by D. J. Taylor
“There’s no wolves, are there, in these parts?” Dewar wondered cravenly.
Dunbar laughed. “No, no wolves. Not for a hundred years and more. That was a fox, most like. Or a marten. But no wolves.”
It was by now quite dark, and with an absence of moon that, Dunbar calculated, boded ill for the night’s activity. Something of the place’s immensity communicated itself to him—a silence that, he acknowledged, proceeded from the entire absence of man—and he fell quiet, recalling similar excursions: walking twenty miles from Grantown once in the middle of a snowstorm; a journey into the upper reaches of Norway, where in the few hours of daylight the sun seemed to hang on the rim of the horizon like the yolk of an egg. At the same time his eye began to accustom itself to the terrain and its distinctive character: the cracked stone on the path that glittered in the lantern light; dense banks of fir heralding the innermost parts of the glen; what his memory told him was the smell of water borne back over the treetops. The mastiff dog, huddled up at his master’s feet, caught some second scent and moved its muzzle restlessly. They were nearing their destination.
“Stop the cart!” Dewar cried suddenly. His face, caught in the lantern glare, was unnaturally white: submerged, Dunbar thought, like the underside of a fish thrown breathless upon the riverbank. “Stop the cart, sir, I beg you.”
Mackay jerked on the reins. “Why, what ails you?”
Dewar took in a gulp of air. A fish, Dunbar thought again: the belly of a trout turned up from the Wensum or the Yare. “I must…that is…a man has to relieve himself occasionally,” he protested. “I’ve had no opportunity since Edinburgh.”
“A nervous creature, that,” Mackay remarked, as a series of violent detonations marked Dewar’s progress into the undergrowth.
“He’ll do,” Dunbar said. “It’s little enough he’s getting. And at least he’ll stay dry.”
“He may not, for all that.”
Shamefacedly, Dewar returned to the cart. The warm aroma of excrement trailed behind him. So woebegone did he appear that Dunbar, conscious of the hours that stretched before them, determined to lighten the younger man’s spirits.
“Come, Dewar, this will never do. We must take you out of yourself, indeed we must. Look, this is where our journey takes us. Did you ever see such a spot?”
The sight towards which he now extended his hand, as the cart came suddenly out of the forest’s edge and onto the fresh turf, was certainly a magnificent one, whether seen by day or night. Illumined now by faint streaks of moonlight, the loch stretched for perhaps a mile beyond them, falling away at its uttermost extremity into impenetrable borders of trees grown right up to the water’s edge. Cold and depthless the water seemed, black in the moonlight, its surface ruffled here and there by the tremor of the wind but otherwise undisturbed. In the very midst of it, so centrally placed that it seemed to accord to some geometrical plan, lay a small island topped by a cairn of rock. This, closer inspection revealed to be a ruin some twelve or fifteen feet high, the topmost ramparts altogether crumbled and fallen away. As they watched, a dark shape moved off the surface of the water a quarter of a mile distant, soared briefly into the night sky beyond the tree wall and then was gone.
“There’s our tenant,” Dunbar remarked. “What will he say when he finds the bailiffs have called? I wonder.”
A little way along the loch’s surround, at a point where an inlet dipped into the forest, they found a boathouse, very blear and empty in the darkness, with a couple of canoes hung on hooks from the wall and a nest of field mice that scurried away at the approach of Mackay’s lantern. Dunbar stood by the glassless window, clapping his hands together against the cold, as between them Dewar and Mackay unloaded the baggage. In his mind he was calculating shrewdly, but the nature of the calculation was lost on the other men, both of whom now regarded him expectantly as the great mastiff dog loped around the hut poking its nose into the empty nest and worrying out an abandoned straw hat from beneath the table.
“You’d best be off, Mackay,” Dunbar said. “You have business to attend to, no doubt. Back after the dawn, mind. You can leave the lamp.” The Scotsman gave a nod and moved off into the darkness, the dog following at his heels. “Now,” he went on, “we’ve work to do. Attend to me, if you please.” As Dewar watched uncertainly, he slipped out of his greatcoat and began to tug open the buttons of his green jacket.
“What’s that you’re doing?”
“What does it look like that I’m doing? However else do you suppose a man could reach the rock?”
“I thought we might…” Dewar gestured at the two canoes.
“Both in need of caulking and not a paddle in sight. No, I’ll not drown in an upturned coracle. Not while I can swim. Here, take this.”
Standing in his underthings, as he strapped the cork life jacket around his chest, Dunbar indicated a bundle of rope that he had taken from a sack. “Now, tie the end to this loop here. A good strong knot.” Wondering, Dewar did as he was bid. “This is our means of contact, d’you see?” Dunbar went on. “A single tug and you’re to draw me in. Two pulls and there’s danger.”
“What am I to do then?”
“Do? Why, pull on the other jacket and swim out to find me! Come, let’s be off.”
They moved out once again into the silence of the loch, two tiny figures swallowed up in space and silence. Dewar felt something light yet piercing strike against his forehead. It was a snowflake. He clutched at it and felt it melt between his fingers.
“It’s cold enough,” he muttered.
“And you haven’t even to swim. Take the rope!” They were at the water’s edge now. Dewar felt his feet sink into mud. Without turning, Dunbar slid into the water, like an otter, immersing himself limb by limb until only his head and shoulders remained above the surface. “Here’s luck!” he called back. Then with a powerful overarm stroke he launched himself out into the moving blackness.
Alone on the bank, Dewar tried at first to keep his eye fixed on his companion’s bobbing head. Within fifty yards, however, it had vanished altogether. After that he bent his mind on the noise of Dunbar splashing, but after a moment or two even this passed out of earshot. He looked vainly at the rope, which lay coiled in his hand, and wondered what he would do if there came two tugs on it. It was certainly very cold. Narrowing the range of his vision, he strained to glimpse the outcrop to which his friend was headed, but found only shadow, vague shapes of nothing in the dark air. He was quite alone, he realised, altogether thrown upon his own resources. A sudden thrill of terror struck through his body. Was that a twitch on the rope? No, he assured himself, it was merely the coil playing out as Dunbar swam on. A moment or two passed: Dewar had no means of knowing how long. Then, from far off, from some place he could not see, high over the lake, there came a shriek of something—human or animal, he could not determine—which sent him into a paroxysm of fear. The rope, he observed, had ceased to play out. Despairing, he pulled on it himself, but there was no response. It hung slack in the water, disappearing from sight only a yard or two from his feet.
What was to be done? There was a box of sulphur matches in his pocket, and remembering them he pulled one forth and struck it on the heel of his boot, but the wind caught it and extinguished it almost from the moment of its striking. What was to be done? he asked himself again. He resolved to fetch the lantern from the boathouse and then told himself that this would be the action of a fool. There was more snow falling now, gently descending on his scalp, on his shoulders, on the coil of rope that still lay in his hand, and he watched it with a kind of benevolent detachment. Surely it was too cold for a man to swim out there in the frozen lake? What should he do if his companion failed to return? He was conscious that, apart from believing that he had been set down in Inverness-shire, he barely knew where he was, that he possessed no return railway ticket—this was in Dunbar’s care—nor the means of purchasing one. All these thoughts tumbled about his head and oppressed him in a way that was immeas
urably increased by the solitariness of the place and the lateness of the hour. A man could die out here, he thought, could perish under a rowan bush or out on the open moor and not be found. What if he were to be that man? He had a sudden vision of himself dancing helplessly through driven snow, falling to his knees as the drifts piled up above his head.
Almost without apprehending that the thing was upon him, he became aware of a disturbance to his left, out in what seemed to be the darkest part of the lake: a shout—undoubtedly a human voice—and a splashing of water. The rope jerked so violently in his hand that for a second it fell from his grasp into the mud. Seizing it, he began to pull with what seemed to him superhuman industry, staring all the while into the blackness before him. “Dunbar,” he called into the raw air. “Where are you? Answer me.” But there was no more shouting, only the slow, steady noise of someone beating a path through the water towards him and a black lump that, through some mysterious agency of the light, suddenly declared itself to be a human figure swimming on its back.
“Gracious heavens, Dunbar, is that you?”
Teeth chattering, water cascading from the extremities of his body, Dunbar made his way through the shallows. He seemed in excellent spirits.
“Who the devil did you think it was? And why didn’t you pull the first time I tugged on the rope, eh? But never mind, it’s all well that ends well—look here!” He extended his hands, palms upwards, and Dewar saw that in each lay a small ruddy-brown egg. “Quick, man, to the boathouse, and the whisky, or I shall perish of cold.”
Later Dewar would remember the strangeness of the scene: the snow continuing to fall over the silent lake; himself on his knees in the doorway of the hut attempting to light a fire out of brushwood and old paper; an owl calling out in the trees and contending with Dunbar’s voice as, towelling himself with a piece of rough cloth, he recounted his exploits.
“I got over quite safe—it was a distance of a quarter mile, perhaps, no further—and tied the rope to a stone. The cock bird flew off before I reached the island. After I had climbed up to the top of the ruin and was just on the nest I put out my hand to catch the hen, but when she felt me she gave a scream and shied away also. Anyway, I took two eggs and was thankful for them. The question was: how to carry them, for in my haste I had forgotten my cap. I tried putting one egg in my mouth but I could not breathe with it. There was nothing to do, I decided, but to swim ashore on my back with an egg in each hand. Which is how you found me. Still, I have had worse journeys. Now, be a good fellow. Step outside and fetch me a reed from the shore.”
“A reed, did you say?”
“Naturally. How else am I to blow the eggs?”
“Blow them, you say?”
Dewar went shivering out into the night and stumbled to the shore. The reed fetched, Dunbar trimmed it with his knife until he had fashioned a tiny straw three or four inches in length and pointed at one end. Then, craning towards the lamplight with the first egg in his palm, he made a tiny mark in the shell with the tip of his knife. This done, he inserted the straw and placed the blunt end between his lips. “You suck away, see, and then discharge the yolk”—he spat suddenly and a gob of white, viscous slime spattered onto the floor—“thus. There is no art to it. Then rinse the inside with a little of this whisky, line your travelling case with some moss, and we are done.”
And so they laboured on for half an hour or so, as the fire burned down to its embers and the snowflakes fell hissing onto the hot coals, so that a passerby chancing to peer through the boathouse window might have thought Dunbar’s gaunt, bony face that of an old wizard instructing his protégé in the magical arts and the eggs some rare treasure sprung from their devisings.
Dunbar whistled as he worked, or sang snatches of the “Skye Boat Song.” He seemed in the highest spirits still, his manner ever more confidential and mysterious.
“You see, we are getting on famously,” he remarked at one point. “You must come and look me up in London, indeed you must. Eighteen Watling Street, above the chandler’s, will find me when I’m not at my business.”
Then something else struck him, and he said, “That was a bad business in Suffolk, to be sure.”
“What business was that?” Dewar wondered.
“You don’t know? Or perhaps you are a cleverer fellow than I take you to be and pretend not to know?”
“I know nothing.”
“At any rate, it was a secret that should have been kept and has not been. But let us say no more about it.”
And so the lamplight flickered, the snow fell desultorily over the loch, the mice came scurrying back beneath the boathouse door and nothing more was said about it.
II
MR. HENRY IRELAND AND HIS LEAVINGS
At the time when our story commences, Mr. Henry Ireland of Theberton in the county of Suffolk had been dead a year. It is perhaps necessary to say of this gentleman only that he was subject to the gravest misfortune. Black care had waylaid him and flung him from his horse, and though he had struggled to regain his seat and continued on his way, it was to find his assailant ever grinning from the saddle behind him. And yet there was a singularity about Mr. Ireland’s tribulations sufficient to imbue them with a terrible pathos. Who does not know the man who is ruined in an instant, so to speak, who breakfasts very heartily with his wife and children, only to arrive at his countinghouse to find the blinds still drawn, the funds fallen and the clerks whispering among themselves? Such men, if they possess fortitude and friends, can generally salvage something from the wreck. Rothschild was a bankrupt once, they say, and Lord Palmerston’s stamped paper the delight of the bill-discounters.
On the contrary, Mr. Ireland’s misfortunes had crept up on him by stealth, so gradually in fact that he barely glimpsed their approach. At the age of twenty-five, on the death of his father, he had come into his property. The enthusiasm with which the young man set up as squire would have touched the heart of the stoniest philosopher. He proposed to make a study of agriculture, to import breeding cattle from the continent, to build model cottages, even, for his tenants. There was nothing, in fact, that might not have been done, could the payment have been received in good intentions rather than ready money. But then it was discovered that Mr. Ireland Senior had encumbered the estate with debt and that there was, in addition, an entail that no man, and certainly no lawyer, could break. After this, Mr. Ireland Junior gave up his schemes of marsh drainage and tenants’ cottages and retired to London to live off his rents.
All this, however, would have counted as nothing to the young man—would have mattered to him as little as the fine Suffolk rain—had he succeeded in his chief ambition. This, it may be flatly stated, was the gaining of a wife whose hand would be worth the winning, whom he could love and be loved by in return, and whose affection would be the lasting glory of his days. Such paragons are not easily found, and yet Mr. Ireland, in the weeks before his marriage, had dared to hope that he had secured one. He was at this time a man of thirty: soft-voiced and even-tempered, well-disposed towards his fellow men, conscious of the failure of his agricultural schemes, but resolved that, as a husband and a father, he would conquer the world anew. Many men have made such resolves, and many have wished that they could make them. Alas, it was here—here in the hour of his nuptial triumph, as the very orange blossoms descended on his hymeneal carriage—that Mr. Ireland’s troubles began.
At the time of his marriage, which took place at St. George’s, Hanover Square, and was reported in the fashionable newspapers (for Mr. Ireland wanted the world to know of the grand prize he had brought down), Miss Isabel Brotherton was a young woman of three-or four-and-twenty: of medium height, graceful in her carriage and with abundant auburn hair of which it was said that Titian might have painted it. Her father, now dead, had been a literary man, it is true, but of an altogether superior kind. Dickens had called at his house, and duchesses pressed him to attend their parties. Mr. Thackeray himself had stood pallbearer at his funeral, and a royal p
rince subscribed five guineas to his memorial edition. And so Mr. Ireland felt that in the matter of station, though he might have done worse, he could not have done better.
Of all the things in the world, perhaps, a marriage is the most perplexing to write of. Who can tell whether Mr. Brief, of Her Majesty’s Northern Circuit, the proud father of three bouncing girls and the proud owner of an elegant stucco house in Kensington Square, is a happy man, and whether his Drusilla, formerly Miss Bates of Cheam, is all to him that she should be? By the same token, who knows whether, on the days when her lord and master quits her for the Northern Circuit, Mrs. Brief does not creep away into her bedroom and weep bitter tears for the hardness of her life? At any rate, Mr. Ireland, seeing his wife as she stood before him, felt that he was a happy man and the friends to whom he opened his doors said that he was a lucky fellow and that Mrs. Ireland was a woman of spirit. For myself, I am inclined to agree with them. There are, heaven knows, some women to whom the duty of hospitality is merely that, who bid you to their table with the same air that they rattle florins in the church collection plate, but Mrs. Ireland was not among their number. Though she spoke little herself, she had a way of listening to those who did that mingled the highest seriousness and the richest mirth, and the gentlemen who snuffed up her husband’s beefsteaks and sampled his claret went away convinced that they had eaten a very agreeable dinner. As to their wives, well, I am not certain that Mrs. Ireland was altogether a great favourite among ladies. She had a habit, in a soft, feminine way, of poking fun, of saying sharp little words that were remembered long after her smiles and her solicitations were forgotten.