Lament for a Maker by Michael Innes Page B

long way round to visit her auntie at Kildoon.
    Every week-end Miss Strachan cycles over to visit her auntie, an old body with a hantle silver put by that a niece would naturally be fell attentive to. Most times she holds down the highroad to Dunwinnie and turns off short at Thompson’s Mains, Kildoon being but a rickle of houses two–three miles over the moor from there. But whiles in summer, being given to what she calls the lure of the wanderer, she makes away up the glen past Erchany and then bumps and rattles her machine over the braes until she strikes a bit shepherd’s track that takes her down to the bridle-path through Glen Mervie. Toilsome it must be and none so chancy at the best of times; the schoolmistress tells you she’s near skite on the Athletic Ideal, and none can say she’s not right tough and stringy. But that it was just the lure of the wanderer that should take her up Glen Erchany in a quick thaw after a first winter snow was a thing fell hard to believe, forbye it being just the time all the speak was going round about the affairs at the meikle house. Some said it was the lure of Tammas was working on her and that for one with small chance of a lad in his right senses the news of how the daftie had briskened uplike must be fell attractive. But there’s no need to enquire into the woman’s motives; it’s enough that in the last weekend of November up the glen she went.
    The Drochet was green and leaping with the snows from Ben Cailie and the fir trees were still and dripping in the still thaw, only whiles a whisper of wind stirring them would send a scatter of drops across the path of the schoolmistress as she pedal-pedalled her bit boneshaker through the slush and up the brae. It was only when she was near the glen head, which is to say on the tail of the Ben itself, that she saw the storm coming from over the loch, east away, the beginning of the great storm that came with that thaw. Dark and sullen and secret the loch would be in its frame of dark snow-weighted trees, then far to the east the surface would break and stir, the whole surface would tremble, would leap to points of foam, over the working foam-flecked surface great shadows scurrying and sweeping in sudden washes of stormy light and shade, syne the gale, sweeping up the braes from the long funnel of the loch, would catch at the drooping branches of the trees and toss them, showering now their icy drips, up the darkening lift where the storm clouds would be massing in sudden tremendous triumph round Ben Cailie.
    It must have been a daunting sight to the schoolmistress did she think to make Kildoon by her mountain paths that night. But if her eye was on Erchany the storm came fell convenient; within miles and miles around was no human dwelling save the meikle house and the deserted home farm hidden among the larches away below. So when the full blast came down, fit to blow the bit things from off her as she rode, she held on past her usual track and was presently dropping down to the biggins of Erchany farm.
    More than half-way she’d got and could see through the smurr of the storm the shuttered windows and silent cattle court, right desolate in that savage desolate place, when over a dip and towards her, white and hurrying like it had been an uneasy ghost, came the slim figure of a quean. Next minute the schoolmistress saw it was Christine herself – indeed it couldn’t well be another in that remote spot – and she thought Christine must have seen her from down by the farm and was hurrying to meet her, friendly-like, in the storm. So she gave a wave, and a bit call that was straight snatched from her lips by the wind, and hurried down the path as fast as the machine she was wheeling would let her. But syne it came with a bit shock to the schoolmistress that Christine hadn’t seen her after all; the quean was holding up the brae slantwise away now, climbing fast with the long loon’s limbs of her and with nothing against the