Lang Leeb detached herself from active living. Once a year she made an expedition to town, and visited in turn the homes of her three Lorimer nephews. She carried on these occasions a huge pot of jam, which she called ‘the berries’; and having ladled out the Andrew Lorimers’ portion with a wooden spoon, replaced the pot in her basket and bore it to the Roberts and the Johns. For the rest, she sat aside and chuckled. Life is an entertainment hard to beat when one’s affections are not engaged. Theresa managed the house and throve on it, having found too little scope at the farm for her masterful temper. Her mother let her be, treating even her craze for acquisition with an ironic indulgence. Already with the things they had brought from the farm the house was full. But Theresa never missed a chance to add to her possessions. She had a passion for roups. ‘A ga’in foot’s aye gettin’,’ she said.
‘She’s like Robbie Welsh the hangman,’ Lang Leeb would chuckle, ‘must have a fish out of ilka creel.’ And when Mrs Hunter told Jonathan Bannochie the souter, a noted hater of women, that Miss Theresa was at the Wastride roup, ‘and up and awa wi’ her oxter full o’ stuff,’ she was said to have added, ‘They would need a displenish themsels in yon hoose, let alane bringin’ mair in by.’ ‘Displenish,’ snorted Jonathan. ‘Displenish, said ye? It’s a roup o’ the fowk that’s needed there.’
Miss Annie too, when she gave up the farm brought part of her plenishing. Ellen was the only one who brought nothing to the household gear. Ellen brought nothing but her child; and there was nowhere to put her but the daft room at the head of the stairs that Theresa had been using for lumber.
‘It’s a mad-like place,’ Theresa said. ‘Nothing but a trap for dust. But you won’t take a Finnan haddie in a Hielan’ burnie. She’s no way to come but this, and she’ll just need to be doing with it. She’s swallowed the cow and needn’t choke at the tail.’
Ellen did not choke. She loved the many-cornered room with its irregular windows. There she shut herself in as to a tower and was safe; or rather, she felt, shut herself out from the rest of the house. The room seemed not to end with itself, but through its protruding windows became part of the infinite world. There she lay and watched the stars; saw dawn touch the mountains; and fortified her soul in the darkness that had come on her.
TWO
Of the three Craigmyle sisters, Ellen was the likest to her mother. She too was long and lean, though she had not her mother’s delicacy of fingers and of skin; and to Ellen alone among her daughters Mrs Craigmyle had bequeathed the wild Lorimer heart.
How wild it was not even the girl herself had discovered, when at twenty seven she married Charley Falconer. There was no opposition to the match, though Falconer was a stranger; well-doing apparently; quiet and assured: which the family took to mean reliable, and Ellen, profound. Her life had hitherto been hard and rigid; her father, James Craigmyle, kept his whole household to the plough; not from any love of tyranny, but because he had never conceived of a life other than strait and laborious. To work in sweat was man’s natural heritage. His wife obeyed him and bided her time; Ellen obeyed, and escaped in thought to a fantastic world of her own imagining. The merest hint of a tale sufficed her, her fancy was off. Her choicest hours were spent in unreality—a land where others act in accordance with one’s expectations. Sometimes her toppling palaces would crash at the touch of the actual, and then she suffered an agony of remorse because the real Ellen was so unlike the Ellen of her fancies. ‘There I am again—I mustn’t pretend these silly things,’ she would say; and taking her Bible she would read the verse that she had marked for her own especial scourging: ‘Casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.’ For a day or two she would sternly dismiss each fleeting suggestion of fiction, striving to empty a mind that was naturally quick and receptive, and finding the plain sobriety of a Craigmyle regimen inadequate to fill it. Shortly she was ‘telling herself stories’ again. It might be wicked, but it made life radiant.
Concerning Charley Falconer she told herself an endless story. The tragedy of her brief married life lay in the clash between her story and the truth. Charley was very ordinary and a little cheap. He dragged her miserably from one lodging to another, unstable, but with a certain large indifference to his own interests that exposed his memory to Craigmyle and Lorimer contempt, when at his death Ellen could no longer deny how poor she was.
She came back to her mother’s house, dependent, the more so that she had a child; at bitter variance with herself. She had been forced up against a grinding poverty, a shallow nature and a life without dignity. By the time she returned home her father was dead, the Weatherhouse built and Theresa comfortably settled as its genius. Ellen found herself tolerated. Power was too sweet to this youngest sister who had had none: the widowed and deprived was put in her place. Since that place was the odd-shaped upstairs room, Ellen did not grumble; but Theresa’s management made it perhaps a trifle harder for her to come to terms with the world. Her own subordinate position in the house was subtly a temptation: it sent her back to refuge in her imaginings. After a time the rancour and indignity of her married years faded out. She thought she was experienced in life, but in truth she had assimilated nothing from her suffering, only dismissed it and returned to her dreams.
Two things above all restored her—her child and the country. It was a country that liberated. More than half the world was sky. The coastline vanished at one of the four corners of the earth, Ellen lost herself in its immensity. It wiled her from thought.
Kate also took her from herself. She was not a clever child, neither quaint nor original nor ill-trickit; but never out of humour. She asked nothing much from life—too easily satisfied, her mother thought, without what she could not have. Ellen, arguing from her own history, had schooled herself to meet the girl’s inevitable revolt, her demand for her own way of living. But Kate at thirty had not yet revolted. She had wanted nothing that was not to her hand. She had no ambition after a career, higher education did not interest her, she questioned neither life nor her own right to relish it. Had she not been brought up among Craigmyles, their quiet domesticity was what she would have fancied. She liked making a bed and contriving a dinner; and since she must earn her living she took a Diploma in Domestic Science and had held several posts as housekeeper or school matron; but late in 1917 she entered (to the regret of some of her relations) upon voluntary work in a Hospital, becoming cook in a convalescent Hospital not far from her home.
Ellen had therefore carried for nearly thirty years the conviction that she had tested life; and mastered it.
At sixty she was curiously young. Her body was strong and supple, her face tanned, a warm glow beneath the tan. She walked much alone upon the moors, walking heel first to the ground with a firm and elastic tread. Her eyes were young; by cause both of their brightness and of their dreaming look. No experience was in their glance. She knew remote and unspeakable things—the passage of winds, the trembling of the morning star, the ecstasy of February nights when all the streams are murmuring. She did not know human pain and danger. She thought she did, but the pain she knew was only her own quivering hurt. Her world was all her own, she its centre and interpretation; and she had even a faint sweet contempt for those who could not enter it. The world and its modes passed by and she ignored them. She was a little proud of her indifference to fashion and chid her sister Theresa for liking a modish gown. She saw—as who could have helped seeing—the external changes that marked life during the thirty years she had lived in the Weatherhouse: motor cars, the shortening skirt, the vacuum cleaner; but of the profounder revolutions, the change in temper of a generation, the altered point of balance of the world’s knowledge, the press of passions other than individual and domestic, she was completely unaware.
Insensibly as these thirty years passed she allowed her old fashion to grow on her. Fancy was her tower of refuge. Like any green girl she pictured her futures by the score. After a time she took the habit of her imaginary worlds
