brothers, said of her, when the old lady attained her ninetieth birthday, ‘She’ll live to be a hundred yet, and attribute it to singing nothing but ballads all her life.’
Cousin Theresa cared more for what the folk of her own day did—matter of little moment to the children. But she had, too, the grisly tales: of the body-snatchers at Drum and the rescue by the grimy blacksmith on his skelping mare; of Malcolm Gillespie, best-hated of excisemen, and the ill end he came by on the gallows, and of the whisky driven glumly past him in a hearse. To Cousin Ellen the children paid less heed; though they laughed (as she laughed herself) at her funny headlong habit of suggesting conclusions to every half-told tale she heard. Cousins Annie or Theresa would say, ‘Oh, yes, of course Nell must know all about it!’ and she would laugh with them and answer, ‘Yes, there I am again.’ But sometimes she would bite her lip and look annoyed. It was she too, who said, out on the moor, ‘Look, you can see Ben A’an today—that faint blue line,’ or talked queer talk about the Druid stones. But these were horizons too distant for childish minds. It was pleasanter to hear again the familiar story of how the Weatherhouse came to be built.
Mrs Craigmyle at fifty four, widowed but unperturbed, announced to her unmarried daughters that she was done with the farm: Annie could keep it if she liked—which Annie did. Theresa and her mother would live free. Theresa was not ill-pleased, when it became apparent that she was to be mistress of the new home. Theresa could never understand her mother’s idle humour. The grace of irresponsibility was beyond her. But Mrs Craigmyle, whose straight high shoulders and legs of swinging length had earned her the family by-name of Lang Leeb, had been a wild limb, with her mind more on balladry than on butter; and her father, the Reverend Andrew, was thankful when he got her safely married into the douce Craigmyle clan. She had made James Craigmyle an excellent wife; but at fifty four was quite content to let the excellence follow the wifehood.
‘We’ll go to town, I suppose,’ said Theresa, who liked company.
‘Fient a town. We’ll go to Andra Findlater’s place.’
Annie and Theresa stared.
Andra Findlater was a distant cousin of their mother, dead long since. A stonemason to trade, he had lived in a two-roomed cottage on the edge of their own farmlands. When his daughters were seven and eight years old, Mrs Findlater decided that she wanted the ben-end kept clear of their muck; and Andra had knocked a hole in the back wall and built them a room for themselves: a delicious room, low-roofed and with a window set slanting.
‘But if I could big a bit mair—’ Andra kept thinking. Another but-and-ben stood back from theirs, its own length away and just out of line with the new room—now what could a man do with that were he to join them up? Be it understood that Andra Findlater had no prospect of being able to join them up; but the problem of how to make the houses one absorbed him to his dying day. It helped, indeed, to bring about his death; for Andra would lean against a spruce tree for hours of an evening, smoking his pipe and considering the lie of the buildings. He leaned one raw March night till he caught cold; and died of pneumonia.
Lang Leeb, as mistress of the big square farmhouse, had always time for a newse with her poor relations. She relished Andra. Many an evening she dandered across the fields, in her black silk apron and with her shank in her hands, to listen to his brooding projects. She loved the site of the red-tiled cottages, set high, almost on the crest of the long ridge; she loved the slanting window of the built-out room. A month after her husband’s death she dandered down the field one day and asked the occupant of the cottage to let her see the little room again. ‘It’s a gey soster,’ said she. ‘The cat’s just kittled in’t.’ Lang Leeb went home and told her daughters she was henceforth to live at Andra Findlater’s place; and her daughters stared.
But Leeb knew what she was doing. She took the cottages and joined them. Andra’s problem was, after all, easy enough to solve. She had money: a useful adjunct to brains. She knocked out the partition of Andra’s original home and made of it a long living-room with a glass door to the garden; and between the two cottages, with the girls’ old bedroom for corridor, she built a quaint irregular hexagon, with an upper storey that contained one plain bedroom and one that was all corners and windows—an elfin inconsequential room, using up odd scraps of space.
The whole was roofed with mellowed tiles. None of your crude new colourings for Leeb. She went up and down the country till she had collected all she required, from barns and byres and outhouses. Leeb knew how to obtain what she wanted. She came back possessed of three or four quern stones, a cruisie lamp and a tirl-the-pin; and from the farm she brought the spinning wheel and the old wooden dresser and plate racks.
The place grew quaint and rare both out of doors and in. One morning Leeb contemplated the low vestibule that had been a bedroom, humming the gay little verse it often brought to her mind:
The grey cat’s kittled in Charley’s wig,
There’s ane o’ them livin’ an’ twa o’ them deid.
‘Now this should be part of the living-room,’ said she. ‘It’s dark and awkward as a passage. We’ll have it so—and so.’
She knew exactly what she wanted done, and gave her orders; but the workman sent to her reported back some three hours later with instructions not to return.
‘But what have you against the man?’ his master asked.
‘I’ve nothing against him, forbye that he’s blind, and he canna see.’
She refused another man; but one day she called Jeames Ferguson in from the garden. Jeames was a wonder with his hands. He had set up the sundial, laid the crazy paving, and constructed stone stalks to the querns, some curved, some tapering, some squat, that made them look like monstrous mushrooms. ‘Could you do that, Jeames?’ ‘Fine that.’ Jeames did it, and was promptly dismissed to the garden, for his clumps of boots were ill-placed in the house. Mrs Craigmyle did the finishing herself and rearranged her curious possessions. Some weeks later Jeames, receiving orders beside the glass door, suddenly observed, ‘I hinna seen’t sin’ it was finished,’ and strode on to the Persian rug with his dubbit and tacketty boots. But no Persian rug did Jeames see. Folding his arms, he beamed all over his honest face and contemplated his own handiwork.
‘That’s a fine bit o’ work, ay is it,’ he said at last.
‘You couldn’t be angered at the body. He was that fine pleased with himself,’ said Mrs Craigmyle.
But the house once to her mind, Mrs Craigmyle did no more work. Dismissing her husband in a phrase, ‘He was a moral man—I can say no more,’ she sat down with a careless ease in the Weatherhouse and gathered her chapbooks and broadsheets around her:
Songs, Bibles, Psalm-books and the like,
As mony as would big a dyke—
though, to be sure, daughter of the manse as she was, the Bible had scanty place in her heap of books. Whistle Binkie was her Shorter Catechism. She gave all her household dignity for an old song: sometimes her honour and kindliness as well; for Leeb treated the life around her as though it were already ballad. She relished it, but having ceased herself to feel, seemed to have forgotten that others felt. She grew hardly visibly older, retaining to old age her erect carriage and the colour and texture of her skin. Her face was without blemish, her hands were delicate; only the long legs, as Kate Falconer could have told, were brown with fern-tickles. Kate had watched so often, with a child’s fascinated stare, her grandmother washing her feet in a tin basin on the kitchen floor. Kate grew up believing that her grandmother ran barefoot among tall bracken when
