The Leithen Stories (32 page)

‘I suppose so. The time he was due the fog was thick. I couldn't pick him up from here with the glass when the weather cleared, but that's as it should be, for the place he selected was absolutely hidden from this side.'

‘Well, good luck to us a'.' Wattie tossed off a dram from the socket of Lamancha's flask, and, dragging the stag by the horns, disappeared in two seconds from sight.

‘I'll be off, Charles,' said Palliser-Yeates, ‘for I'd better get down-hill and down the glen before I start.' He paused to stare at his friend. ‘By Gad, you do look a proper blackguard. Do you realise that you've a face like a nigger and a two-foot rent in your bags? It would be good for Johnson Claybody's soul to see you!'

IT MAY BE doubted whether in clear weather Sir Archie could ever have reached his station unobserved by the watchers on the hill. The place was cunningly chosen, for the road, as it approached the Doran, ran in the lee of a long covert of birch and hazel, so that for the better part of a mile no car on it could be seen from beyond the stream, even from the highest ground. But as the car descended from the Crask ridge it would have been apparent to the sentinels, and its non-appearance beyond the covert would have bred suspicion. As it was the clear spell had gone before it topped the hill, for Sir Archie was more than an hour behind the scheduled time.

This was Janet's doing. She had started off betimes on the yellow pony for Crask, intending to take the by-way from the Larrig side, but before she reached the Bridge of Larrig she had scented danger. One of the correspondents, halted by the roadside with a motor bicycle, accosted her with great politeness and begged a word. She was Miss Raden, wasn't she? and therefore she knew all about John Macnab. He had heard gossip in the glen of the coming raid on Haripol, and understood that this was the day. Would Miss Raden advise him from her knowledge of the country-side? Was it possible to find some coign of vantage from which he might see the fun?

Janet stuck to the simple truth. She had heard the same story, she admitted, but Haripol was a gigantic and precipitous forest, and it was preserved with a nicety unparalleled in her experience. To go to Haripol in the hope of finding John Macnab would be like a casual visit to England on the chance of meeting the King. She advised him to go to Haripol in the evening. ‘If anything has happened there,' she said, ‘you will hear about it from the gillies. They'll either be triumphant or savage, and in either case they'll talk.'

‘We've got to get a story, Miss Raden,' the correspondent
observed dismally, ‘and in this roomy place it's like looking for a needle in a hayfield. What sort of people are the Claybodys?'

‘You won't get anything from them,' Janet laughed. ‘Take my advice and wait till the evening.'

When he was out of sight she turned her pony up the hill and arrived at Crask with an anxious face. ‘If these people are on the loose all day,' she told Sir Archie, ‘they're bound to spoil sport. They may stumble on our car, or they may see more of Mr Palliser-Yeates's doings than we want. Can nothing be done? What about Mr Crossby?'

Crossby was called into consultation and admitted the gravity of the danger. When his help was demanded, he hesitated. ‘Of course I know most of them, and they know me, and they're a very decent lot of fellows. But they're professional men, and I don't see myself taking on the job of gulling them.
Esprit de corps
, you know … No, they don't suspect me. They probably think I left the place after I got off the Strathlarrig fish scoop, and that I don't know anything about the Haripol business. I daresay they'd be glad enough to see me if I turned up … I might link on to them and go with them to Haripol and keep them in a safe place.'

‘That's the plan,' said Archie. ‘You march them off to Haripol – say you know the ground – which you do a long sight better than they. Some of the gillies will be hunting the home woods for Lady Claybody's pup. Get them mixed up in that show. It will all help to damage Macnicol's temper, and he's the chap we're most afraid of … Besides, you might turn up handy in a crisis. Supposin' Ned Leithen – or old John – has a hard run at the finish you might confuse the pursuit … That's the game, Crossby my lad, and you're the man to play it.'

It was after eleven o'clock before the Ford car, having slipped over the pass from Crask in driving sleet, came to a stand in the screen of birches with the mist wrapping the world so close that the foaming Doran six yards away was only to be recognised by its voice. All the way there Sir Archie had been full of forebodings.

‘We're givin' too much weight away, Miss Janet,' he croaked. ‘All we've got on our side is this putrid weather. That's a bit of luck, I admit. Also we've two of the most compromisin' objects on earth, Fish Benjie and that little brute Roguie … Claybody has a hundred navvies, and a pack of gillies, and every beast will be in the Sanctuary, which is as
good as inside a barb-wire fence … The thing's too ridiculous. We've got to sit in this car and watch an eminent British statesman bein' hoofed off the hill, while old John tries to play the decoy-duck, and Ned Leithen, miles off, is hoppin' like a he-goat on the mountains … It's pretty well bound to end in disaster. One of them will be nobbled – probably all three – and when young Claybody asks, “Wherefore this outrage?” I don't see what the cowerin' culprit is goin' to answer and say unto him.'

But when the car stopped in the drip of the birches, and Archie had leisure to look at the girl by his side, he began to think less of impending perils. The place was loud with wind and water, and yet curiously silent. The mist had drawn so close that the two seemed to be shut into a fantastic, secret world of their own. Janet was wearing breeches and a long riding-coat covered by a grey oilskin, the buttoned collar of which framed her small face. Her bright hair, dabbled with raindrops, was battened down under an ancient felt hat. She looked, thought Sir Archie, like an adorable boy. Also for the last half-hour she had been silent.

‘You have never spoken to me about your speech,' she said at last, looking away from him.

‘Yours, you mean,' he said. ‘I only repeated what you said that afternoon on Carnmore. But you didn't hear it. I looked for you everywhere in the hall, and I saw your father and your sister and Bandicott, but I couldn't see you.'

‘I was there. Did you think I could have missed it? But I was too nervous to sit with the others, so I found a corner at the back below the gallery. I was quite near Wattie Lithgow.'

Archie's heart fluttered. ‘That was uncommon kind. I don't see why you should have worried about that – I mean I'm jolly grateful. I was just going to play the ass of all creation when I remembered what you had said – and – well, I made a speech instead of repeating the rigmarole I had written. I owe everything to you, for, you see, you started me out – I can never feel just that kind of funk again … Charles thinks I might be some use in politics … But I can tell you when I sat down and hunted through the hall and couldn't see you it took all the gilt off the gingerbread.'

‘I was gibbering with fright,' said the girl, ‘when I thought you were going to stick. If Wattie hadn't shouted out, I think I would have done it myself.'

After that silence fell. The rain poured from the trees on to the cover of the Ford, and from the cover sheets of water cascaded to the drenched heather. Wet blasts scourged the occupants and whipped a high colour into their faces. Janet arose and got out.

‘We may as well be properly wet,' she said. ‘If they get the stag as far as the Doran, they must find some way across. There's none at present. Hadn't we better build a bridge?'

The stream, in ordinary weather a wide channel of stones where a slender current falls in amber pools, was now a torrent four yards wide. But it was a deceptive torrent with more noise than strength, and save in the pools was only a foot or two deep. There were many places where a stag could have been easily lugged through by an able-bodied man. But the bridge-building proposal was welcomed, since it provided relief for both from an atmosphere which had suddenly become heavily charged. At a point where the channel narrowed between two blaeberry-thatched rocks it was possible to make an inclined bridge from one bank to the other. The materials were there in the shape of sundry larch-poles brought from the lower woods for the repair of a bridge on the Crask road. Archie dragged half a dozen to the edge and pushed them across. Then Janet marched through the water, which ran close to the top of her riding-boots, and prepared the abutment on the farther shore, weighting the poles down with sods broken from an adjacent bank.

‘I'm coming over,' she cried. ‘If it will bear a stag, it will bear me.'

‘No, you're not,' Archie commanded. ‘I'll come to you.'

‘The last time I saw you cross a stream you fell in,' she reminded him.

Archie tested the contrivance, but it showed an ugly inclination to behave like a see-saw, being insufficiently weighted on Janet's side.

‘Wait a moment. We need more turf,' and she disappeared from sight beyond a knoll. When she returned she was excessively muddy as to hands and garments.

‘I slipped in that beastly peat-moss,' she explained. ‘I never saw such hags, and there's no turf to be got except with a spade … No, you don't! Keep off that bridge, please. It isn't nearly safe yet. I'm going to roll down stones.'

Roll down stones she did till she had erected something very
much like a cairn at her end, which would have opposed a considerable barrier to the passage of any stag. Then she announced that she must get clean, and went a few yards down-stream to one of the open shallows, where she proceeded to make a toilet. She stood with the current flowing almost to her knees, suffering it to wash the peat from her boots and the skirts of her oilskin and at the same time scrubbing her grimy hands. In the process her hat became loose, dropped into the stream, and was clutched with one hand, while with the other she restrained the efforts of the wind to uncoil her shining curls.

It was while watching the moving waters at their priest-like task that crisis came upon Sir Archie. In a blinding second he realised with the uttermost certainty that he had found his mate. He had known it before, but now came the flash of supreme conviction … For swelling bosoms and pouting lips and soft curves and languishing eyes Archie had only the most distant regard. He saluted them respectfully and passed by the other side of the road – they did not belong to his world. But that slender figure splashing in the tawny eddies made a different appeal. Most women in such a posture would have looked tousled and flimsy, creatures ill at ease, with their careful allure beaten out of them by weather. But this girl was an authentic creature of the hills and winds – her young slimness bent tensely against the current, her exquisite head and figure made more fine and delicate by the conflict. It is a sad commentary on the young man's education, but, while his soul was bubbling with poetry, the epithet which kept recurring to his mind was ‘clean-run.' … More, far more. He saw in that moment of revelation a comrade who would never fail him, with whom he could keep on all the roads of life. It was that which all his days he had been confusedly seeking.

‘Janet,' he shouted against the wind, ‘will you marry me?'

She made a trumpet of one hand.

‘What do you say?' she cried.

‘Will you marry me?'

‘Yes,' she turned a laughing face, ‘of course I will.'

‘I'm coming across,' he shouted.

‘No. Stay where you are. I'll come to you.'

She climbed the other bank and made for the bridge of larchpoles, and before he could prevent her she had embarked on that crazy structure. Then that happened which might have
been foreseen, since the poles on Archie's side of the stream had no fixed foundation. They splayed out, and he was just in time to catch her in his arms as she sprang.

‘You darling girl,' he said, and she turned up to him a face smiling no more, but very grave.

Archie, his arms full of dripping maiden, stood in a happy trance.

‘Please put me down,' she said. ‘See, the mist is clearing. We must get into cover.'

Sure enough the haze was lifting from the hill-side before them and long tongues of black moorland were revealed stretching up to the crags. They found a place among the birches which gave them a safe prospect and fetched luncheon from the car. Hot coffee from a thermos was the staple of the meal, which they consumed like two preoccupied children. Archie looked at his watch and found it after two-o'clock. ‘Something must begin to happen soon,' he said, and they took up position side by side on a sloping rock, Janet with her Zeiss glasses and Archie with his telescope.

His head was a delicious merry-go-round of hopes and dreams. It was full of noble thoughts – about Janet, and himself, and life. And the thoughts were mirthful too – a great, mellow, philosophic mirthfulness. John Macnab was no longer an embarrassing hazard, but a glorious adventure. It did not matter what happened – nothing could happen wrong in this spacious and rosy world. If Lamancha succeeded, it was a tremendous joke, if he failed a more tremendous, and, as for Leithen and Palliser-Yeates, comedy had marked them for its own … He wondered what he had done to be blessed with such happiness.

Already the mist had gone from the foreground, and the hills were clear to half-way up the rocks of Sgurr Mor and Sgurr Dearg. He had his glass on the Beallach, on the throat of which a stray sun-gleam made a sudden patch of amethyst.

‘I see someone,' Janet cried. ‘On the edge of the pass. Have you got it? – on the left-hand side of that spout of stones.'

Archie found the place. ‘Got him … By Jove, it's Wattie … And – and – yes, by all the gods, I believe he's pullin' a stag down … Wait a second … Yes, he's haulin' it into the burn … Well done, our side! But where on earth is Charles?'

The two lay with their eyes glued on the patch of hill, now lit everywhere by the emerging sun. They saw the little figure dip
into a hollow, appear again and then go out of sight in the upper part of a long narrow scaur which held the headwaters of a stream – they could see the foam of the little falls farther down. Before it disappeared Archie had made out a stag's head against a background of green moss.

‘That's that,' he cried. ‘Charles must be somewhere behind protectin' the rear. I suppose Wattie knows what he's doin' and is certain he can't be seen by the navvies. Anyhow, he's well hidden at present in the burn, but he'll come into view lower down when the ravine opens out. He's a tough old bird to move a beast at that pace … The question now is, where is old John? It's time he was gettin' busy.'