The Leithen Stories

by John Buchan

  I knew now where the House lay. I clutched my pistol, and ran down a broad path, with a horrid fear that I was too late after all. I ran blindly, and had just time to step aside to let two figures pass.

  They were two of the guards – hillmen by their dress – and even in my absorption I wondered what had happened to them. For they were like men demented, with white faces and open mouths. One of them stumbled and fell, and seemed to stay on his knees for a second praying, till his companion lugged him forward. I might have faced them with impunity, for their eyes were sightless. Never have I seen men suffering from an extremer terror.

  The road twisted too much for my haste, so I cut across country. The surge and crackle of the flames filled the air, but it seemed as if I heard another sound, the sound of running feet, of bodies, many bodies, brushing through the thicket. I was close on the House now, and close on the road which led to it from the broken wall and the Dancing Floor. As I jumped a patch of scrub and the gloom lightened in the more open avenue, I bumped into another man and saw that it was Maris.

  He was waiting, pistol in hand, beside the road, and in a trice had his gun at my head. Then he recognised me and lowered it. His face was as crazy as the hillmen’s who had passed me, and he still wore nothing but breeches and a ragged shirt, but his wild eyes seemed to hold also a dancing humour.

  ‘Blessed Jesu!’ he whispered, ‘you have come in time. The fools are about to receive their Gods. You have your pistol? But I do not think there will be shooting.’

  He choked suddenly as if he had been struck dumb, and I too choked. For I looked with him up the avenue towards the burning House.

  Part Three

  THIRTEEN

  THIS PART OF the story (said Leithen) I can only give at second-hand. I have pieced it together as well as I could from what Vernon told me, but on many matters he was naturally not communicative, and at these I have had to guess for myself …

  Vernon left England the day after the talk with me which I have already recorded, sending his boat as deck cargo to Patras, while he followed by way of Venice. He had a notion that the great hour which was coming had best be met at sea, where he would be far from the distractions and littlenesses of life. He took one man with him from Wyvenhoe, a lean gipsy lad called Martell, but the boy fell sick at Corfu and he was obliged to send him home. In his stead he found an Epirote with a string of names, who was strongly recommended to him by one of his colleagues in the old Aegean Secret Service. From Patras they made good sailing up the Gulf of Corinth, and, passing through the Canal, came in the last days of March to the Piraeus. In that place of polyglot speech, whistling engines and the odour of gas-works, they delayed only for water and supplies, and presently had rounded Sunium, and were beating up the Euripus with the Attic hills rising sharp and clear in the spring sunlight.

  He had no plans. It was a joy to him to be alone with the racing seas and the dancing winds, to scud past the little headlands, pink and white with blossom, or to lie of a night in some hidden bay beneath the thymy crags. He had discarded the clothes of civilisation. In a blue jersey and old corduroy trousers, bareheaded and barefooted, he steered his craft and waited on the passing of the hours. His mood, he has told me, was one of complete happiness, unshadowed by nervousness or doubt. The long preparation was almost at an end. Like an acolyte before a temple gate, he believed himself to be on the threshold of a new life. He had that sense of unseen hands which comes to all men once or twice in their lives, and both hope and fear were swallowed up in a calm expectancy.

  Trouble began under the snows of Pelion as they turned the north end of Euboea. On the morning of the first Monday in April the light winds died away, and foul weather came out of the north-west. By midday it was half a gale, and in those yeasty shallow seas, with an iron coast to port and starboard, their position was dangerous. The nearest harbour was twenty miles distant, and neither of the crew had ever been there before. With the evening the gale increased, and it was decided to get out of that maze of rocky islands to the safer deeps of the Aegean.

  It was a hard night for the two of them, and there was no chance of sleep. More by luck than skill they escaped the butt of Skiathos, and the first light found them far to the south-east among the long tides of the North Aegean. They ran close-reefed before the gale, and all morning with decks awash nosed and plunged in seas which might have been the wintry Atlantic. It was not till the afternoon that the gale seemed to blow itself out and two soaked and chilly mortals could relax their vigil. Soon bacon was frizzling on the cuddy-stove, and hot coffee and dry clothes restored them to moderate comfort.

  The sky cleared, and in bright sunlight, with the dregs of the gale behind him, Vernon steered for the nearest land, an island of which he did not trouble to read the name, but which the chart showed to possess good anchorage. Late in the evening, when the light was growing dim, they came into a little bay carved from the side of a hill. They also came into fog. The wind had dropped utterly, and the land which they saw was only an outline in the haze. When they cast anchor the fog was rolling like a tide over the sea, and muffling their yards. They spent a busy hour or two, repairing the damage of the storm, and then the two of them made such a meal as befits those who have faced danger together. Afterwards Vernon, as his custom was, sat alone in the stern, smoking and thinking his thoughts. He wrote up his diary with a ship’s lantern beside him, while the mist hung about him low and soft as an awning.

  He had leisure now for the thought which had all day been at the back of his mind. The night – the great night – had passed and there had been no dream. The adventure for which all his life he had been preparing himself had vanished into the Aegean tides. The hour when the revelation should have come had been spent in battling with the storm, when a man lives in the minute at grips with too urgent realities.

  His first mood was one of dismal relaxedness. He felt as useless as an unstrung bow. I, the only man to whom he had ever confided his secret, had been right, and the long vigil had ended in fiasco. He tried to tell himself that it was a relief, that an old folly was over, but he knew that deep down in his heart there was bitter disappointment. The fates had prepared the stage, and rung up the curtain and lo! there was no play. He had been fooled, and somehow the zest and savour of life had gone from him. After all, no man can be strung high and then find his preparations idle without suffering a cruel recoil.

  And then anger came to stiffen him – anger at himself. What a God-forsaken ass he had been, frittering away his best years in following a phantom! … In his revulsion he loathed the dream which he had cherished so long. He began to explain it away with the common sense which on my lips he had accounted blasphemy … The regular seasonal occurrence was his own doing – he had expected it and it had come – a mere case of subjective compulsion … The fact that each year the revelation had moved one room nearer was also the result of his willing it to be so, for subconsciously he must have desired to hasten the consummation … He went through every detail, obstinately providing some rationalistic explanation for each. I do not think he can have satisfied himself, but he was in the mood to deface his idols, and one feeling surged above all others – that he was done with fancies now and for ever. He has told me that the thing he longed for chiefly at that moment was to have me beside him that he might make formal recantation.

  By and by he argued himself into some philosophy. He had dallied certain years, but he was still young and the world was before him. He had kept his body and mind in hard training, and that at any rate was not wasted, though the primal purpose had gone. He was a normal man now among normal men, and it was his business to prove himself. He thought in his Calvinistic way that the bogus vision might have been sent to him for a purpose – the thing might be hallucination, but the askesis which it had entailed was solid gain … He fetched from his locker the little book in which he had chronicled his inner life, and wrote in it ‘Finis’. Then he locked it and flung the key overboard. The volume would be kept
at Severns to remind him of his folly, but it would never be opened by him.

  By this time he was his own master again. He would sail for England next morning and get hold of me and make a plan for his life.

  He was now conscious for the first time of his strange environment. The boat was in a half-moon of bay in an island of which he had omitted to notice the name but whose latitude and longitude he roughly knew. The night was close around him like a shell, for the fog had grown thicker, though the moon behind it gave it an opaque sheen. It was an odd place in which to be facing a crisis …

  His thoughts ran fast ahead to the career which he must shape from the ruins of his dream. He was too late for the Bar. Business might be the best course – he had big interests in the north of England which would secure him a footing, and he believed that he had the kind of mind for administration … Or politics? There were many chances for a young man in the confused post-bellum world …

  He was absorbed in his meditations and did not hear the sound of ears or the grating of a boat alongside. Suddenly he found a face looking at him in the ring of lamplight – an old bearded face curiously wrinkled. The eyes, which were shrewd and troubled, scanned him for a second or two, and then a voice spoke:

  Will the Signor come with me?’ it said in French.

  Vernon, amazed at this apparition which had come out of the mist, could only stare.

  ‘Will the Signor come with me?’ the voice spoke again. ‘We have grievous need of a man.’

  Vernon unconsciously spoke not in French but in Greek.

  ‘Who the devil are you, and where do you come from?’

  ‘I come from the House. I saw you enter the bay before the fog fell. Had there been no fog, they would not have let me come to you.’

  ‘Who are “they”?’ Vernon asked.

  But the old man shook his head. ‘Come with me and I will tell you. It is a long story.’

  ‘But what do you want me to do? Confound it. I’m not going off with a man I never saw before who can’t tell me what he wants.’

  The old man shrugged his shoulders despairingly. ‘I have no words,’ he said. ‘But Mademoiselle Elise is waiting at the jetty. Come to her at any rate and she will reason with you.’

  Vernon – as you will admit, if I have made his character at all clear to you – had no instinct for melodrama. He had nothing in him of the knight-errant looking for adventure, and this interruption out of the fog and the sea rather bored him than otherwise. But he was too young to be able to refuse such an appeal. He went below and fetched his revolver and an electric torch which he stuffed into a trouser pocket. He cried to the Epirote to expect him when he saw him, for he was going ashore.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll come and see what the trouble is.’

  He dropped over the yacht’s side into the cockleshell of a boat, and the old man took up the sculls. The yacht must have anchored nearer land than he had thought, for in five minutes they had touched a shelving rock. Somebody stood there with a lantern which made a dull glow in the fog.

  Vernon made out a middle-aged woman with the air and dress of a lady’s maid. She held the lantern close to him for a moment, and then turned wearily to the other. ‘Fool, Mitri!’ she cried. ‘You have brought a peasant.’

  ‘Nay,’ said the old man, ‘he is no peasant. He is a Signor, I tell you.’

  The woman again passed the light of her lantern over Vernon’s face and figure. ‘His dress is a peasant’s, but such clothes may be a nobleman’s whim. I have heard it of the English.’

  ‘I am English,’ said Vernon in French.

  She turned on him with a quick movement of relief.

  ‘You are English … and a gentleman? But I know nothing of you … only that you have come out of the sea. Up in the House we women are alone, and my mistress has death to face, or worse than death. We have no claim on you, and if you give us your service it means danger – oh, what danger! See, the boat is there. You can return in it and go away, and forget that you have been near this accursed place. But, O Monsieur, if you hope for Heaven and have pity on a defenceless angel, you will not leave us.’

  Vernon’s blood was slow to stir, and, as I have said, he had no instinct for melodrama. This gesticulating French maid was like something out of an indifferent play.

  ‘Who is your mistress?’ he asked. ‘Did she send you for me?’

  The woman flung up her hands.

  ‘I will speak the truth. My mistress does not know you are here. Only Mitri and I saw you. She will not ask help, for she is foolishly confident. She is proud and fearless, and will not believe the evidence of her eyes. She must be saved in spite of herself. I fear for her and also for myself, for the whole House is doomed.’

  ‘But, Mademoiselle, you cannot expect me to intrude uninvited on your mistress. What is her name? What do you want me to do?’

  She clutched his arm and spoke low and rapidly in his ear.

  ‘She is the last of her line, you must know – a girl with a wild estate and a father dead these many months. She is good and gracious, as I can bear witness, but she is young and cannot govern the wolves who are the men of these parts. They have a long hatred of her house, and now they have it rumoured that she is a witch who blights the crops and slays the children … Once, twice, they have cursed our threshold and made the blood mark on the door. We are prisoners now, you figure. They name her Basilissa, meaning the Queen of Hell, and there is no babe but will faint with fright if it casts eyes on her, and she as mild and innocent as Mother Mary … The word has gone round to burn the witch out, for the winter has been cruel and they blame their sorrows on her. The hour is near, and unless salvation comes she will go to God in the fire.’

  There was something in the hoarse excited voice which forbade Vernon to dismiss lightly this extraordinary tale. The woman was patently terrified and sincere. It might be a trap, but he had his pistol, and from an old man and a woman he had nothing to fear. On the other hand there might be some desperate need which he could not disregard. It seemed to him that he was bound to inquire further.

  ‘I am willing to go to your mistress,’ he said, and the woman, murmuring ‘God’s mercy’, led the way up a steep causeway to some rocky steps cut in a tamarisk thicket.

  She stopped half-way to whisper an injunction to go quietly. ‘They cannot see us in this blessed fog,’ she whispered, ‘but they may hear us.’ Then to Vernon: ‘They watch us like wild beasts, Monsieur; their sentries do not permit us to leave the House, but this night the kind God has fooled them. But they cannot be far off, and they have quick ears.’

  The three crept up the rock staircase made slippery by the heavy mist. Presently a great wall of masonry rose above them, and what seemed the aperture of a door. ‘Once,’ the woman whispered, ‘there were three such posterns, but two were walled up by my lady’s father – walled up within, with the doors left standing. This our enemies do not know and they watch all three, but this the least, for it looks unused. Behold their work!’

  Vernon saw that tall bundles of brushwood had been laid around the door, and that these had with difficulty been pushed back when it was opened.

  ‘But what …?’ he began.

  ‘It means that they would burn us,’ she hissed. ‘Now, Monsieur, do you believe my tale, and, believing, does your courage fail you?’

  To Vernon, shy, placid, a devotee of all the conventions, it was beginning to seem a monstrous thing to enter this strange house at the bidding of two servants, primed with a crazy tale, to meet an owner who had given no sign of desiring his presence. A woman, too – apparently a young woman. The thing was hideously embarrassing, the more so as he suddenly realised that he was barefooted, and clad in his old jersey and corduroys. I think he would have drawn back except for the sight of the faggots – that and the woman’s challenge to his courage. He had been ‘dared’ like a schoolboy, and after twenty-four hours fighting with storms and the shattering of the purpose of a lifetime he was in that ha
lf-truculent, half-reckless mood which is prone to accept a challenge. There was business afoot, it appeared, ugly business.

  ‘Go on. I will see your mistress,’ he said.

  With a key the old man unlocked the door. The lock must have been recently oiled, for it moved easily. The three now climbed a staircase which seemed to follow the wall of a round tower. Presently they came into a stone hall with ancient hangings like the banners in the church. From the open frame of the lantern a second was kindled, and the two lights showed a huge desolate place with crumbling mosaics on the floor and plaster dropping from the walls and cornices. There was no furniture of any kind and the place smelt damp and chilly like a vault.

  ‘These are unused chambers,’ the woman said, and her voice was no longer hushed but high-pitched with excitement. ‘We live only on the landward side.’

  Another heavy door was unlocked, and they entered a corridor where the air blew warmer, and there was a hint of that indescribable scent which comes from human habitation. The woman stopped and consulted in whispers with the old man. Now that she had got Vernon inside, her nervousness seemed to have increased. She turned to him at last:

  ‘I must prepare my mistress. If Monsieur will be so good he will wait here till I fetch him.’

  She opened a door and almost pushed Vernon within. He found himself in black darkness, while the flicker of the lantern vanished round a bend in the corridor.

  FOURTEEN

  FROM HIS POCKET Vernon drew his electric torch and flashed it round the room in which he found himself. It was the extreme opposite of the empty stone hall, for it was heavily decorated and crowded with furniture. Clearly no one had used it lately, for dust lay on everything and the shutters of the windows had not been unbarred for months. It had the air, indeed, of a lumber-room, into which furniture had been casually shot. The pieces were for the most part fine and costly. There were several Spanish cabinets, a wonderful red-lacquer couch, quantities of Oriental rugs which looked good, and a litter of Chinese vases and antique silver lamps.