‘Sometimes I can,’ he admitted reluctantly.
There was a pause and then Julia said, ‘That must make you feel very powerful,’ and I saw her colour deepen.
‘I would give much not to be able to do it,’ he said, and he spoke so strenuously for so tranquil a person that I was startled.
‘Why?’ Julia challenged. In an effort to be at ease again, she began to speak rapidly. ‘I would have imagined it would put you in such a strong position—for one thing you will never be surprised at anything you hear and will always be prepared. What does it feel like to read people’s thoughts?’
‘I don’t read them,’ he said, ‘I see them.’
‘See them!’ And when he did not explain, she pressed, ‘How do you mean “see them”?’
‘They come and go before my eyes in pictures.’
I thought it unfair to question one who was so obviously unwilling to answer, but nothing would stay Julia.
‘How strange,’ she remarked. ‘And when you are with several people, what happens then?’
‘Then their thoughts behave mostly like cows all running in wrong directions.’
‘I see,’ Julia said; ‘now I know why you don’t like reading them,’ and her smile looked somehow twisted. ‘You must feel as though you were walking through people. I would have imagined it would be an advantage, not a drawback; that it would have given you a start in life, added something to it.’
‘I think this life is given us to find out how much we can do without.’
‘Nonsense,’ she rallied, her old self once again, ‘we are here to enjoy, to have and to share, not to deny and chill ourselves.’
He did not contradict her but I was aware that he had withdrawn himself from us. He was taller than she and had to gaze down into her eyes which were darkened by the brim of her tilted hat. He was not cadaverous, but his features were those that threw shades on his face. I noticed there were shadows in the pits where his eyes were, in the dent of his chin and the concaves of his nostrils.
BOOK ONE. CHAPTER SEVEN
For the best part of a week we had not been able to leave the house and had spent the days hung with rain alone in the manse with mamma, papa and Nannie, visited only by the irregular mail.
Two unfortunate things happened during that time. Julia had won a playful wager with Edwin Strathern, who handsomely paid it by sending her six pairs of gloves. When they arrived, however, she found they were not large enough, for, in a fit of quite unusual vanity, she had told him a size smaller than she really took. She despatched them back to the shop which paid no attention either to the returned gloves or her letter asking for them to be exchanged. ‘And they would have done so beautifully for me,’ mourned Emmy.
She had made so ambitious a twirl design in the corners of mamma’s tunic that half-way round she discovered she was not going to have nearly enough braid to finish. More material had to be written for and mamma said the tunic was working out much dearer than it was worth.
The patter of rain on the skylights, the drippings from the trees outside, were a ceaseless accompaniment throughout the days and nights. The rain-streaked windows darkened the already dark house. In the bedrooms the massive dressing-tables were placed at the windows, blocking the little light that managed to slip between the branches of the trees. The long rolls made out of padded blue cloth, now faded to a hyacinth purple, which lay along the window-sills to dry up any damp, were wet when we turned them each morning.
Emmy grew restless and Julia, as the mist stole nearer and nearer the manse, became more remote and silent and inaccessible, as though wrapt in another world. She had received a letter from the dominie, enclosing the verses of the lullaby she liked. I was untutored in the ways of men but I knew he had pretended to forget to give her them on Tuesday that he could have an excuse to write.
I was troubled at the rain because it prevented my walking to Barnfingal on Friday for my lesson. Julia wanted me to go despite it, and said she would come with me, but as the steady downpour made no signs of abatement, mamma would not hear of it and asked Julia what she could be thinking of.
At last, late on the Saturday afternoon, the rain began to lessen. Light broke palely from the reaches of sky, then the sun burst through gloriously, like a guest who knows well his visit is long overdue. We ate supper hurriedly, so anxious were we to be out, and even Emmy, after we had finished, was ready quickly. She might be going only as far as the manse gate, but always she dressed herself as carefully as though she were bound to meet the Laird.
The mud sucked at our shoes as we ran, laughing, up the path, through the wood, with its glistening wet trees, to the gate where raindrops swung from the bars. We were all feeling a little fey after being confined for so long to the house. Julia was singing ‘Caller Herrin’’ in a pensive voice, as though experimenting with her notes and the clear, cool air, Emmy had her hands full of dripping red mosses she intended to plant in the garden because she liked their colour, and I had on a very old straw hat with a broken cone-shaped crown and must have looked wild for I felt my hair pushing through it. We were walking towards Barnfingal—Julia said she liked it better than Auchendee—and had reached the sand-pit, with its exposed knotted roots of trees, when Emmy said suddenly:
‘Who’s that over there?’
‘Where?’ asked Julia, looking round. ‘Oh, why, that must be Mr MacDonald, the dominie.’
He was standing with his back towards us, beside a tree some yards from the road, watching something so intently that he did not hear us.
‘Let’s go and see what he’s looking at,’ Julia proposed.
Emmy was as interested as she and we crossed the sodden grass. He looked round sharply at our approach and his eyes lit up as he recognised us. Now that we were beside him, we saw that what he had been looking at with such absorption was a gipsy encampment in a small clearing amongst the trees. There were three or four tents, all dirty and so low they could hardly be dignified by the name of tent. They were sopping wet and every now and then flapped heavily, with a sound like a slap, in the slight breeze. A cart rested on its shafts and beside it grazed a tethered, lean-flanked horse.
‘There’s something happened here,’ the dominie said in a lowered voice, ‘but I can’t make out what it is. No one seems to be about.’
‘There’s some one in there,’ said Emmy, pointing to the largest of the tents.
From underneath the flap a fierce little child looked out, watching us blackly. I could not have told whether it were male or female, for it had the face of a boy but was dressed in tattered skirts. Julia advanced towards it and spoke to it softly but it would answer her nothing.
Suddenly we were surrounded by a group of staring children of varying ages and sizes. So quickly did they appear around us that they seemed to have sprung from the ground like enchanted mushrooms.
‘Where are all your fathers and mothers?’ Julia asked them laughingly.
They gathered round us closer. ‘They’ were burying Hester’s boy, they told us and their dark eyes watched us fearfully as though the properties of life and death lay in our hands. He had died last night. ‘They’ had asked several of the crofters’ wives to come and see him to tell them what was the matter with him, but none of them would come. We were not surprised, for well we knew the fear with which the crofters and farmers regarded those dusky aliens who kept to themselves with the aloofness of royalty. The pig-wife who came round every year with her heavy burden of china was sure of a seat and something to eat in any of the cottages, the gangrel tinkers who mended pots and pans were always asked for news, as were the other itinerants who walked over the hills peddling tapes and buttons from village to clachan. But gipsies were a different race altogether from tinkers and tramps.
‘We had better go,’ said Emmy.
The