The Key of the Chest (18 page)

The music stopped.

The doctor sat for a little time without moving, his whole being listening to the night, then, motioning them to remain as they were, he slowly rose again. He remained standing so long and so still that Michael began to stir.

As he sat down, the doctor laid a strong detaining hand on Michael, who whispered intensely, ‘Is he gone?'

‘No.'

‘Did you see him?'

‘No.'

‘You know who it is?'

The doctor's expressionless face looked at Michael's face, looked beyond it, and made no answer. ‘Hsh!' he warned.

The music started again, and clearly the player had come under the fatal spell of the one theme. The same notes, the long-held and intolerable cries with the swift notes between bubbling like blood in the heart.

‘I'm going to have a look,' whispered Michael.

The doctor held him for a moment. ‘All right. But listen. Keep your face hidden behind the heather.' Then his voice dropped two full tones. ‘Don't let your head be seen. And whatever happens, don't move. Do you understand that?'

‘Yes,' whispered Mr. Gwynn.

The doctor started at Michael.

‘Yes,' whispered Michael quietly.

There was nothing to be seen but the night as they had already seen it, the dark heather, the frozen movement of the earth, and the lines that ran against a sky pale blue in the east and passing by imperceptible gradation to a deep blue in the west.

Mr. Gwynn knew that, as never before, he was held in thrall to the living night, and as the marvel of this was something that could not be exceeded, he turned his head away from the invisible source of the magical notes, to look, as he had so often looked, at the moon. It was a carelessness, beyond fear, of the secret spirit in a new dimension, and in this weird dimension he wanted to see how the lady moon walked.

She was walking now above the hill-tops of Garuvben deer forest, and a trail of passing cloud going in her direction set up the familiar illusion of her walking the opposite way. Her light came on the breast of the near slope passing upward on his right hand and as his eye ran along the slope – his breath caught, and in the same moment the doctor's fingers closed over his arm.

By an odd chance, the head of the approaching figure passed across the moon. The whole figure was completely silhouetted and in the same moment the three watchers knew it was a woman.

She looked very tall upon the hillside and came slowly and without sound. The doctor had no need to press down his companions. Anxiety not to be seen was purely instinctive, and balanced by the instinct which dared not release the eyes.

They saw her stop when she heard the music. She stood quite still, as if she might stand like that for ever. But in a little while she was coming on again, only more slowly, as if each footstep now were an adventure not on the breast of the hill.

She was almost opposite them, barely thirty yards away, when the music stopped abruptly as if the pipe had been struck from the player's mouth.

She stood again, and now they knew she was waiting and would never go on.

They heard him coming, heard the reckless thrust of his
feet, and there he was, the moon shining on him, swiftly approaching, coming close to her, with the cry ‘Flora!' in his mouth. Without another word – no cry had come from her – they stood locked in an embrace, his face fallen over her shoulder, without the slightest movement, clearly without thought, lost at the end of an experience that needed blindness and rest.

His voice began whispering, softly and hidden. They heard her sighing breath and voice smother against him in a small cry. He put his arm round her and, leaving the right of way, by which she had come, they began walking into the heart of the Ros, towards Loch Geal. Within fifty yards, they had passed from sight.

Upon the silence came Michael's low voice:

‘So that was the murderer!'

The doctor did not move.

Mr. Gwynn looked up at the doctor and was held by the tense immobility of his body and face.

‘Charlie!' Astonishment and wild humour raked out of Michael's throat. ‘Hell, could you beat it!'

‘Hsh!' said Mr. Gwynn, feeling Michael was about to laugh wildly upon the night.

‘Let us go,' said the doctor in a drained voice. He stood for a moment or two perfectly still, then turned away. Mr. Gwynn followed him, with Michael behind.

They went on in silence, and not until they had reached the shore path was a word spoken. There Mr. Gwynn expelled a loud breath. ‘I'm tired,' he said and sat down.

‘It was Charlie, wasn't it?' Michael asked the doctor, both of them standing.

The doctor turned his head and looked at him. ‘Do you think so?'

‘Of course it was!'

The doctor moved his head and looked about the ground.

‘Don't you?' persisted Michael.

‘Here,' said the doctor to Mr. Gwynn, ‘the low ground at this time of year is always damp and treacherous. I shouldn't advise you to sit long.'

Mr. Gwynn got up. ‘I think you're right.'

‘We'd better keep going,' said the doctor like one automatically offering medical advice.

Michael gave a small laugh as he followed. Presently he said, ‘It's up there that he dislodged the stone.' His voice, being raised to a natural pitch for the first time since they had started out, sounded astonishingly loud. ‘What the hell was Charlie's game, following me?'

Neither of the two in front replied.

‘Have you no idea, Doctor?'

‘None,' answered the doctor.

Michael laughed. ‘You sound so bloody mysterious.' The amazing justification of his previous experience, which had been so doubtfully received, the fabulous happenings of the night with their new and incredible implications, had induced in him a vast and unconquerable gaiety. Perhaps the doctor had gone all quiet and non-committal because of the rather obvious way, now that things about money and what not were leaking out, in which the magnificent Procurator-Fiscal and himself, not to mention the policeman, had mishandled the affair of Charlie and the throttled seaman! Though it was hardly fair to bait the doctor – that's the way Gwynn would put it – because he was professionally involved! Hell beneath, it was laughable!

And that a girl should be in it! That tilted the whole applecart! No city civilization could ‘produce' a show like this. It hadn't the background, the backcloth
sub specie
aeternitatis
! His mind roared upon the night. They – haunters of hotel lounges and night dives – said nothing ever happened in the country beyond the birth of a cow.‘They' flashed through Michael's mind, their known faces, their eternal hectic laughter, their swift movement and gabble and glitter of faces in artificial light. Their languorous moods. He knew them all. He cheered to them derisively.

Christ, these women! he thought, his teeth on edge but only in the moment's spasm.

A girl walking somnambulistic upon a tilted heath. It couldn't be ‘produced'. By God, a man daren't produce it. The rotten world wouldn't believe it. Imagination was dead, choked, damned.

A girl's head passing across the gibbous moon! It had
become artificial, poetically made-up! Michael shook with silent laughter that ran in a shiver over his skin. A girl… what girl?

Gehenna, it must be a girl in the place!…
Flora
! The cry came back upon Michael. Flora! The minister's daughter! The thought, like a fist against his chest, stopped Michael in his tracks.

He saw the other two go on, go steadily on. Gwynn was taking short quick steps, trying to keep up with the striding doctor. The small figure seemed to waddle in its urgency, purposeful as ever, but waddling a little.

An intense imaginative bout in Michael often reached a sudden satiety, when his mind refused to function. Stress fell away and exhaustion flowed softly over the brain. The eyes of the imagination closed and sank; sometimes his physical eyes closed for a few seconds also.

Now he simply could not move, and he stood, letting the other two walk on. They rounded a rocky bluff, and he stood alone.

They were waiting for him at the gate.

‘The needs of the night,' explained Michael. ‘Come in, Doctor, and have a drink.' His voice was friendly.

‘No, thanks,' said the doctor quite firmly. ‘I must get home.'

‘I was asking him,' said Mr. Gwynn, ‘what was the instrument. It's called a chanter, the pipe which a piper practises on.'

‘Was it?' said Michael incuriously. ‘Sorry to disappoint you over the supernatural.'

‘But don't you see,' said Mr. Gwynn, ‘that it's far more marvellous than any supernatural.' His imagination was not yet exhausted, perhaps because it dealt now so much in theories. ‘That there should be a pipe like that! That's where the imagination—'

‘Staggers and reels,' suggested Michael as Mr. Gwynn paused.

Mr. Gwynn made his gesture and rolled his head a little.

‘I must go,' said the doctor. Then he added, ‘It might be as well if we kept this to ourselves.'

‘Good God,' declared Michael, ‘what do you think?'

‘Right!' said the doctor, backing away a pace or two. ‘Good night.' Then he went along the path between the plantation wall and the sea.

Robbie Ross came out of the door of his mother's cottage to take the air of the morning. Yes, dawn's twilight was creeping over the land. He looked at the sky and decided it was going to be a fresh but broken day. The wind was still asleep and the small fields lay quiet. As he slowly scratched his whiskered chin the familiar scene was translated into a far past through which his boy's feet went running and his boy's mouth cried sounds that no mortal ear now would ever catch. The final moment of parting had come, the severing with all that had been.

His hand fell away from his beard but only a few inches as if it, too, were affected by the moment's vision, while his eyes stared at the little barn. Then they were staring past the barn, and only when they focused of their own accord on a figure coming into view beyond it, was the past pulled away like a grey translucent veil. His brows gathered over the small black eyes; he backed a couple of steps into the doorway; then turned and entered the room which he had just left.

‘The minister is coming up the field,' he said quietly.

The faces of two women and a man were turned to him in the yellow lamplight. They stared for a little while as if they had not heard aright. Then one of the women, with a small cry, got to her feet and began tidying the room, removing dishes and fragments of food, whisking this away and arranging that. The other woman, smoothing back her hair, went to the box-bed and leaned over.

‘Mother,' she said, putting a glad earnest note into her voice, as if she were talking to a child, ‘the minister is coming to see you.'

The old woman, who was eighty-one years of age, lifted her eyes to her daughter's face but did not speak.

‘The minister,' repeated her daughter, a little louder. ‘He's just coming.'

The veined wrinkled hands stirred, their long nails faintly scratching the hard texture of the counterpane.

‘Aren't you glad?'

‘The minister,' breathed the spent voice of the woman, whose death they had been awaiting all night.

‘Yes, the minister himself. Aren't you the proud woman to be having him calling on you on the Sabbath morning? Whoever had the like before?'

The daughter straightened the pillows and smoothed back the white hair from the worn forehead and tucked it under the goffered linen cap. ‘You look like a picture,' she said, on a rush of feeling. As she turned away, there were tears in her eyes.

‘Go to the door, one of you,' said the other sister in a harsh voice.

Robbie went out again. The minister came up to him, breathing a trifle heavily, for the croft lay on the high slope above Cruime village.

‘How is your mother?'

‘She is still with us,' replied Robbie.

They spoke quietly as they shook hands.

Robbie made way for him.

The minister went into the room and shook hands first with Robbie's brother, Callum, because he was nearest to him, and then with the two sisters, Ellen who had tidied the room, and Martha who had spoken to her mother.

‘I awoke thinking of your mother while it was yet dark,' he said and turned to the figure in the bed.

Martha hurried to place a convenient chair for him, but he stood looking down on the dying woman, a smile on his face. He caught her right hand gently. ‘And how are you to-day, Mrs. Ross?' She did not answer, but her eyes were on his face. ‘Not feeling very strong to-day?' He pressed the cold hand firmly. ‘I thought you might like to see me. We are very old friends.' He felt the fingers of her left hand creeping over the back of his own. Then she held his hand in both of hers. She could not speak, for the emotion that was just capable of showing itself in her expression took all
her strength. ‘It came to me to come and see you and I am very glad,' he concluded.

The head moved in a small slow nod which was all that courtesy and weakness could manage. She had always retained the old-fashioned grace, the traditional manners, of her Gaelic folk. This grace was most deeply expressed when the heart was touched, for then it caught a warmth and a welcoming. Its light was in her eyes.

Martha, understanding all, put her hand to her mouth and turned away. It was as if, in some strange way, the minister had brought death with him, and the long-sealed fountains of emotion felt the final pressure. Ellen threw her a sharp glance and turned to the peat fire, where she swept the pale yellow ash noiselessly back along the hearth stone. As she had done this recently, there was little to sweep. She then felt the weight of the iron kettle and retired with it, walking softly. The brothers heard the two tin jugs of water being poured quietly into the kettle from the covered buckets which stood just inside the front door. Then she returned with the kettle and hung it over the fire. She would have liked to have gone out with the brown earthenware teapot, as she had done several times during the long night, but now the minister had sat down on the chair by the bed. Martha had handed him the family Bible and was setting the wick to its highest point. Ellen, watching her – for Martha was the younger – saw that the funnel had become discoloured. Martha had turned the wick a little too high in the middle night when Robbie had read a chapter.

But nothing more could be done now and Ellen, sitting on a small hard chair, dropped her hands in her lap and stared into the fire.

Martha thought that perhaps the minister was reading passages her mother specially liked, for her mother had been living here alone for many years, ever since her father had died. The four members of the family now present were all married, two brothers were beyond the seas, and one sister dead. Callum worked the croft along with his own. That two brothers of the one family should have remained in their birth district was very unusual. Martha had arrived two days ago from the east country.
She was the youngest of the four, being only forty-three.

But already the minister's words were stealing their senses away. From long habit, his voice took on its pulpit intonation, and once more Robbie felt himself being translated, not now into the intimate scenes of his own boyhood, but distantly to places that were places of pilgrimage, far lands, and towns that, seen from a plain, were Nazareth or Nineveh or the City of David. No voice could be familiar with those names. The voice had to be translated a little, too.

Yet the minister's voice was more familiar than it was in the pulpit, it was nearer to them and softer in its cadence, so that all was seen in a more intimate light. The resounding force, which held authority and therefore fear, fell away from it. Here in this house now they were at one, and the oneness came upon them, and came upon the minister, too. The intonation caught a strangely poetic or imaginative quality, and Martha heard the voice of her grandmother, dead these thirty years, telling her a story at the end of the day, in the listening twilight, when the eyes grow large, and the sudden clucking of the hens outside, or the arrogant
kok
-
kok
-
kok
of the cock, or the lowing of a cow across the fields, or the distant barking of a dog, takes on a significance that is inexpressibly known and will for ever haunt the mind.

Robbie and Martha had the dark eyes of the dying woman, but Ellen was thin and had the assessing grey eyes of her tall brother Callum, yet all four of them now became as children again, under the minister's voice and the potency of the mother who had been firm in her kindness, reprimanding and guiding them, gentle and laughing often, but with that calmness in hard circumstance, that providing of their endless needs, which now, as parents themselves, they acknowledged to be the wisdom they could never hope to attain.

‘Let us pray,' said the minister. He stood up, clasped his hands in front of him, and bowed his head. They all stood up and bowed their heads.

The oneness now grew upon them more strongly. For Martha, somehow, this was not ‘religion'. She had always
had an instinctive repugnance – in earlier life not unmixed a little, perhaps, with fear – for the dolefulness of religious observance. But now when the minister in his eloquent, strongly felt prayer came to the part where he referred to the dying woman in terms of her goodness as an exemplary mother and lifted up his face with its closed eyes to bring his pleading more directly ‘on high', Martha opened her own eyes, for her love was all for her mother, and looked at her mother in a great quickening of love, and cried inwardly: ‘Oh, it would be lovely if she died now!' This was a shattering cry within her, but it gave her face a great sweetness.

When the prayer was ended, the minister sat down, and turned the leaves to one of the Psalms of David, not yet looking at the woman in the bed.

They all joined in the singing, knowing the familiar words, all except the woman in the bed, who had so often led it. Martha had her mother's voice, and as it poured through her like an eternal stream, she looked at her mother directly as if she would draw her, too, into it.

Her mother's head turned slowly on the pillow and the dark eyes looked at the singers and came to rest on Martha's eyes. Martha smiled to her, crying silently:
Mother! Mother!
even as she sang. Then a smile went over her mother's face, a faint tired smile, and the head, as though what held it had suddenly let go, fell flat against the pillow and the chin sagged. This time Martha cried aloud.

It was full daylight outside when the minister, having shaken hands with the four soft-voiced sorrowers, turned the corner of the barn and looked far upon the morning sea and then more closely upon the houses of Cruime spread away below him. Not a smoke yet ascended from any chimney, and would not for another hour. This was the Sabbath day when no work was done and even early rising would have shown an indecent haste in worldly affairs. The day of rest for man and beast. The boats were drawn far up on the beach and the houses were quiet and seemly.

The effect of communion in the death service was exceptionally strong upon the minister, cleansing and cooling
his mind, and giving it a renewed assurance. He was glad now that he had obeyed the urge to go and see Mrs. Ross with whom he had had many a quiet and pleasant hour, and allowed himself only half consciously to think of it as divinely inspired. He could still feel its wondrous healing power and was content to leave it thus within the miracle of God's grace to His servant.

He stood looking down upon the familiar scene, broad-shouldered and powerful. Then suddenly something made him turn his head, and in a surge of incredulous amazement he saw a man driving sheep along the slope above the arable fields, as if it were an ordinary weekday and he were driving them from a market. There was something in the very gait of the man that was like a curse. It was Dougald MacIan.

A faint darkness from a flush of blood came over the minister's vision. Rage at what he saw, black hatred of its abominable desecration, had him in an instant. That a man, accursed already, should so dare!

As Dougald altered course to cut in below the dead woman's croft and so open out on a direct drive for the Ros, the minister bore down upon him.

‘What's this you're doing, Dougald MacIan?' cried the minister.

Dougald looked round, and staggered, and stood.

‘What's this you're doing on the Lord's Day?'

Dougald glowered at the minister as if his wits were struggling back to him like black sheep.

The wrath in the minister's face gave it a wild and piercing power. The hairy eyebrows stood out stormily. He was half a head taller than Dougald and overbore him from the slope.

Dougald's expression narrowed dangerously; the mouth parted and the under jaw shot out a little showing the tips of the small strong teeth.

‘Do you hear me?' cried the minister, and in the quiet morning his voice was heard by those stirring in near cottages. From the gable-end of their childhood's home, Robbie and Callum looked down upon the naked scene.

‘Huh!' grunted Dougald, and from the wind of his
onward bodily thrust came the smell of whisky to the minister's nostrils.

Swiftly the minister overtook him and barred his way. ‘You will answer for this!' he cried.

Again Dougald stopped.

‘You will answer for this before God, you desecrator of His holy day. You will not carry on like this, making foul His very air with your vile breath. I will not have it. Do you hear me?'

The minister was now shouting, and here and there a halfclad figure appeared by a door-jamb or a gable corner. As his denunciation rose, his very words could be made out.

‘… You, treading our holy earth to mire with your sheep's feet and your own drunken feet! I tell you, Dougald MacIan, that a day will come upon you when the wrath of God will burn you up. Burn you up, you—'

Dougald suddenly lurched forward to pass the minister, but as he did so his left arm shot out. It was the shepherd's gesture to his collie when he wanted the dog to round up sheep on the left flank, and it was accompanied by the shepherd's cry, now a harsh half-choked brutal cry, but in the same instant the two brothers in the croft above heard the clear skelp of the back of Dougald's hand against the minister's face.

The minister staggered and stood as Dougald lurched on.

It was often afterwards conjectured in Cruime what might have happened next, for the minister was a very powerful man and he started after Dougald, but Robbie Ross, running down the slope, called in his sea voice: ‘Minister! Minister!' and the minister stopped and looked up. He was trembling when Robbie spoke to him.

There was a full congregation in the church that day, including for the first time Michael Sandeman and his guest Mr. Gwynn, who had come innocently enough, or at least with a strong desire on the part of Michael to look at the girl Flora and with a general interest in his peculiar theories on the part of Mr. Gwynn.

And Mr. Gwynn had a lot to think about that seemed
mysterious enough. That they should sit for the singing and stand during the minister's prayer had its interest, but something portentously quiet about the minister's bearing and voice and an air of expectancy in the congregation which he could feel somehow surprised him. Here was an inward as well as an outward unity which he had not quite anticipated, and clearly the unity was not one of easy acceptance, of purely religious peace, not anyhow as Mr. Gwynn had hitherto understood acceptance and peace. Underneath it all, something was curiously, avidly, alive.