Free A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

you’ve your lessons and studies, the English Chris, and living and eating and sleeping that other Chris that stretches your toes for you in the dark of the night and whispers a drowsy I’m you. But you might not stay from the thinking when all in a day, Marget, grown part of your life, came waving to you as you neared the Knapp with the news she was off to Aberdeen to live with an auntie there— it’s a better place for a scholar, Chae says, and I’ll be trained all the sooner.
    And three days later Chae Strachan and Chris drove down to the station with her, and saw her off at the platform, and she waved at them, bonny and young, Chae looked as numb as Chris felt. He gave her a lift from the station, did Chae,and on the road he spoke but once, to himself it seemed, not Chris: Ay, Marget lass, you’ll do fine, if you keep the lads at bay from kissing the bonny breast of you.
    Â Â 
    SO THAT WAS YOUR Marget gone, there seemed not a soul in Kinraddie that could take her place, the servant queans of an age with Chris were no more than gowks and gomerils a-screech round the barn of the Mains at night with the ploughmen snickering behind them. And John Guthrie had as little use for them as Marget herself. Friends? Stick to your lessons and let’s see you make a name for yourself, you’ve no time for friends.
    Mother looked up at that, friendly-like, not feared of him at all, she was never feared. Take care her head doesn’t soften with lessons and dirt, learning in books it was sent the wee red daftie at Cuddiestoun clean skite, they say. And father poked out his beard at her. Say? Would you rather see her skite with book-learning or skite with —and then he stopped and began to rage at Dod and Alec that were making a noise in the kitchen corner. But Chris, a-pore above her books in the glow of the paraffin lamp, heeding to Caesar’s coming in Gaul and the stour the creature raised there, knew right well what father had thought to speak of— lust was the word he’d wanted, perhaps. And she turned a page with the weary Caesar man and thought of the wild career the daftie Andy had led one day in the roads and woods of Kinraddie.
    Marget had barely gone when the thing came off, it was fair the speak of the place that happening early in April. The sowing time was at hand, John Guthrie put down two parks with grass and corn, swinging hand from hand as he walked and sowed and Will carried the corn across to him from the sacks that lined the rigs. Chris herself would help of an early morning when the dew had lifted quick, it was blithe and lightsome in the caller air with the whistle of the blackbirds in Blawearie’s trees and the glint of the sea across the Howe and the wind blowing up the braes with a fresh, wild smell that caught you and made you gasp. So silent the world with the sun just peeking above the horizon those hours that you’dhear, clear and bright as though he paced the next field, the ringing steps of Chae Strachan—far down, a shadow and a sunlit dot, sowing his parks behind the steadings of Peesie’s Knapp. There were larks coming over that morning, Chris minded, whistling and trilling dark and unseen against the blaze of the sun, now one lark, now another, till the sweetness of the trilling dizzied you and you stumbled with heavy pails corn-laden, and father swore at you over the red beard of him Damn’t to hell, are you fair a fool, you quean?
    That morning it was that the daftie Andy stole out of Cuddiestoun and started his scandalous rampage through Kinraddie. Long Rob of the Mill was to say he’d once had a horse that would do that kind of thing in the early Spring, leap dykes and ditches and every mortal thing it would if it heard a douce little mare go by. Gelding though it was, the horse would do that, and what more was Andy, poor devil, than a gelding? Not that Mistress Ellison had thought him that—faith, no!
    It was said she