And yet, I know, and that well, too, that I am thinking this vision of Teenabrae, as the house was called, and of its dismal vicinage, in the light of tragic memory. For there were seasons when the rains suspended, or came and went like fugitive moist shadows: days when the sunlight and the wind made the mountains wonderful, and wrought the wild barren hills to take on a softness and a dear familiar beauty: hours, even, when, in the hawthorn-time, the cuckoo called joyously across the pine-girt scaurs and corries on Melbèinn, or, in summer, the swallows filled the straths as with the thridding of a myriad shuttles.
Sure enough, I was too young to be there: though, indeed, Morag was no more than a year older, being twenty; but when my mother died, and my father went upon the seas upon one of his long whaling voyages, I was glad to leave my lonely home in the Carse o’ Gowrie and go to Teenabrae in Strathglas, and to be with my aunt, that was wife to Archibald mac Alasdair Ruadh—Archibald Campbell, as he would be called in the lowland way—or Gorromalt as he was named by courtesy, that being the name of his sheep-farm that ran into the two straths where the Gorromalt Water surged turbulently through a narrow wilderness of wave-scooped, eddy-hollowed stones and ledges.
I suppose no place could be called lifeless which had always that sound of Gorromalt Water, that ceaseless lamentation of the sheep crying among the hills, that hoarse croaking of the corbies who swam black in the air betwixt us and Maol-Dunn, that mournful plaining of the lapwings as they wheeled querulously for ever and ever and ever. But, to a young girl, the whole of this was an unspeakable weariness.
Beside the servant-folk—not one of whom was to me anything, save a girl called Maisie, who had had a child and believed it had become a “pee-wit” since its death, and that all the lapwings were the offspring of the sorrow of joy—there were only Archibald Campbell, his wife, who was my aunt, Muireall the elder daughter, and Morag. These were my folk: but Morag I loved. In appearance she and I differed wholly. My cousin Muireall and I were like each other; both tall, dark-haired, dark-browed, with dusky dark eyes, though mine with no flame in them; and my face too, though not uncomely, without that touch of wildness which made Muireall’s so strangely attractive, and at times so beautiful. Morag, however, was scarce over medium height. Her thick wavy hair always retained the captive gold that the sunshine had spilled there; her soft, white, delicate, wild-rose face was like none other that I have ever seen: her eyes, of that heart-lifting blue which spring mornings have, held a living light that was fair to see, and gave pain too, perhaps, because of their plaintive hillside wildness. Ah, she was a fawn, Morag!… soft and sweet, swift and dainty and exquisite as a fawn in the green fern.
Gorromalt himself was a gaunt stern man. He was two inches or more over six feet, but looked less, because of a stoop. It always seemed to me as if his eyes pulled him forward: brooding, sombre, obscure eyes, of a murky gloom. His hair was iron-grey and matted; blacker, but matted and tangled, his thick beard; and his face was furrowed like Ben Scorain of the Corries. I never saw him in any other garb than a grey shepherd tweed with a plaid, though no Campbell in Argyll was prouder than he, and he allowed no plaid or tunag anywhere on his land or in his house that was not of the tartan of MacCailin Mòr. He was what, there, they called a black protestant; for the people in that part held to the ancient faith. True enough, for sure, all the same: for his pity was black, and the milk of kindness in him must have been like Gorromalt Water in spate. Poor Aunt Elspeth! my heart often bled for her. I do not think Archibald Campbell was unkind to his wife, but he was harsh, and his sex was like a blank wall to her, against which her shallow waters surged or crawled alike vainly. There was to her something at once terrible and Biblical in this wall of cruel strength, this steadfast independence of love or the soft ways or the faltering speech of love. There are women who hate men with an unknowing hatred, who lie by their husband night after night, year after year; who fear and serve him; who tend him in life and minister to him in death; who die, before or after, with a slaying thirst, a consuming hunger. Of these unhappy housemates, of desolate hearts and unfrequented lips, my aunt Elspeth was one.
It was on a dull Sunday afternoon that the dark hour came of which I have spoken. The rain fell among the hills. There was none on the north side of Strathglas, where Teenabrae stood solitary. The remembrance is on me keen just now: how I sat there, on the bench in front of the house, side by side with Morag, in the hot August damp, with the gnats pinging overhead, and not a sound else save the loud raucous surge of Gorromalt Water, thirty yards away. In a chair near us sat my aunt Elspeth. Beyond her, on a milking-stool, with his chin in his hands, and his elbows on his knees, was her husband.
There was a gloom upon all of us. The day before, as soon as Gorromalt had returned from Castle Avale, high up in Strathmòr, we had seen the black east wind in his eyes. But he had said nothing. We guessed that his visit to the Englishman at Castle Avale, who had bought the Three Straths from Sir Ewan Campbell of Drumdoon, had proved fruitless, or at least unsatisfactory. It was at the porridge on the Sabbath morning that he told us.
“And … and … must we go, Archibald?” asked his wife, her lips white and the deep withered creases on her neck ashy grey.
He did not answer, but the tumbler cracked in his grip, and the splintered glass fell into his plate. The spilt milk trickled off the table on to the end of his plaid, and so to the floor. Luath, the collie, slipped forward, with her tongue lolling greedily: but her eye caught the stare of the silent man, and with a whine, and a sudden sweep of her tail, she slunk back.
It must have been nigh an hour later, that he spoke.