The Leithen Stories (37 page)

Then he thought of the journalists, who had made such a nuisance of themselves in the morning. They were certain to be still about the place. If they could see his triumphant arrival at Haripol they would write such a story as would blaze his credit to the world and make the frustrated poacher a laughing-stock.

As it chanced, as they entered one of the woodland drives of Haripol, they met the gillie, Andrew, on his way home for a late tea. He was asked if he had seen any of the correspondents, and replied that he and Peter and Cameron had captured one after a hard chase, who at the moment was in Cameron's charge and using strong language about the liberty of the Press. Andrew was privately despatched to bid Cameron bring his captive, with all civility and many apologies, up to the house, with a message that Mr Claybody would be glad to have a talk with him. Then, with three navvies as a vanguard and four as a rear-guard, Lamancha was conducted down the glade between Johnson and Macnicol – the picture of a criminal in the grip of the law.

That picture was seen by a small boy who was lurking among the bracken. To the eyes of Benjie it spelt the uttermost disaster. The stag was safe at Crask, but the major part of John Macnab was in the hands of his enemies. Benjie thought hard for a minute, and then wriggled back into the covert and ran as hard as he could through the wood. To him at this awful crisis
there seemed to be but a single hope. Force must be brought against force. The Bluidy Mackenzie, now tied up under a distant tree, must be launched against the foe. The boy was aware that the dog had accepted him as an ally, but that it had developed for Lamancha the passion of its morose and solitary life.

The prisoner's uneasiness grew with every step he took down the sweet-scented twilit glade. He was being taken to the house, and in that house there would be people – women, perhaps – journalists, maybe – and a most embarrassing situation for a Cabinet Minister. The whole enterprise, which had been so packed with comedy and adventure, was about to end in fiasco and disgrace, and it was he, the promoter, who had let the show down. For the first time since he arrived at Crask Lamancha whole-heartedly wished himself out of the thing with a clean sheet. There was something to be said, after all, for a man keeping to his groove …

They emerged from the trees, and before them stretched the lawns, with a large and important mansion at the other end. This was worse than his wildest dreams. He stopped short.

‘Look here,' he said, ‘isn't it time to end this farce? I admit I was trespassing, and was fairly caught out. Isn't that enough?'

‘By Gad, it isn't,' said Johnson, into whose bosom a certainty of triumph and revenge had at last entered. ‘Into the house you go, and there we'll get the truth out of you.'

‘I'll pay any fine in reason, but I'm damned if I'm going near that house.'

For answer, Johnson nodded to Macnicol, and the two closed in on the prisoner. Lamancha, now really desperate, shook off the stalker and was about to break to his left, when Johnson tackled high and held him.

At the same moment the Bluidy Mackenzie took a hand in the game.

That faithful hound, conducted by Benjie, had just arrived on the scene of action. He saw his adored Lamancha, the first man who had really understood him, being assaulted by another whose appearance he did not favour. Like a stone from a sling he leaped from the covert straight at Mr Johnson Claybody's throat.

It all happened in one crowded instant. Lamancha felt the impact of part of Mackenzie's body, saw Johnson stagger and fall, and next observed his captor running wildly for the house
with Mackenzie hot on his trail. Then, with that preposterous instinct to help human against animal which is deeper than reason, he started after him.

Never had a rising young commercial magnate shown a better gift of speed, for a mad dog was his private and particular fear, and this beast was clearly raving mad. Macnicol and the navvies were some twenty yards behind, but Lamancha was a close second. Crying hoarsely, Johnson leaped the flower-beds and doubled like a hare in and out of a pergola. Ahead lay his mother's pet new lily-pond, and, remembering dimly that mad dogs did not love water, he plunged into it, and embraced a lead Cupid in the centre.

Mackenzie loved water like a spaniel, and his great body shot after him. But the immersion caused a second's delay and enabled Lamancha to take a flying leap which brought him almost atop of the dog. He clutched his collar and swung him back, making a commotion in the fountain like a tidal wave. Mackenzie recognised his friend and did not turn on him, but he still strained furiously after Johnson, who was now emerging like Proteus on the far side.

Suddenly the windows of the house, which was not thirty yards off, opened, and the stage filled up with figures. First the amazed eyes of Lamancha saw Crossby entering from the right, evidently a prisoner, in the charge of two gillies. Then at one set of windows appeared Sir Edward Leithen with a scared face, while from the other emerged the forms of Sir Archibald Roylance, Mr Palliser-Yeates, and a stout gentleman in a kilt who might be Lord Claybody. To his mind, keyed by wrath and confusion to expectation of tragedy, there could only be one solution. Others besides himself had failed, and the secret of John Macnab was horridly patent to the world.

‘Archie,' he panted, ‘for God's sake call off your tripe- hound. I can't hold on any longer … He'll eat the little man.'

Lord Claybody had unusual penetration. He observed his son and heir dripping and exhausted on the turf, and a figure, which looked like a caricature in the Opposition Press of an eminent Tory statesman, surrendering a savage hound to a small and dirty boy. Also he saw in the background a group of gillies and navvies. There was mystery here which had better be unriddled away from the gaze of the profane crowd. His eye caught Crossby's and Lamancha's.

‘I think you'd better all come indoors,' he said.

THE GREAT DRAWING-room had lost all its garishness with the approach of evening. Facing eastward, it looked out on lawns now dreaming in a green dusk, though beyond them the setting sun, over-topping the house, washed the woods and hills with gold and purple. Lady Claybody sat on a brocaded couch with something of the dignity of the late Queen Victoria, mystified, perturbed, awaiting the explanation which was her due. Her husband stood before her, a man with such an air of being ready for any emergency that even his kilt looked workmanlike. The embarrassed party from Crask clustered in the background; the shameful figures of Lamancha and Johnson stood in front of the window, thereby deepening the shadow. So electric was the occasion that Lady Claybody, finically proud of her house, did not notice that these two were oozing water over the polished parquet and devastating more than one expensive rug.

Lamancha, now that the worst had happened, was resigned and almost cheerful. Since the Claybodys had bagged Leithen and Palliser-Yeates and detected the complicity of Sir Archie, there was no reason why he should be left out. He hoped, rather vaguely, that his captors might not be inclined to make the thing public in view of certain episodes, but he had got to the pitch of caring very little. John Macnab was dead, and only awaited sepulture and oblivion. He looked towards Johnson, expecting him to take up the tale.

But Johnson had no desire to speak. He had been very much shaken and scared by the Bluidy Mackenzie and had not yet recovered his breath. Also a name spoken by his father, as they entered the room, had temporarily unsettled his wits. It was Lord Claybody who broke the uncomfortable silence.

‘Who owns that dog?' he asked, looking, not at Lamancha, but at his son.

‘The brute's mine,' said Archie penitently. ‘He followed the
car, and I left him tied up. Can't think how he got loose and started this racket.'

The master of the house turned to Lamancha. ‘How did you come here, my lord? You look as if you had been having a rough journey.'

Lamancha laughed. Happily the waning light did not reveal the full extent of his dirt and raggedness. ‘I have,' he said, ‘I'm your son's prisoner. Fairly caught out. I daresay you think me an idiot, unless Leithen or Palliser-Yeates has explained.'

Lord Claybody looked more mystified than ever.

‘I don't understand. A prisoner?'

‘He's John Macnab,' put in Johnson, whose breath was returning, and with it sulkiness. He was beginning to see that there was to be no triumph in this business, and a good deal of unpleasant explanation.

‘Well, a third of him,' said Lamancha. ‘And as you've already annexed the other two-thirds you have the whole of the fellow under your roof.'

Lord Claybody's gasp suddenly revealed to Lamancha that he had been premature in his confession. How his two friends had got into the Haripol drawing-room he did not know, but apparently it was not as prisoners. The mischief was done, however, and there was no going back.

‘You mean to say that you three gentlemen are John Macnab? You have been poaching at Glenraden and Strathlarrig? Does Colonel Raden – does Mr Bandicott know who you are?'

Lamancha nodded. ‘They found out after we had had our shot at their preserves. They didn't mind – took it very well indeed. We hope you're going to follow suit?'

‘But I am amazed. You had only to send me a note and my forest was at your disposal for as long as you wished. Why – why this – this incivility?'

‘I assure you, on my honour, that the last thing we dreamed of was incivility … Look here, Lord Claybody, I wonder if I can explain. We three – Leithen, Palliser-Yeates, and myself – found ourselves two months ago fairly fed up with life. We weren't sick, and we weren't tired – only bored. By accident we discovered each other's complaint, and we decided to have a try at curing ourselves by attempting something very difficult and rather dangerous. There was a fellow called Tarras used to play this game – he was before your time – and we resolved to take a leaf out of his book. So we quartered ourselves on Archie
– he's not to blame, remember, for he's been protesting bitterly all along – and we sent out our challenge. Glenraden and Strathlarrig accepted it, so that was all right; you didn't in so many words, but you accepted it by your action, for you took elaborate precautions to safeguard your ground … Well, that's all. Palliser-Yeates lost at Glenraden owing to Miss Janet. Leithen won at Strathlarrig, and now I've made a regular hat of things at Haripol. But we're cured, all of us. We're simply longing to get back to the life which in July we thought humbug.'

Lord Claybody sat down in a chair and brooded.

‘I still don't follow,' he said. ‘You are people who matter a great deal to the world, and there's not a man in this country who wouldn't have been proud to give you the chance of the kind of holiday you needed. You're one of the leaders of my party. Personally, I have always considered you the best of them. I'm looking to Sir Edward Leithen to win a big case for me this autumn. Mr Palliser-Yeates has done a lot of business with my firm, and after the talk I've had with him this afternoon I look to doing a good deal more with him in the future. You had only to give me a hint of what you wished and I would have jumped at the chance of obliging you. You wanted the thrill of feeling like poachers. Well, I would have seen that you got it. I would have turned on every man in the place and used all my wits to make your escapade difficult. Wouldn't that have contented you?'

‘No, no,' Lamancha cried. ‘You are missing the point. Don't you see that your way would have taken all the gloss off the adventure and made it a game? We had to feel that we were taking real risks – that, being what we were, we should look utter fools if we were caught and exposed.'

‘Pardon me, but it is you who are missing the point.' Lord Claybody was smiling. ‘You could never have been exposed – except perhaps by those confounded journalists,' he added as he caught sight of Crossby.

‘We had the best of them on our side,' Lamancha put in. ‘Mr Crossby has backed us up nobly.'

‘Well, that only made your position more secure. Colonel Raden and Mr Bandicott accepted your challenge, and in any case they were sportsmen, and you knew it. If they had caught one or the other of you they would never have betrayed you. You must see that. And here at Haripol you were on the safest
ground of all. I'm not what they call a sportsman – not yet – but I couldn't give you away. Do you think it conceivable that I would do anything to weaken the public prestige of a statesman I believe in, a great lawyer I brief, and a great banker whose assistance is of the utmost value to me. I'm a man who has made a fortune by my own hard work and I mean to keep it; therefore in these bad times I am out to support anything which buttresses the solid structure of society. You three are part of that structure. You might poach every stag on Haripol, and I should still hold my tongue.'

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.'