The Leithen Stories (88 page)

‘And Leithen? He went there, didn't he?'

‘Yes, and brought Lew away. Leithen didn't have a sick heart. He was facing the North with clear eyes. He would always have won out.'

‘But he died!'

‘That was victory – absolute victory … But Leithen had a
fleuve de rêve
also. I suppose we all have. It was this little stream. That's why we brought his body here. It is mine, too – and yours – the place we'll always come back to when we want comforting.'

‘Which stream?' she asked. ‘There are two.'

‘Both. One is the gate of the North and the other's the gate of the world.'

She faced round and looked down the green cup of the Clairefontaine. It was a pleasant pastoral scene, with none of the wildness of the other – the white group of farm buildings in the middle distance and the patches of ploughland, and far beyond a blue shimmer which was the St Lawrence.

The woman laughed happily.

‘That is the way home,' she said.

‘Yes, it is the way home – to our home, Felicity, which please God will never again be broken. I've a lot of atoning to do. The rest of my life cannot be long enough to make up to you for what you have suffered.'

She stroked his hair. ‘We'll forget all that. We're starting afresh, you know. This is a kind of honeymoon.'

She stopped and gazed for a little at the glen, which suddenly overflowed with a burst of sunlight.

‘It is also the way to the wars,' she said gravely.

‘Yes, I'm bound for the wars. I don't know where my battlefront will be. In Europe, perhaps, or maybe in New York or Washington. The North hasn't sent me back to malinger.'

‘No, of course not. But, anyhow, we're together – we'll always be together.'

The two by a common impulse turned their eyes to the wooden cross on the lawn of turf. Galliard rose.

‘We must hurry, my dear. The road back is none too good.'

She seemed unwilling to go.

‘I feel rather sad, don't you? You're leaving your captain behind.'

Galliard turned to his wife, and she saw that in his eyes which made her smile.

‘I can't feel sad,' he said. ‘When I think of Leithen I feel triumphant. He fought a good fight, but he hasn't finished his course. I remember what Father Duplessis said – he knew that he would die; but he knew also that he would live.'

John Buchan (1875–1940), had a long and successful literary and public career. He was educated in Glasgow, where his father was a Free Church minister in the Gorbals, but his childhood holidays were spent in the Scottish border country.

After graduating at Glasgow University, Buchan took a scholarship to Oxford where he wrote his first two historical novels while still an undergraduate. With interests in law and journalism, he worked for the British High Commission in South Africa at the end of the Boer War. Returning to London in 1903, he eventually became a director of Thomas Nelson the publishers. Buchan worked for the Ministry of Information during the First War, and also wrote a substantial history of the conflict. He became a Tory M.P. for the Scottish Universities from 1927 to 1935, in which year he was appointed Governor-General of Canada as Lord Tweedsmuir.

Buchan took pride in the craft of storytelling and he is probably best known for his Richard Hannay thrillers, with six titles ranging from
The Thirty-Nine Steps
in 1915, to
The Island of Sheep
in 1936. His other fiction includes
John Burnet of Barns
(1898);
Prester John
(1910);
The
Power-House
(1913);
Huntingtower
(1922);
John Macnab
(1925);
The Dancing Floor
(1926);
Witch Wood
(1927); and
Sick Heart River
, published posthumously in 1941.

Buchan's health had never been strong, yet he achieved an enormous literary output in the course of his life, with no fewer than 30 novels and over 60 non-fiction books, including fine biographies of Walter Scott and James Graham, the Marquis of Montrose, whom he greatly admired. His autobiography,
Memory Hold-the-
door
, was published in the year of his death from a cerebral stroke.