Certain passengers travelling by the Kelso Express were presently
switched off on a Branch Line, to rumble for a chilly hour in
unwarmed and feebly-lighted carriages, between low-breasting heathery
hills patched with larch and oak-woods, shagged with gorse and
delicately topped with snow. Upon the left hand, beyond the
blue-green riband of a river narrowing between its encroaching icy
borders; lying between low sandstone cliffs hollowed by spates from
the hills, the last embers of a fierce red sunset were smouldering
away....
Signs of the Day were apparent, in the significant age or suggestive
youth of the plaided shepherds who moved as isolated dots upon the
cheerless landscape; their collies bounding at their heels, or
harrying flocks of black-faced sheep back to the round, stone-built
folds upon the hills. Or in the macintosh and shawl-enveloped women
driving shaggy ponies in the farm-gigs; or kilted and breeched,
wearing the green armlet with the red Crown and lettering,--carting
mangolds or forking swedes, herding rough-coated milch-cows back to
the byres--or wheeling red Post Office bicycles up steep brae-roads.
A fanged east wind spattering icy sleet, blew from the North Sea
across the Cheviots, and lights began to twinkle from grey
stone-built manses and slate-roofed farms. Dark had come down when
the train stopped at Cauldstanes, the bleak little granite station of
the Border market-town. The dazzling blue-white headlights of a big
Rolls-Royce car blazed in the dark beyond the platform fence-rails.
A one-armed, silver-badged male servant waited on the wet asphalte
under the jumping gas. The Station Master, stout, white-bearded and
important, passed towards the rear of the train, demanding a "ledda
for Whingates." Presently to return, loaded with rugs, pillows and
suit-cases, ushering the sought-for lady,--who said in her
characteristically staccato accents as she bade her fellow-traveller
adieu:
"Good-night and good-bye, if we never meet again! Though this is a
small world, isn't it?--and most roads seem to cross at the Front.
No! you are Not to help with the things! ... Mr. Smellie will be so
obliging.... And here is Padsworth. Glad to see you so fit,
Padsworth. I've not forgotten to bring the artificial arm!"
Thus Lady Wastwood, who vanished away into the conjectural regions
beyond the platform fence-rails, tall, thin, triangular-faced,
graciously smiling; attended by the laden station-master and followed
by the one-armed groom....
A red-cheeked girl in a macintosh and scarlet Tam O' Shanter took the
soldier's ticket at the gate in the platform-railing, and cried in a
strident key, intended for some unseen ear:
"Mrs. Govan, mem! ... Is Mrs. Govan no' ootside wi' the doug-cairt
frae the _Cross Keys_?"
A voice pleasanter, rounder and more womanly, came back out of the
blackness of the station entrance-yard, crying:
"Ay, am I, Leezie! Is Cornel Yaill there?"
Leezie shrieked back as the headlights of the Rolls-Royce revolved,
and the big car turning,--backed, snorted, forged ahead and sped away
on soundless tyres into the chilly darkness:
"I kenna, but there's a sodger seekin' a nicht's lodgin'!"
"Tell him the _Cross Keys_ wi' guid supper an' clean beddin' is
inside the meenute's walk frae here!" called back the matronly voice.
"Losh me! Whatna's that?"
As John Hazel stood outside the platform gate, in the wind-blown
flare of its solitary gas-lamp, another tall figure in khaki had
appeared from the velvety blur of blackness under the eaves of the
preposterous little booking-office; and passing close to the head of
the quiet beast between the shafts, had halted by the off-wheel and
spoken to the driver....
"Eh, Cornel!" the womanly voice went on, "Gude guide us, but ye
scairt me sair! Risin' up oot o' the dairk richt under auld
Broonie's nose! ... But that the meir kens ye, the puir beast micht
have boltit. An' wha' wad manage the _Cross Keys_ then, I wad weel
like to know!"
The answer came in a man's deep voice, with an inflection of
melancholy underlying its pleasantness:
"I am sorry, Mrs. Govan. But how is it I find you here, on such a
bitter night?"
"Huts! The nicht's no' waur than ither for the time o' year," Mrs.
Govan retorted from her perch on the driver's seat. "An' the guidman
being laid by wi' a sair hoast--forbye a lad we canna' trust wi' a
guid beast on a mirk night--there's nane but mysel' to drive ye to
Kerr's Arbour!" The speaker added, in the high keening tone which a
Scotswoman of her class invariably assumes in speaking of things
having reference to death and mourning; "An' haud ye back ae mair
half-hoor from ane that's thinkin' lang until ye come to her--I
wouldna'! Not to win my ain lad Alec back frae the Front the night!"
She went on as the person addressed made a responsive sound of
indeterminate meaning:
"But whatna's to hinder ye, Cornel Yaill, knowing the road's weel as
yer pocket, frae driving yersel--as ye've done to my knowledge--mony
an' mony a time before noo. Up wi' ye!" She relinquished the reins
and jumped down, nimbly enough considering her years and matronly
proportions, adding as the man she addressed promptly assumed her
vacated seat.... "Bid them gie Broonie a het mesh, puir thing, she's
nane sae yoong as has been!--and mind ye send her back wi' the cairt
early in the morn's morn. She'll be wantit to bring Mr. Kellar, the
lawyer, oot on business conneckit wi' the Will! Na, na! I'll no' be
needing a lift to the _Cross Keys_! Here's a soger-man from Lunnon
that's bound for the inn, and needin' a wise body to guide him. Gang
yer ways wi' guid luck! Gie my love to Miss Forbis!"
The woman added as Yaill tightened the reins, and the mare, answering
a whip-touch with an indignant snort, trotted away with the dog-cart
into the sleety darkness:
"Your road's lang and ower rough. But, O, Man! there's a braw, braw
leddy waiting to greet ye at the ither end!"
X
She was so braw a lady,--not only in the physical meaning of splendid
height and just bodily proportion; noble outlines and sweet,
healthful hues; hair as richly black-brown as the bracken of her
wintry braes, and eyes as tawny-golden as the crystals of her
Scottish mountains,--that the heart of the man who loved and had lost
her, seemed to shrivel and blister in his bosom, as though some
fierce corrosive acid had been poured upon the throbbing flesh....
Again and again he said what he was coming to say, as the willing
mare, urged by no sparing hand, made good her journey towards Kerr's
Arbour. Straining up steep bare brae-roads; picking her way down
slippery descents; plashing through muddy bottoms walled with high
cliff-banks clad with funereal firs and shadowy larches, revealed by
passing gleams from the dog-cart's lamps. As the high-road changed
to a hilly private road bordered by a plantation of conifers backed
by a wire park-fence, the beast, which had given signs of distress
unheeded by the man--checked at the steep with almost a woman's
sob....
Something in the sound wakened a dull pity in Edward Yaill. He got
down, and walked beside Brownie, as she slipped and stumbled on
stones washed loose by the rain-scour; and as a soldier will, he
cursed the badness of the road. It was in a rotten state, compared
to what it had been before the War came to take its super-toll of
human energy. Sweeping into its huge and bloody maw gentle and
simple, noble and infamous, ignorant and learned, penniless and rich.
Nothing was the same. Nothing would, could, ever be the same again.
Life had been transmuted, not into gold--but from honest silver into
a strange, new ugly metal--in this vast, comprehensive crucible of
War....
Most hopelessly, irremediably changed of all human beings was Edward
Yaill. Once a man meant by his Maker to inhabit an earthly Paradise,
by the warm, fragrant side of the tenderest of mates. To that
sick-hearted wretch, dogged by a pitiless Fate: outcast, or it seemed
so to him--from decent Society: traitor to the woman unswervingly
worshipped through the long years of a drawn-out engagement, it was
meagrest comfort to know himself blamelessly loyal. Even as a Saint
who in the delirium of fever has heard his own crazed voice
blaspheming God....
In the horrible wreck and wastage of Yaill's plans, one thought was
clear. He must get to Katharine first, and tell her himself before
others carried the tale. He looked up at the thin, pale face of the
new moon coldly staring down at him between overshadowing branches,
and thought it judged and condemned and repulsed him; like the face
of the woman in the train. The woman knew Katharine Forbis--might
even have written to her. He might find Kerr's Arbour mined, when he
got there. A hundred things might have happened to ruin his
chances.... What chances he meant he did not clearly know.
Sometimes his mood was cold as he tramped by Brownie, and sometimes
hot,--but always he tramped in Hell. He was going--going unless
another had been before him, to break the heart of the dearest of
living women with five words of his mouth.
"Listen! I have married another!" Afterwards adding: "Even with my
soul and body worshipping none but you!" Then--would she die with
her great wide eyes reproaching him? Or would she drive him from her
with words of scorn? Scornful words would be unlike Katharine
Forbis--Katharine who rarely judged and seldom blamed. But the
silence in which she would hear him out to an ending, would be
infinitely more tragic, unspeakably more terrible than wrath....
Insensibly beneath his feet the steepness levelled. Another mile and
Kerr's Arbour would be in sight. But Yaill walked on, now obsessed
and held by visions. In mental flashes Katharine came and went.
A hundred times they had climbed this hill together. He felt as
though she moved beside him now. He could see the sleet-drops
glistening on her smooth cheek, whipped to a sweet carnation by the
chilly wind. The scent of camphor from her furs came back to him,
with the light pressure of her gloved hand upon his arm. In his ears
were the tones of her nice voice,--the frank glance of her fair eyes
seemed to meet his, for him were her gay words and her tender
ones--like the sweet smile upon her rather large mouth. A smile that
expressed its owner's innate conviction--shared by the majority of
her acquaintances--that never under any imaginable circumstances
could Miss Forbis be unwelcome or undesirable in the estimation of
any being she chose to bless. No wonder her wretched Edward was
wrung and tortured. In vision after vision she came and vanished, as
he tramped beside the now exhausted Brownie under the thin new
February moon.
The iron-hard ringing ground, slippery with cat-ice; whitened with
powdery hoar-frost; flowed on unheeded under the footfalls of brute
and human, who marched together to a worsting Fate. All Nature
seemed to reproduce Yaill's mood--the desolate, wintry hills, the
eerie scream of the whaups--frozen out of their feeding-grounds in
marsh and bogland,--the wailing cry of the hunting-owls, were in tune
with him. The skirl of the north-east wind, honed to a razor-edge on
the Jutland coast--tanged with the freezing salt of the wild North
Sea; mined, patrolled, netted, guarded,--watched from bleak shore to
shore, and from the oozy depths, and from the immeasurable heights of
Air, by friends and foes, indomitable in hatred,--echoed through the
chambers of his desolate heart....
In the Spring of 1910 they had become engaged, and were to have been
married in the Winter of that year,--but her mother had died--and
Katharine had been unwilling to leave her father, and there had been
delays and delays.... And then the wedding had been arranged to take
place in the Autumn of 1914, and the War had prevented it--the
damnable War!
He ground his teeth, thinking of what the War had done for him and
for many another man as wretched--and the distant hooting of the
owls, freezing as they hunted freezing rick-mice--and the shriek of
the north-east wind--sounded like Irish Banshees wailing the coming
death of beautiful love....
For Katharine's love had always been perfectly beautiful. She had
been the ideal mate--the sweetheart who never palls. She had fed her
lover's heart with the wholesome bread of tenderness, and never let
his soul lack nourishment. She had met him full at every turn and
exigency of Life--even as they had moved to meet it side by side. In
the purest, most spiritual sense these betrothed lovers were
wedded--though their ancient Church had not yet made them one.
And now he was hastening to meet her and pull down his tower of love
about his ears. Why hurry? whooped the owls and skirled the curlew.
If you are going to tell her as you purpose, will you not reach
Kerr's Arbour far too soon? But if you have the wisdom that men
boast of--take what Life yet may give ere you lose all....
He topped the crest of the final steep, and halted to let his dumb
companion breathe awhile.... Now the sharp tuff-tuff of a
motor-cycle came out of the distance behind him, and he wondered who
was having so cold a ride upon that road to-night. Even from this
point he looked on his journey's ending, with the sensation that a
man may have in meeting with a dying friend....
Nothing of beauty characterised Kerr's Arbour, an irregular mass of
masonry rising from a walled garden-courtyard shut in by high
yew-hedges: a stone wall and a _porte-cochère_ of ancient
wrought-iron, beyond a bridged dry moat at the bottom of the private
road. It showed as a rambling house of Early Jacobean architecture
tacked on to the peel-tower reared by Sir Hew Forbis the Crusader,
somewhere about 1147. The ancient battlemented tower was squat and
clumsy, the rooms with rare exceptions were low-pitched, the ancient
casements small, the stairways narrow, and the stone-flagged passages
anything but level to the tread. But set in a fold of the
snow-tipped hills and shielded on North and East with plantations of
oak and evergreen, with the snow-veiled mirror of a little lake,
burn-fed, trouty, haunted with heron and other waterfowl,--lying
beyond the wintry gardens to the southward; with chilly moonlight on
its frosty battlements and lying in pools upon its stone-flagged
terrace; and smoke curling from its clustered chimneys; with mingled
firelight and lamplight winking from well known windows--it caught at
the wanderer's heart as a vision of Home.
He looked up at the black-white sky, and it seemed to his misery,
that beyond that inky wrack and livid cumulus--hurrying south like a
curse rushing to fulfil itself--dwelt One who in His high austere
remoteness looked coldly on the pigmy woes of men. To Whom his pangs
were the struggle of the fly in the milk-jug,--the writhings of the
worm severed by the gardener's mattock,--the pain of the snail being
beaten by the thrush on the stone....
What, O what was it to Him that Katharine's love had always been
perfectly beautiful! And that to live beggared of all that wealth of
sweetness--perhaps through all the years of life to follow--would be
sheer Hell to her lover, Edward Yaill.
Yaill shrieked at the thought, as a man at the stab of the
bayonet--and the sweat broke out upon him, despite the cold. His
hand went out and gripped the shaft of the dog-cart, so fiercely that
the dogskin glove split.... Baulked passion, thwarted desire rent
and tore him. Oh, what were Honour and Truth but pithless meanings!
He would go down to Kerr's Arbour where she waited, and love and be
loved before the ending came. He would drink one draught of the wine
his soul and body craved for--before Fate dashed the cup out of his
hands.
So said, so it should be done. He took the reins from the
hame-spike, and the flare of the wind-blown candle-lamp showed his
smile. He sprang to his seat and snatched the whip from the socket,
and lashed the mare--who broke into a furious gallop--the cart
swinging and lurching perilously behind her as she pounded madly down
the steep descent. At the bottom lay the curve of the dry moat,
crossed by what had been a wooden drawbridge, converted in the reign
of the last Stuart monarch, into an arch of rough-cut granite blocks.
Beyond the bridge and a short avenue of beeches rose the rust-red
iron gates of Kerr's Arbour, with the arms of the house wrought into
their ancient tracery: a wolf's head crest with the motto "FORBYS
FOES FA" above a shield with the plain device of three escallops
_argent_ on a _fesse_ between two chevrons _sable_ and _gules_.
The gates stood open for the guest of honour. On their cracked stone
pillars, topped with grotesque lead effigies of wolves, each
supporting the sword of a Crusader, oil lanterns burned, dangling by
chains from iron cressets (meant to hold flares of greased or tarry
tow). A dog barked within, and the cracked familiar voice of
Whishaw, the butler, snapped out angrily:
"Down, Dawtie! Quiet, bitch! Gin ye dinna ken the Colonel, ye
daumned eediot, canna ye haud yer tongue like Laddie an' Bran?"
The dog-cart's worn tyres shirred on the gravel of the courtyard.
Yaill leaped down. The heavy nailed hall-door stood wide open.
Warmth and light rushed together on the exile, and the scent of
flowers, the pretty smells of burning peat and apple-wood, lavender,
camphor and sandal from the great Japan cabinets ranged in the hall,
came to him in a satisfyingly, fragrant whiff. This was home....
Katharine's home.... And Katharine.... He trembled and a mist
blurred his vision--and then his sick heart leaped--because she came.