by John Buchan
Lamancha, regardless of the condition of his nether garments, sat down heavily on an embroidered stool which Lady Claybody erroneously believed to have belonged to Marie Antoinette, and dropped his head in his hands.
‘Lord, I believe you’re right,’ he groaned. ‘We’ve all been potting at sitting birds. John, do you hear? We’ve been making godless fools of ourselves. We thought we had got outside civilisation and were really taking chances. But we weren’t. We were all the time as safe as your blessed bank. It can’t be done – not in this country anyway. We’re in the groove and have got to stay there. We’ve been a pretty lot of idiots not to think of that.’
Then Johnson spoke. He had been immensely cheered by Lord Claybody’s words, for they had seemed to raise Haripol again to that dignity from which it had been in imminent risk of falling.
‘I don’t complain personally, Lord Lamancha, though you’ve given me a hard day of it. But I agree with my father – you really were gambling on a certainty and it wasn’t very fair to us. Besides, you three, who are the supporters of law and order, have offered a pretty good handle to the enemy, with those infernal journalists advertising John Macnab. There may be a large crop of Macnabs springing up, and you’ll be responsible. It’s a dangerous thing to weaken the sanctities of property.’
He found, to his surprise, a vigorous opponent in his mother. Lady Claybody had passed from mystification to enlightenment, and from enlightenment to appreciation. It delighted her romantic soul that Haripol should have been chosen for the escapade of three eminent men; she saw tradition and legend already glorifying her new dwelling. Moreover, she scented in Johnson’s words a theory of life which was not her own, a mercantile creed which conflicted with her notion of Haripol, and of the future of her family.
‘You are talking nonsense, Johnson,’ she said, ‘You are making property a nightmare, for you are always thinking about it. You forget that wealth is made for man, and not man for wealth. It is the personality that matters. It is so vulgar not to keep money and land and that sort of thing in its proper place. Look at those splendid old Jacobites and what they gave up. The one advantage of property is that you can disregard it.’
This astounding epigram passed unnoticed save by Janet, for the lady, smiling benignly on the poaching trinity, went on to a practical application. ‘I think the whole John Macnab adventure has been quite delightful. It has brightened us all up, and I’m sure we have nothing to forgive. I think we must have a dinner for everybody concerned to celebrate the end of it. What Claybody says is perfectly true – you must have known you could count on us, just as much as on Colonel Raden and Mr Bandicott. But since you seem not to have realised that, you have had the fun of thinking you were in real danger, and after all it is what one thinks that matters. I am so glad you are all cured of being bored. But I’m not quite happy about those journalists. How can we be certain that they won’t make a horrid story of it?’
‘My wife is right,’ said Lord Claybody emphatically. ‘That is the danger.’ He looked at Crossby. ‘They are certain to want some kind of account.’
‘They certainly will,’ said the latter. ‘And that account must leave out names and – other details. I don’t suppose you want the navvy business made public?’
‘Perhaps not. That was Johnson’s idea, and I don’t consider it a particularly happy inspiration.’
‘Well, there is nothing for it but that I should give them the story and expurgate it discreetly. John Macnab has been caught and dismissed with a warning – that’s all there is to it. I suppose your gillies won’t blab? They can’t know very much, but they might give away some awkward details.’
‘I’ll jolly well see that they don’t,’ said Johnson. ‘But who will you make John Macnab out to be?’
‘A lunatic – unnamed. I’ll hint at some family skeleton into which good breeding forbids me to inquire. The fact that he has failed at Haripol will take the edge off my colleagues’ appetites. If he had got his stag they would have been ramping on the trail. The whole thing will go the way of other stunts, and be forgotten in two days. I know the British Press.’
Within half an hour the atmosphere in that drawing-room had changed from suspicion to something not far from friendliness, but the change left two people unaffected. Johnson, doubtless with Lamancha’s behaviour on the hill in his memory, was still sullen, and Janet was obviously ill at ease.
Lamancha, who was suffering a good deal from thirst and hunger and longed for a bath, arose from his stool.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we three – especially myself – owe you the most abject apologies. I see now that we were taking no risks worth mentioning, and that what we thought was an adventure was only a faux pas. It was abominably foolish, and we are all very sorry about it. I think you’ve taken it uncommonly well.’
Lord Claybody raised a protesting hand. ‘Not another word. I vote we break up this conference and give you something to drink. Johnson’s tongue is hanging out of his mouth.’
The voice of Janet was suddenly raised, and in it might have been detected a new timidity. ‘I want to apologise also. Dear Lady Claybody, I stole your dog … I hope you will forgive me. You see we wanted to do something to distract Macnicol, and that seemed the only way.’
A sudden silence fell. Lady Claybody, had there been sufficient light, might have been observed to flush.
‘You – stole – Roguie,’ she said slowly, while Janet moved closer to Sir Archie. ‘You – stole – Wee Roguie. I think you are the ——’
‘But we were very kind to him, and he was very happy.’
‘I wasn’t happy. I scarcely slept a wink. What right had you to touch my precious little dog? I think it is the most monstrous thing I ever heard in my life.’
‘I’m so very sorry. Please, please forgive me. But you said yourself that the only advantage of property was that you could disregard it.’
Lady Claybody, to her enormous credit, stared, gasped, and then laughed. Then something in the attitude of Janet and Archie stopped her, and she asked suddenly: ‘Are you two engaged?’
‘Yes,’ said Janet, ‘since ten minutes past one this afternoon.’
Lady Claybody rose from the couch and took her in her arms.
‘You’re the wickedest girl in the world and the most delightful. Oh, my dear, I am so pleased. Sir Archibald, you will let an old woman kiss you. You are brigands, both of you, so you should be very very happy. You must all come and dine here tomorrow night – your father and sister too, and we’ll ask the Bandicotts. It will be a dinner to announce your engagement, and also to say good-bye to John Macnab. Poor John! I feel as if he were a real person who will always haunt this glen, and now he is disappearing into the mist.’
‘No,’ said Lamancha, ‘he is being shrivelled up by coals of fire. By the way’ – and he turned to Lord Claybody – ‘I’ll send over the stag in the morning. I forgot to tell you I got a stag – an old beast with a famous head, who used to visit Crask. It will look rather well in your hall. It has been in Archie’s larder since the early afternoon.’
Then Johnson Claybody was moved to a course which surprised his audience, and may have surprised himself. His sullenness vanished in hearty laughter.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘I have made rather a fool of myself.’
‘I think we have all made fools of ourselves,’ said Lamancha.
Johnson turned to his late prisoner and held out his hand.
‘Lord Lamancha, I have only one thing to say. I don’t in the least agree with my mother, and I’m dead against John Macnab. But I’m your man from this day on – whatever line you take. You’re my leader, for, by all that’s holy, you’ve a most astonishing gift of getting the goods.’
Epilogue
CROSSBY, FROM WHOM I had most of this narrative, was as good as his word, though it went sorely against the grain. He himself wrote a tale, and circulated his version to his brother journalists, which made a good enough yarn, but was a sad anti
climax to the Return of Harald Blacktooth. He told of a gallant but frustrated attempt on the Haripol Sanctuary, the taking of the culprit, and the magnanimous release by young Mr Claybody of a nameless monomaniac – a gentleman, it was hinted, who had not recovered from the effects of the war. The story did not occupy a prominent page in the papers, and presently, as he had prophesied, the world had forgotten John Macnab, and had turned its attention to the cinema star, just arrived in London, whom for several days, to the disgust of that lady’s agents, it had strangely neglected.
The dinner at Haripol, Crossby told me, was a hilarious function, at which four men found reason to modify their opinion of the son of the house, and the host fell in love with Janet, and Archie with his hostess. There is talk, I understand, of making it an annual event to keep green the memory of the triune sportsman who once haunted the place. If you go to Haripol, as I did last week, you will see above the hall chimney a noble thirteen-pointer, and a legend beneath proclaiming that the stag was shot on the Sgurr Dearg beat of the forest by the Earl of Lamancha on a certain day of September in a certain year. Lady Claybody, who does not like stag’s heads as ornaments, makes an exception of this; indeed, it is one of her household treasures to which she most often calls her guests’ attention.
Janet and Archie were married in November in the little kirk of Inverlarrig, and three busy men cancelled urgent engagements to be there. Among the presents there was one not shown to the public or mentioned in the papers, and a duplicate of it went to Junius and Agatha at their wedding in the following spring. It was a noble loving-cup in the form of a quaich, inscribed as the gift of John Macnab. Below four signatures were engraved – Lamancha, Edward Leithen and John Palliser-Yeates, and last, in a hand of surprising boldness, the honoured name of Benjamin Bogle.
THE DANCING FLOOR
‘Quisque suos patimur Manes’
Virgil, Aeneid, vi. 743
To
Henry Newbolt
NOTE
An episode in this tale is taken from a short story of mine entitled ‘Basilissa’, published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1914.
J.B.
Part One
ONE
This story was told me by Leithen, as we were returning rather late in the season from a shooting holiday in North Ontario. There were few passengers, the weather was a succession of snow blizzards and gales, and as we had the smoking-room for the most part to ourselves, we stoked up the fire and fell into a mood of yarns and reminiscences. Leithen, being a lawyer, has a liking for careful detail, and his tale took long in the telling; indeed, snatches of it filled the whole of that rough October passage. The version I have written out is amplified from his narrative, but I think it is accurate, for he took the trouble to revise it.
ROMANCE (HE SAID) is a word I am shy of using. It has been so staled and pawed by fools that the bloom is gone from it, and to most people it stands for a sugary world as flat as an eighteenth-century Arcadia. But, dry stick as I am, I hanker after my own notion of romance. I suppose it is the lawyer in me, but I define it as something in life which happens with an exquisite aptness and a splendid finality, as if Fate had suddenly turned artist – something which catches the breath because it is so wholly right. Also for me it must happen to youth. I do not complain of growing old, but I like to keep my faith that at one stage in our mortal existence nothing is impossible. It is part of my belief that the universe is on the whole friendly to man and that the ordering of the world is in the main benevolent … So I go about expecting things, waiting like an old pagan for the descent of the goddess. And once – only once – I caught the authentic shimmer of her wings.
1
My story begins in January 1913, when I took my nephew Charles to dine with the Amysforts for a ball they were giving. Balls are not much in my line, for when I came first to London it was the foolish fashion of young men not to dance, but to lounge superciliously in doorways, while their elders took the floor. I had a good deal of work on hand, and I meant to leave immediately after dinner, but the necessity of launching Charles made me linger through the first few dances. My nephew was a cheerful young gentleman in his second year at Oxford, and it presently appeared that he did not want for friends of his own age. There was a perpetual bandying of nicknames and occult chaff with other fresh-coloured boys.
One in particular caught my attention. He was a tall young man of about Charles’s age, who was not dancing but stood beside one of the windows with his head silhouetted against a dark curtain. He was uncommonly handsome after the ordinary English pattern, but our youth is mostly good to behold and that would not have fixed my attention. What struck me was his pose. He was looking at the pretty spectacle with a curious aloofness – with eyes that received much but gave out nothing. I have never seen anyone so completely detached, so clothed with his own atmosphere, and since that is rare at the age of twenty, I asked Charles if he knew him.
‘Rather. It’s old Milburne. He’s up at Magdalen with me. First string for the ‘Varsity mile. Believed’ – his voice became reverential – ‘to be going to knock five seconds off his last year’s time. Most awful good chap. Like me to introduce you?’
The young man in response to my nephew’s beckoning approached us. ‘Hello, Vernon, how’s life?’ said my nephew. ‘Want to introduce you to my uncle – Sir Edward Leithen – big legal swell, you know – good fellow to have behind you if you run up against the laws of England.’
Charles left us to claim a partner, and I exchanged a few commonplaces with his friend, for I too – consule Planco – had run the mile. Our short talk was the merest platitudes, but my feeling about his odd distinction was intensified. There was something old-fashioned in his manner – wholly self-possessed yet with no touch of priggishness – a little formal, as if he had schooled himself to be urbanely and delicately on his guard. My guess at the time was that he had foreign blood in him, not from any difference of colouring or feature, but from his silken reserve. We of the North are apt to be angular in our silences; we have not learned the art of gracious reticence.
That boy’s face remained clearly fixed in my memory. It is a thing that often happens to me, for without any reason on earth I will carry about with me pictures of some casual witnesses or clients whom I am bound to recognise if I ever see them again. It is as freakish a gift as that which makes some men remember scraps of doggerel. I saw the face so vividly in my mind that, if I had been an artist, I could have drawn it accurately down to the finest lines of the mouth and the wary courtesy of the eyes. I do not suppose I gave the meeting another conscious thought, for I was desperately busy at the time. But I knew that I had added another portrait to the lumber-room of my absurd memory.
I had meant to go to Scotland that Easter vacation to fish, but a sudden pressure of Crown cases upset all my plans, and I had to limit my holiday to four days. I wanted exercise, so I took it in the most violent form, and went for a walk in the Westmorland hills. The snow lay late that year, and I got the exercise I sought scrambling up icy gullies and breasting north-easters on the long bleak ridges. All went well till the last day, which I spent among the Cartmel fells, intending to catch a train at an obscure station which would enable me to join the night mail for London at Lancaster. You know how those little hills break down in stony shelves to the sea. Well, as luck would have it, I stepped into a hole between two boulders masked with snow, and crawled out with the unpleasing certainty that I had either broken or badly wrenched my ankle. By the time I had hobbled down to the beginning of the stone-walled pastures I knew that it was a twist and not a break, but before I reached a road I knew also that I would never reach the station in time for my train.
It had begun to snow again, the spring dusk was falling, and the place was very lonely. My watch told me that even if I found a farm or inn and hired a trap I should miss my train. The only chance was to get a motor-car to take me to Lancaster. But there was no sign of farm or inn – only interminable dusky snowy fields, and
the road was too small and obscure to make a friendly motor-car probable. I limped along in a very bad temper. It was not a matter of desperate urgency that I should be in London next morning, though delay would mean the postponement of a piece of business I wanted to get finished. But the prospect was black for my immediate comfort. The best I could look forward to was a bed in a farm-or a wayside public-house, and a slow and painful journey next day. I was angry with myself for my clumsiness. I had thought my ankles beyond reproach, and it was ridiculous that after three days on rough and dangerous mountains I should come to grief on a paltry hillock.
The dusk thickened, and not a soul did I meet. Presently woods began to creep around the road, and I walked between two patches of blackness in a thin glimmer of twilight which would soon be gone. I was cold and hungry and rather tired, and my ankle gave me a good deal of pain. I tried to think where I was, and could only remember that the station, which had been my immediate objective, was still at least six miles distant. I had out my map and wasted half a dozen matches on it, but it was a map of the hill country and stopped short of my present whereabouts. Very soon I had come to a determination to stop at the first human habitation, were it a labourer’s cottage, and throw myself upon the compassion of its inmates. But not a flicker of light could I see to mark the presence of man.