of course. Yes, he’s very nice, but a little like a moral come alive—no
