The Cone-Gatherers. Robin Jenkins

none of my business. You’d better explain it to her when you see her. She wants you to be early: half-past nine. Are you finished here? Have you had enough?’

      ‘Aye, plenty, thanks.’ He rose up.

      She began to gather the plates and cutlery. Out of the window he caught sight of stars glittering above the dark tops of trees.

      ‘You’ll be going in to talk to Peggy?’

      The comedian was still cracking jokes, and the laughter of his audience surged like waves. Peggy would tell him about the jokes he had missed.

      ‘Later,’ he said. ‘I want to have a look at Prince’s paw. He got a thorn in it yesterday.’

      ‘I ken a heart with thorns in it.’

      For a moment he almost gave way and shouted, with fists outstretched towards those stars, that in his heart and brain were thorns bitterer than those that bled the brow of Christ. Instead, he merely nodded.

      ‘I’ll not be long,’ he murmured. ‘I’m frightened the paw might fester.’

      Quick though he had been in his restraint, she had caught another glimpse of his torment. It shocked her and yet it satisfied her too: she saw it, clear as the sun in the sky, as divine retribution.

      ‘A heart can fester too, John,’ she said, as he opened the door and went out.

      Going up the path to visit the dogs, he loitered and tried to light his pipe. It was such a night as ought to have enticed his head and shoulders amongst the stars. But he could not even enjoy his pipe. When he had it at last lit, after striking eight matches, he found that as usual he had been expecting too much from it; it seemed merely a device to exercise his agitation rather than to allay it.

      The air was keen with frost. Tomorrow would be another warm sunny day, ideal for a deer drive. An idea suddenly occurred to him, simple, obvious, likely to be approved by his mistress, yet to him a conscious surrender to evil. It would be easy for him to persuade Lady Runcie-Campbell to telephone Mr Tulloch to ask for the services of his men as beaters for the drive. The forester would not dare refuse. The cone-gatherers would have to obey; and surely the dwarf, who slobbered over a rabbit’s broken legs, must be driven by the sight of butchered deer into a drivelling obscenity. Lady Runcie-Campbell, in spite of her pity, would be disgusted. She would readily give him permission to dismiss them from the wood. That dismissal might be his own liberation.

      All the time that he was ministering to his three golden Labrador dogs, he was perfecting his scheme to ensnare the cone-gatherers: preparing what he would say to Lady Runcie-Campbell to overcome her scruples; planning the positions he would give them during the deer drive; and considering what would be the best setting in which to give them the order to go for ever from the wood.

      The dogs were uneasy. Although he spoke to them with more than customary friendliness, and handled them with unwonted gentleness, they still mistrusted him. They nuzzled into his hands, they thrust themselves against his legs, they gazed up at him with affection; but there was always a detectable droop of appeasement, as if they sensed what was in his mind and were afraid that it might at any moment goad him into maltreating them. He was more and more aware of their apprehension, and saw himself, in furious revenge, rising and snatching a switch from the wall and thrashing them till their noses and eyes dripped faithful blood: they would suffer his maddest cruelty without retaliation. But as he saw himself thus berserk he sat on the box and continued to pat the cringing dogs and speak consolingly to them.

      Several times his mother-in-law shouted to him from the back door that Peggy was asking where he was and when he was coming to see her. He did not answer, and left the shed only when his wife’s light had gone out.

      He was going into his own bedroom when Mrs Lochie opened the door of hers. She was in her nightgown.

      ‘So you’ve come in at last,’ she whispered.

      He closed his eyes.

      ‘I thought you’d like to ken your wife sobbed herself to sleep. I thought if you knew that it might help to soothe you over yourself. I ken you find sleep hard to come by.’

      He smiled, with his eyes still closed. Several times, desperate in his sleeplessness, he had left the house and wandered in the wood long after midnight.

      ‘I think,’ she whispered, ‘you’ll never sleep again this side of the grave.’

      He opened his eyes and looked at her.

      ‘And on the other side?’ he asked, in a voice so mild it disconcerted her.

      ‘If you have deserved mercy, John, you’ll get it,’ she answered.

      Then she closed her door, but not before he had heard her sobbing.

      ‘It’s too late,’ he muttered, as he went into his room and stood with his hand on the bed-rail. ‘It’s too late.’ He did not clearly know what it meant, but he recognised the sense of loss that began to possess him, until he felt as terrified and desolate as an infant separated from his mother in a great crowd.

       CHAPTER THREE

      Next morning was so splendid that as he walked through the policies towards the mansion house despair itself was lulled. The sky was vast and bright; the withered leaves underfoot were iridescent with melting frost; the very air glittered. As if in contrition for last night’s mistrust in the dim shed, his dogs showed him how to enjoy such sunshine as they ran here and there, giving holiday sniffs and yelps, and barking up at squirrels as tawny as themselves darting along red pine branches. It was a morning that seemed to beguile the mind with recollections of a time of innocence before evil and unhappiness were born.

      Peggy and her mother had been asleep, and the stars still shining, when he had slipped out. He had taken no breakfast and hadn’t shaved.

      He walked under the squirrels, gun under his arm, smiling.

      When he came near the house he heard cries and the crack of ball against bat. They must be playing cricket on the lawn. Young Roderick would have coaxed his uncle to play with him. The boy was useless at games, as far as Duror could judge; his awkwardness, physical and mental, prevented him from being proficient no matter how zealously he persevered. Duror had watched him once kicking a football for an hour; at the finish he had been clumsier and keener than at the beginning. Perhaps because he was like his father outwardly, with startled deer’s eyes and hare’s teeth, he was his mother’s favourite, although his sister Sheila, two years younger, was beautiful healthy, courageous, and as assured as any lady. Roderick from birth had been weak in body and complicated in mind. He had had to be removed from school, and now was tutored at home. He had never liked Duror, and when little had not hesitated to say so. His mother more than once had had to apologise for him.

      Duror was early. He stood behind a thick holly to watch the players on the lawn; his dogs sat at his feet. Roderick batted; his uncle bowled; and Sheila was supposed to field, assisted by her dog, a small short-legged terrier called Monty. Roderick was very earnest as he faced up to the ball, swiped out at it, missed, and shouted an explanation for his miss. He immediately ran behind the wicket to retrieve the ball and throw it back to his uncle so that the whole thing could be repeated as soon as possible. Once he struck the ball, and began to race between the wickets as if those runs would mean the winning of a Test Match. His uncle called to him laughingly that there was no need for such hurry. Roderick paused to glance towards where the ball had flown. He was obviously displeased to see that Monty had it in his mouth and was playing a game of come-and-get-it-if-you-can with Sheila. Roderick shouted to his sister that she was spoiling the game; but his uncle, still laughing, came down the pitch and put an arm round his neck. He was a tall almost bald man of about thirty-five, in peacetime a lawyer from Edinburgh, where his father, Lord Forgan, had been a judge. Duror knew him as a quiet, pleasant, considerate man, with his only vanity a moustache as black and glossy as a snail.

      Duror came out from behind the holly and walked respectfully along the