The Cone Gatherers (18 page)

‘Where are they?' she was crying. ‘Are they coming?'

‘No, my lady,' he replied, ‘I'm sorry to say they're not coming.' It would have been easier on his nerves to talk thus, to her shoes; but politeness, and honour, were injured. He rose with groans, holding on to a ladder that lay against the tree. A glance round showed him faces like hungry wolves: they were hungry for good news, and were savage that he was not providing it. Baird from the home farm was there, with Manson the ploughman and Betty the landgirl; Hendry the gardener, his boss; Sheila who was sobbing and the dog which was bored; and the mistress. Harry was not to be seen: he was looking round for him when Lady Runcie-Campbell seized him in a grip that, for all its fragrance and jewellery, was as fierce as Duror's.

‘Did you explain it to them?' she cried.

The imputation was that he had bungled the message, with his labourer's obtuseness. When he recalled the eloquence and emotion expended yonder by the pine tree, he almost smiled in a pity in no way personal, but universal.

‘I did, my lady,' he said. ‘I told them the boy's life was in danger.'

‘And they actually refused after that?'

‘Not they, my lady. To be fair, the wee one was never in the conversation. He was gathering his cones. The big one was on the ground. I spoke to him.'

The picture she had of the tall cone-gatherer was of him slinking past her in the beach hut out into the rain and the lightning.

‘What possible reason could he give for refusing?'

‘I'll tell you what he said, my lady, though I don't
understand what he meant by it. He said: “A man can surrender only so far.” It seems to me they've both lived in loneliness so long that they're strange in the mind.' Again he almost smiled: who so lonely as he, and who so wise?

She retired into thought for a few moments, leaving him free to learn that Harry was up the tree keeping Roderick company; that Manson the ploughman had been up too; that Roderick, who'd been sick, kept moaning for the cone-gatherers. It seemed he had faith only in them. The pathos of the situation was not lost on Graham. He felt that there by the giant tree tremendous issues were involved; and at the very heart stood himself.

With a confidence borrowed from the vastness of the moment, he approached the lady although her beauty and haughtiness were then at their height. The rest had shrunk back a little from her terribleness, but he went so close that he heard her breathing.

‘My lady,' he whispered, so that only she could near, ‘begging your pardon, but he said he would come if you were to go yourself and ask him.'

She seemed about to strike.

If the blow came, he would forgive and treasure it. ‘I told him, my lady, that was an unseemly thing for the like of him to say.'

She glanced up into the tree.

Then he remembered Duror. His own stupidity astounded him; he was, after all, what he looked, a common labourer. In contrite bitterness he told her. The effect was far different from what he expected.

She put her clenched fists to her cheeks.

‘My God,' she muttered. Then she added, almost as if she was afraid to ask it: ‘Did he have his gun?'

Graham frowned. Could he say definitely Duror had it? One took it for granted a gamekeeper carried his gun. In any case, what did it matter? He tried to imagine Duror against the rotting tree, and walking away over the withered leaves.

‘I think so, my lady,' he said. ‘Yes, he had it. He hadn't his dogs.'

Again she glanced up into the tree. She put her hand on it, as if pleading with it.

‘Roderick,' she cried, ‘listen to me. I'm going to fetch the cone-gatherers myself.' She could not keep a sob out of her voice. ‘Hold on. Don't lose heart.'

He did not answer.

‘Harry,' she then shouted.

‘Yes, my lady,' came Harry's voice, faraway, small, and scared.

‘Will he be all right for another few minutes?'

‘I think so.'

‘You must be sure.'

‘Could somebody come up and help me? My arms are getting tired.'

Baird immediately volunteered on behalf of his ploughman.

‘Bob here will go up again, my lady, and give Harry a hand.'

‘Will you, Manson?'

‘I'll do my best, my lady.' Manson's face was badly scratched; his right eye too was bloodshot where a sharp branch had jabbed it. ‘There's not much room for three of us, but I'll try.'

‘Thank you. Just see that he does not fall. You'll not regret it, I promise you. Graham, will you come with me?'

‘Gladly, my lady,' he said.

She understood. ‘No, I was forgetting, Graham. You must be tired. Stay here and rest. Mr Baird, will you come, please?'

‘Certainly, my lady.'

As soon as she saw Manson begin his ascent she made for the Point, with Baird following at what he judged to be a respectful distance.

As she ran, and stumbled, climbed fences, jumped over streams, scrambled up banks, and plunged deep into leaves, Lady Runcie-Campbell tried to make her anger against the cone-gatherers grow. Their insolence, independence and their even more outrageous attempt at revenge, resulting in the prolonged danger to her son,
were surely just reasons for hating and despising them; for wishing Duror well in his intention to chastise them into decency and obedience; and for vowing, when all this was over, to obliterate the forester's false yellow smile of comprehension and forgiveness by complaining to his superiors so strongly that they must either dismiss him or degrade him. As a mother, as a landowner, as a Christian even, surely she was justified? Yet not for a second of that dreadful journey to the Point did she convince herself. Whatever she ought to feel, anger seemed wrong and unavailing. She kept remembering Roderick's strange chatter that morning about Bhudda; Harry after she'd struck him, and also before he had, trembling with shyness and trepidation, offered to climb the tree; Duror with the naked doll in his fist and the obscene accusations so lusciously on his lips; old Graham at the fir tree stinking so rankly of sweat and whispering so compassionately into her ear; and always, dominating every other memory, the two cone-gatherers leaving the beach hut. Fear, anxiety, love, sorrow, regret, and hope, were in her mind, but not anger.

From the silver fir to the Point took ten minutes; during them she seemed to travel to the furthest limits of her being, there to be baulked by not finding what she had hoped to find, and without which she could never return.

Behind her, always at that proper distance, ran Baird, a big red-eared solemn man, who kept thinking what a good thing it was he had, after all, taken Manson with him to the tree. The lady had promised to reward Bob; but it was a recognised rule of the world that if a subordinate was rewarded, his master must be rewarded also, to maintain stations, and of course more handsomely according to his higher degree. In the war, for instance, there were different medals for privates and officers, although they fought in the same battles.

From a bank of whins and bracken she looked down on the promontory. Never had the loch been so potently beautiful: it was as vast, bright, and detailed as in a dream; and there seemed to be a wonderful interpretation, if it could only be known. A warship steamed down the loch.
So intimate a part of the dream was it, she seemed, during those few moments of suspense upon the bank, to know all its crew and what was to be each man's fate in the sea towards which it was bound. There, too, dream-like, were the pines, her favourite trees, making against sea and sky what had always struck her as Scottish gestures, recalling the eerie tormented tragic grandeur of the old native ballads. Gulls, as prodigal of time and sky as she must be parsimonious, flew and shrieked high over them.

She could not see any men; they must be hidden by the trees. But as she began to go down the bank, tearing her clothes on the whins and splintering the bracken, she heard the report of a gun, followed by a scream, and then by the quickened wails of the gulls.

As she raced among the pines, making for that gunshot, she prayed that Duror in his madness had not hurt the cone-gatherers, not for their sakes, nor for his, nor for his wife's, but for her son's.

She saw Duror before she saw them. He was walking away among the pine trees with so infinite a desolation in his every step that it was this memory of him, rather than that of the little hunchback dangling from the tree, or that of his brother climbing so frenziedly up into it, which was to torment her sleep for months.

She forced herself to go over to the tree. It was the strap of his bag which had caught on a branch. He hung therefore in twisted fashion, and kept swinging. His arms were loose and dangled in macabre gestures of supplication. Though he smiled, he was dead. From his bag dropped a cone, and then another. There might have been more, but other drops, also singly, but faster and faster, distracted her: these were of blood.

With moans and yelps of lamentation like an animal his brother was struggling along that branch to try and reach him.

As she watched, with Baird as horrified as she, another gunshot rang out. She glanced at him and saw that it had not occurred to him so soon what it meant. She knew that somewhere, on her beloved promontory, Duror, with his face shattered and bloody, lay dead.

Then, while she stood there emptied by horror, she heard far away a voice she loved screaming in excitement: ‘Mother, he's down. It's all right. He's safe. Harry got him down.'

Baird thought she had not heard. Not looking at the cone-gatherer still trying to reach his dead brother, and not daring to approach too close to her, he took a step forward and told her what Sheila was still screaming. What she did then shocked him, even there amidst those shocking sights.

First she said: ‘Help him, Baird.' Then she went down on her knees, near the blood and the spilt cones. She could not pray, but she could weep; and as she wept pity, and purified hope, and joy, welled up in her heart.