Lament for a Maker by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

plenty tried their hand at an explanation and plenty more at controverting them that did the explaining. The stationy got a good deal of respect by saying he could distinguish alternative hypotheses: it’s wonderful how a couple incomprehensible words will impress folk little acquaint with letters.
    One bit speak I can mind at the Arms, if but by the unco happening that put an end to it.
    Once in a while, you must know, I take a look over to the private bar – most of the better-thought-of folk of the parish think it a decent enough place for a bit crack of an evening. Will Saunders was there, and Rob Yule, and whiles in came the stationy, still with a hypothesis, so to speak, in each pocket – for it was ever his way to seem holding back a bit inner knowledge: to hear him talk on politics you would think he held in with the editors of the Scotsman and The Times themselves. And behind the bar was Mistress Roberts, banging the pots about to show she was real unfriendly to the liquor and had never thought to come to the serving of it; a sore trial she was to Roberts but not undeserved, folk said, for all the time of their courting had she not been slipping him wee tracts about the poisonous action of alcohol on the blood-stream, and might a publican not have taken warning from that? Mistress Roberts said never a word until in came wee Carfrae, the greengrocer. Carfrae never touches, only he comes into the private for a gossip and Mistress Roberts keeps him a special ginger beer; at one time she put a row of the stuff behind the bar with a notice: Sparkling, Refreshing and Non-Injurious , but at that Roberts put his foot down, everything had its place, he said, and the place for a notice like that was in the sweetie-shops. As I say, wee Carfrae came in for this dreich drink of his, and it was him restarted the speak about Guthrie.
    ‘Mistress,’ he said, giving a sad look over at Yule and Saunders and myself, ‘I’m thinking there’s a power of evil idle talk in this parish.’
    ‘There is that for certain, Mr Carfrae, and has been ever since the failure of the Local Option.’ And Mistress Roberts made a great rattle with a pile empty bottles of stout.
    ‘No doubt we’ve some control of our tongues here in the private,’ said Carfrae with another ill look at us in the corner, ‘but out there in the public are two–three ignorant billies claiking away fair scandalous about the laird.’
    ‘Poor soul!’ cried Mistress Roberts, ‘he has much to thole, I’m sure’ – and she cast her eyes up to heaven like a hen after a bit drink. ‘It’s right disgusting what they find to say about him and that strange quean Christine.’
    ‘Shameful,’ said Carfrae, licking his lips as if the ginger had been extra tasty; ‘and the more shameful to speak of since it seems like enough to be true. Bred up to it from a wean, poor lass, the same as you might breed up a sow.’
    It’s this kind of speak makes me times doubt the blessings of Reformation and agree with those that say the muck-rake came to Scotland along with presbytery. But Dr Jervie – and I think he’s in the right of it – says No, that’s a false thought: it’s the tough land and the short leases, the long-grey lift and the chill raw haar seeping to the heart, that robs us of half our right sensuous life and sends us to warm and stir ourselves before the fires of evil speaking and whispered lust. I’ve learnt long since to hold my whisht when folk unbridle their tongues so, and I held my whisht now. But Rob Yule, for all that his silver has long lain cold in his cellars, has a warm heart and a quick temper, and forbye he had ever liked Christine. So he rose now to the creature Carfrae’s bait. ‘Is the old lie about the quean,’ he said, ‘wearing that thin that there’s a new one needed?’
    You must know that Christine was Guthrie’s ward and bore his mother’s name. She had come to the miekle house as an infant – the child, it was explained,