by John Buchan
The voices droned on, the man asking questions, the child answering in a weak unnatural voice. “You are David Warcliff . . . you lost your way coming from school . . . you have been ill and have forgotten. . . . You are better now . . . you remember Haverham and the redshanks down by the river. . . . You are sleepy . . . I think you would like to sleep again.”
Medina spoke. “You can wake him now. Do it carefully.”
I got up and switched on the rest of the lights. The child was peacefully asleep in Mary’s arms, and she bent and kissed him. “Speak to him, Dick,” she said.
“Davie,” I said loudly. “Davie, it’s about time for us to get home.”
He opened his eyes and sat up. When he found himself on Mary’s knee, he began to clamber down. He was not accustomed to a woman’s lap, and felt a little ashamed.
“Davie,” I repeated. “Your father will be getting tired waiting for us. Don’t you think we should go home?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, and put his hand in mine.
*****
To my dying day I shall not forget my last sight of that library — the blazing lights which made the books, which I had never seen before except in shadow, gleam like a silk tapestry, the wood-fire dying on the hearth, and the man sunk in the chair. It may sound odd after all that had happened, but my chief feeling was pity. Yes, pity! He seemed the loneliest thing on God’s earth. You see he had never had any friends except himself, and his ambitions had made a barrier between him and all humanity. Now that they were gone he was stripped naked, and left cold and shivering in the arctic wilderness of his broken dreams.
Mary leaned back in the car.
“I hope I’m not going to faint,” she said. “Give me the green bottle, please.”
“For Heaven’s sake!” I cried.
“Silly!” she said. “It’s only eau-de-cologne.”
She laughed, and the laugh seemed to restore her a little though she still looked deadly pale. She fumbled in her reticule, and drew out a robust pair of scissors.
“I’m going to cut Davie’s hair. I can’t change his clothes, but at any rate I can make his head like a boy’s again, so that his father won’t be shocked.”
“Does he know we are coming?”
“Yes. I telephoned to him after dinner, but of course I said nothing about Davie.”
She clipped assiduously, and by the time we came to the Pimlico square where Sir Arthur Warcliff lived she had got rid of the long locks, and the head was now that of a pallid and thin but wonderfully composed little boy. “Am I going back to Dad?” he had asked, and seemed content.
I refused to go in — I was not fit for any more shocks — so I sat in the car while Mary and David entered the little house. In about three minutes Mary returned. She was crying, and yet smiling too.
“I made Davie wait in the hall, and went into Sir Arthur’s study alone. He looked ill — and oh, so old and worn. I said: ‘I have brought Davie. Never mind his clothes. He’s all right!’ Then I fetched him in. Oh, Dick, it was a miracle. That old darling seemed to come back to life. . . . The two didn’t run into each other’s arms . . . they shook hands . . . and the little boy bowed his head and Sir Arthur kissed the top of it, and said ‘Dear Mouse-head, you’ve come back to me.’ . . . And then I slipped away.”
*****
There was another scene that night in which I played a part, for we finished at Carlton House Terrace. Of what happened there I have only a confused recollection. I remember Julius Victor kissing Mary’s hand, and the Duke shaking mine as if he would never stop. I remember Mercot, who looked uncommonly fit and handsome, toasting me in champagne, and Adela Victor sitting at a piano and singing to us divinely. But my chief memory is of a French nobleman whirling a distinguished German engineer into an extemporised dance of joy.
CHAPTER XX. MACHRAY
A week later, after much consultation with Sandy, I wrote Medina a letter. The papers said he had gone abroad for a short rest, and I could imagine the kind of mental purgatory he was enduring in some Mediterranean bay. We had made up our mind to be content with success. Victory meant a long campaign in the courts and the Press, in which no doubt we should have won, but for which I at any rate had no stomach. The whole business was a nightmare which I longed to shut the door on; we had drawn his fangs, and for all I cared he might go on with his politics and dazzle the world with his gifts, provided he kept his hands out of crime. I wrote and told him that; told him that the three people who knew everything would hold their tongues, but that they reserved the right to speak if he ever showed any sign of running crooked. I had no reply and did not expect one. I had lost all my hate for the man, and, so strangely are we made, what I mostly felt was compassion. We are all, even the best of us, egotists and self-deceivers, and without a little comfortable make-believe to clothe us we should freeze in the outer winds. I shuddered when I thought of the poor devil with his palace of cards about his ears and his naked soul. I felt that further triumph would be an offence against humanity.
He must have got my message, for in July he was back at his work, and made a speech at a big political demonstration which was highly commended in the papers. Whether he went about in society I do not know, for Sandy was in Scotland and I was at Fosse, and not inclined to leave it. . . . Meantime Macgillivray’s business was going on, and the Press was full of strange cases, which no one seemed to think of connecting. I gathered from Macgillivray that though the syndicate was smashed to little bits he had failed to make the complete bag of malefactors that he had hoped. In England there were three big financial exposures followed by long sentences; in Paris there was a first-rate political scandal and a crop of convictions; a labour agitator and a copper magnate in the Middle West went to gaol for life, and there was the famous rounding-up of the murder gang in Turin. But Macgillivray and his colleagues, like me, had success rather than victory; indeed in this world I don’t think you can get both at once — you must make your choice.
We saw Mercot at the “House” Ball at Oxford, none the worse for his adventures, but rather the better, for he was a man now and not a light-witted boy. Early in July Mary and I went to Paris for Adela Victor’s wedding, the most gorgeous show I have ever witnessed, when I had the privilege of kissing the bride and being kissed by the bridegroom. Sir Arthur Warcliff brought David to pay us a visit at Fosse, where the boy fished from dawn to dusk, and began to get some flesh on his bones. Archie Roylance arrived and the pair took such a fancy to each other that the three of them went off to Norway to have a look at the birds on Flacksholm.
I was busy during those weeks making up arrears of time at Fosse, for my long absence had put out the whole summer programme. One day, as I was down in the Home Meadow, planning a new outlet for one of the ponds, Sandy turned up, announcing that he must have a talk with me and could only spare twenty minutes.
“When does your tenancy of Machray begin?” he asked.
“I have got it now — ever since April. The sea-trout come early there.”
“And you can go up whenever you like?”
“Yes. We propose starting about the 5th of August.”
“Take my advice and start at once,” he said.
I asked why, though I guessed his reason.
“Because I’m not very happy about you here. You’ve insulted to the marrow the vainest and one of the cleverest men in the world. Don’t imagine he’ll take it lying down. You may be sure he is spending sleepless nights planning how he is to get even with you. It’s you he is chiefly thinking about. Me he regards as a rival in the same line of business — he’d love to break me, but he’ll trust to luck for the chance turning up. Lavater has been his slave and has escaped — but at any rate he once acknowledged his power. You have fooled him from start to finish and left his vanity one raw throbbing sore. He won’t be at ease till he has had his revenge on you — on you and your wife.”
“Peter John!” I exclaimed.
He shook his head. “No, I don’t thin
k so. He won’t try that line again — at any rate not yet awhile. But he would be much happier, Dick, if you were dead.”
The thought had been in my own mind for weeks, and had made me pretty uncomfortable. It is not pleasant to walk in peril of your life, and move about in constant expectation of your decease. I had considered the thing very carefully, and had come to the conclusion that I could do nothing but try to forget the risk. If I ever allowed myself to think about it, my whole existence would be poisoned. It was a most unpleasant affair, but after all the world is full of hazards. I told Sandy that.
“I’m quite aware of the danger,” I said. “I always reckoned that as part of the price I had to pay for succeeding. But I’m hanged if I’m going to allow the fellow to score off me to the extent of disarranging my life.”
“You’ve plenty of fortitude, old fellow,” said Sandy, “but you owe a duty to your family and your friends. Of course you might get police protection from Macgillivray, but that would be an infernal nuisance for you, and, besides, what kind of police protection would avail against an enemy as subtle as Medina? . . . No, I want you to go away. I want you to go to Machray now, and stay there till the end of October.”
“What good would that do? He can follow me there, if he wants to, and anyhow the whole thing would begin again when I came back.”
“I’m not so sure,” he said. “In three months’ time his wounded vanity may have healed. It’s no part of his general game to have a vendetta with you, and only a passion of injured pride would drive him to it. Presently that must die down, and he will see his real interest. Then as for Machray — why a Scotch deer-forest is the best sanctuary on earth. Nobody can come up that long glen without your hearing about it, and nobody can move on the hills without half a dozen argus-eyed stalkers and gillies following him. They’re the right sort of police protection. I want you for all our sakes to go to Machray at once.”
“It looks like funking,” I objected.
“Don’t be an old ass. Is there any man alive, who is not a raving maniac, likely to doubt your courage? You know perfectly well that it is sometimes a brave man’s duty to run away.”
I thought for a bit. “I don’t think he’ll hire ruffians to murder me,” I said.
“Why.”
“Because he challenged me to a duel. Proposed a place in the Pyrenees and offered to let me choose both seconds.”
“What did you reply?”
“I wired, ‘Try not to be a fool.’ It looks as if he wanted to keep the job of doing me in for himself.”
“Very likely, and that doesn’t mend matters. I’d rather face half a dozen cut-throats than Medina. What you tell me strengthens my argument.”
I was bound to admit that Sandy talked sense, and after he had gone I thought the matter out and decided to take his advice. Somehow the fact that he should have put my suspicions into words made them more formidable, and I knew again the odious feeling of the hunted. It was hardly fear, for I think that, if necessary, I could have stayed on at Fosse and gone about my business with a stiff lip. But all the peace of the place had been spoiled. If a bullet might at any moment come from a covert — that was the crude way I envisaged the risk — then good-bye to the charm of my summer meadows.
The upshot was that I warned Tom Greenslade to be ready to take his holiday, and by the 20th of July he and I and Mary and Peter John were settled in a little white-washed lodge tucked into the fold of a birch-clad hill, and looking alternately at a shrunken river and a cloudless sky, while we prayed for rain.
Machray in calm weather is the most solitary place on earth, lonelier and quieter even than a Boer farm lost in some hollow of the veld. The mountains rise so sheer and high, that it seems that only a bird could escape, and the road from the sea-loch ten miles away is only a strip of heather-grown sand which looks as if it would end a mile off at the feet of each steep hill-shoulder. But when the gales come, and the rain is lashing the roof, and the river swirls at the garden-edge, and the birches and rowans are tossing, then a thousand voices talk, and one lives in a world so loud that one’s ears are deafened and one’s voice acquires a sharp pitch of protest from shouting against the storm.
We had few gales, and the last week of July was a very fair imitation of the Tropics. The hills were cloaked in a heat haze, the Aicill river was a chain of translucent pools with a few reddening salmon below the ledges, the burns were thin trickles, the sun drew hot scents out of the heather and bog-myrtle, and movement was a weariness to man and beast. That was for the day-time; but every evening about five o’clock there would come a light wind from the west, which scattered the haze, and left a land swimming in cool amber light. Then Mary and Tom Greenslade and I would take to the hills, and return well on for midnight to a vast and shameless supper. Sometimes in the hot noontides I went alone, with old Angus the head stalker, and long before the season began I had got a pretty close knowledge of the forest.
The reader must bear with me while I explain the lie of the land. The twenty thousand acres of Machray extend on both sides of the Aicill glen, but principally to the south. West lies the Machray sea-loch, where the hills are low and green and mostly sheep-ground. East, up to the river-head, is Glenaicill Forest, the lodge of which is beyond the watershed on the shore of another sea-loch, and on our side of the divide there is only a stalker’s cottage. Glenaicill is an enormous place, far too big to be a single forest. It had been leased for years by Lord Glenfinnan, an uncle of Archie Roylance, but he was a frail old gentleman of over seventy who could only get a stag when they came down to the low ground in October. The result was that the place was ridiculously undershot, and all the western end, which adjoined Machray, was virtually a sanctuary. It was a confounded nuisance, for it made it impossible to stalk our northern beat except in a south-west wind, unless you wanted to shift the deer on to Glenaicill, and that beat had all our best grazing and seemed to attract all our best heads.
Haripol Forest to the south was not so large, but I should think it was the roughest ground in Scotland. Machray had good beats south of the Aicill right up to the watershed, and two noble corries, the Corrie-na-Sidhe and the Corrie Easain. Beyond the watershed was the glen of the Reascuill, both sides of which were Haripol ground. The Machray heights were all over the 3,000 feet, but rounded and fairly easy going, but the Haripol peaks beyond the stream were desperate rock mountains — Stob Bán, Stob Coire Easain, Sgurr Mor — comprising some of the most difficult climbing in the British Isles. The biggest and hardest top of all was at the head of the Reascuill — Sgurr Dearg, with its two pinnacle ridges, its three prongs, and the awesome precipice of its eastern face. Machray marched with Haripol on its summit, but it wasn’t often that any of our stalkers went that way. All that upper part of the Reascuill was a series of cliffs and chasms, and the red deer — who is no rock-climber — rarely ventured there. For the rest these four southern beats of ours were as delightful hunting-ground as I have ever seen, and the ladies could follow a good deal of the stalking by means of a big telescope in the library window of the Lodge. Machray was a young man’s forest, for the hills rose steep almost from the sea-level, and you might have to go up and down 3,000 feet several times in a day. But Haripol — at least the north and east parts of it — was fit only for athletes, and it seemed to be its fate to fall to tenants who were utterly incapable of doing it justice. In recent years it had been leased successively to an elderly distiller, a young racing ne’er-do-well who drank, and a plump American railway king. It was now in the hands of a certain middle-aged Midland manufacturer, Lord Claybody, who had won an easy fortune and an easier peerage during the War. “Ach, he will be killed,” Angus said. “He will never get up a hundred feet of Haripol without being killed.” So I found myself, to my disgust, afflicted with another unauthorised sanctuary.
Angus was very solemn about it. He was a lean anxious man, just over fifty, with a face not unlike a stag’s, amazingly fast on the hills, a finished cragsman, and with all the Hi
ghlander’s subtle courtesy. Kennedy, the second stalker, was of Lowland stock; his father had come to the North from Galloway in the days of the boom in sheep, and had remained as a keeper when sheep prices fell. He was a sturdy young fellow, apt to suffer on steep slopes on a warm day, but strong as an ox and with a better head than Angus for thinking out problems of weather and wind. Though he had the Gaelic, he was a true Lowlander, plain-spoken and imperturbable. It was a contrast of new and old, for Kennedy had served in the War, and learned many things beyond the other’s ken. He knew, for example, how to direct your eye to the point he wanted, and would give intelligent directions like a battery observer, whereas with Angus it was always “D’ye see yon stone? Ay, but d’ye see another stone?” — and so forth. Kennedy, when we sat down to rest, would smoke a cigarette in a holder, while Angus lit the dottle in a foul old pipe.
In the first fortnight of August we had alternate days of rain, real drenching torrents, and the Aicill rose and let the fish up from the sea. There were few sea-trout that year, but there was a glorious run of salmon. Greenslade killed his first, and by the end of a week had a bag of twelve, while Mary, with the luck which seems to attend casual lady anglers, had four in one day to her own rod. Those were pleasant days, though there were mild damp afternoons when the midges were worse than tropical mosquitoes. I liked it best when a breeze rose and the sun was hot and we had all our meals by the waterside. Once at luncheon we took with us an iron pot, made a fire, and boiled a fresh-killed salmon “in his broo” — a device I recommend to anyone who wants the full flavour of that noble fish.
Archie Roylance arrived on August 16th, full of the lust of hunting. He reported that they had seen nothing remarkable in the way of birds at Flacksholm, but that David Warcliff had had great sport with the sea-trout. “There’s a good boy for you,” he declared. “First-class little sportsman, and to see him and his father together made me want to get wedded straight off. I thought him a bit hipped at Fosse, but the North Sea put him right, and I left him as jolly as a grig. By the way, what was the matter with him in the summer? I gathered that he had been seedy or something, and the old man can’t let him out of his sight. . . . Let’s get in Angus, and talk deer.”