Lament for a Maker Read Free Page B

of glaur for mud pies – during his early and formative years, for that might have made all the difference. As it was, he had a fell unpleasant way with him and was subject to severe nervous disturbance, but he was no more certifiable than the folk who had fee’d the doctors. And as for prognosis, he gave it as his considered opinion that Mr Ranald Guthrie might very well grow worse, and the American cousins have some hope yet. On the other hand he might very well grow better, or for that matter he might very well remain the same. And there the Harley Street medical left off, adding a bill at a guinea a mile from London, and a claim for damages to a like amount – though the tink mongrel had taken only what he could well spare, gross slummock that he was, and who would grudge a Guthrie dog a bold bid for a square meal? Anyway, that was the end for the time being of the American cousins trying to get control of the Guthrie affairs. Guthrie had served them a gey queer turn, it appeared, and it was this had put the attempt in their heads.
    This and a bit more I had from Dr Jervie, us running the kirk session together and so having a bit talk at times over the graver affairs of the parish. More than once our thoughts had turned to the folk at Erchany, for the minister was fell anxious about the quean, Christine Mathers. But that will come: it’s the bogles I’m on the now – a bogle, you must know, being no more than what the English call a scarecrow.
    Well, all Kinkeig knew how Guthrie was fair haunted by the bogles in the fields roundabout; fair haunted, that is, by the thought some feckless chiel might have left a bittock silver in the pooches when breeching and jacketting the sticks. An unco sight it was to see the laird striding his own parks from bogle to bogle, groping ghoul-like among the old clouts for those unlikely halfpennies. About he’d go and back again, visiting the same bogle three times, maybe, in the same day; so that folk said it was plain daft. But the Harley Street slummock said No, that was just neurosis, folie de doute , and no sign of madness, any more than getting up in the night to bar the door when you were full certain you’d barred it already. No doubt he was right from what you’d call a strictly medical point of view.
    What Guthrie did on his own land he did on the tenants’ land too, and there were some made jokes about poaching and pooching and others said the pooching rights should go with the shooting rights in the leases. The strange thing was that Guthrie had as much respect for other people’s property as for his own, and you could see he knew it an unco thing, prowling his tenants’ land to such an end. For on the home farm he’d stride to it as if it were as natural a part of a landowner’s tasks as giving a look to the dykes and fences. But off his own ground he’d stand canny in a lane ten minutes maybe, giving a look here and a look there with his great eyes, the eyes folk said had a glint of gold in them, and then he’d loup warily over the dyke and be up to the bogle as quick and quiet as a futret. Uncanny it was, this strait need to do so daft a thing: you’ll realise the uncanniness of it the better if you remember he was not the first Guthrie to wear boots; dirt as he was in most folk’s speaking there was yet gentry plain in the presence of him. When the bairns mocked at him, as whiles they did the few times he came near a dwelling, never a sign of seeing them would he show – let alone give a bit swipe at them or curse as a common billy would do – but kept all his glowering looks as he strode past for some invisible devil of the middle air. So there was the more talk when he turned out the Gamleys.
    The site of Erchany had been chosen long since for the strength of it, the land about right tough and stony, the home farm no more than a splatter of oats and turnips amid the larch woods. Rob Gamley was called grieve, he and his two grown sons tended the land