Читать книгу The Greatest Historical Novels & Stories of D. K. Broster - D. K. Broster - Страница 135

Aug. 11th—13th.

In his house in the Trongate, in the pleasant and prosperous little city of Glasgow, Mr. John Buchanan, Invernacree’s “doer” for nearly forty years, sat, a little more than six weeks later, on one side of a table and looked at Invernacree’s son, on the other, with a smile compounded of shrewdness and benevolence, as befitted a family lawyer of long standing. He had the round legal face, not the long; it was smooth and fresh, with no trace of eyebrows remaining, and he did not wear spectacles.

“You’ll find those all in order, Mr. Ian,” he said, indicating the packet of documents which he had just handed over. “Or rather the laird will. He still keeps the reins pretty closely in his own hands, I see.”

“There is, thank God, no reason why he should not,” observed Ian.

“Quite so, quite so,” agreed Mr. Buchanan. “And indeed it seems but a few years ago that you were a wee bit wean in petticoats. Yet you are twenty-five years of age now, I’m thinking.”

“Twenty-six,” said his visitor.

“D’ye hear that now, Gib?” remarked the lawyer to the large sphinx of a tabby which sat like an immense paperweight upon his table. “Twenty-six! To think of it! And when shall I have the pleasure of drawing up your marriage contract, young man?”

“Oh, before very long, I expect,” responded Ian in as colourless a voice as he could muster. “Then I am to tell my father that he will hear from you later on the subject of that wadset?”

“If you please. But, speaking of your prospective marriage, my dear young gentleman, who is the fortunate lady to be?”

Ian ran his hand down Gib’s massive back, feeling the muscles under the fur ripple in the opposite direction at his touch. “I have to ask her, sir, before I can tell you that . . . It seems to me that I remember this cat of yours as long as I remember you.”

“I wonder does he remember you—eh, Gib, ye rascal, do ye? And to think you are twenty-six! Aye, ’tis time that ye thought of matrimony now that ye have taken poor Alan’s place.”

Ian made no comment. “I see you have a map upon the wall there,” he said. “I shall make bold to study it for a moment, if I may.”

“Ye surely know your way home, Mr. Ian?”

“Yes, I know my way home,” said the young man, getting up and going over to the map. Nevertheless he looked minutely at it, and there was something in his face as he did so which suggested that he was making calculations. “Thank you, sir; ’twas only curiosity. Maps have ever interested me.”

He came back to the table. The cat Gib stood up, arched his back, stretched himself prodigiously, uttered a small sound and sat down again, fixing upon Ian a gaze of such apparent omniscience as almost to be perturbing. Then the topaz orbs blinked; with a twitch of the end of his tail the sage appeared to dismiss the matter from his mind, and lay solidly down again, folding his paws inward. But Ian had a momentary conviction, quite difficult to shake off, that Gib knew, if his owner did not, why he had just been studying the map.

As he walked away from Mr. Buchanan’s house, past the colonnades of the Trongate, with their cave-like little shops beneath, the papers entrusted to him safely inside his coat, his thoughts were busy with another paper—and that, not to mince matters, a stolen one—which lay nearer to his heart than they did, and was the sole cause of his consulting the lawyer’s map just now.

About a week after Miss Olivia Campbell’s departure from Invernacree, at the end of June, had come a letter from her to Grizel, which, among expressions of undying gratitude to the writer’s dear Miss Stewart for her kindness and her skill, had contained the information that when the summer was a little more advanced she herself was, in deference to her father’s wishes, going up into the hills of Central Perthshire to take that sovereign specific, goats’ milk. “Papa is of opinion that my health—which is in truth perfectly sound, and never was better—would be re-established by a course of the whey. At any rate he so urges it, in order to counteract the possible effects of the coach accident, that I have not the heart to stand out against him; and so, my dear Miss Grizel, you may picture me next month up at Kilrain with my faithful Elspeth in attendance, drinking the whey as though I were some gouty old gentleman doing his annual cure. I trust there will be none of them there at the time, for they would surely think the presence of such a blooming young woman absurd, as I do. I promise you I shall be vastly bored.”

It was for days a matter of puzzled conjecture to Grizel how she could so completely have mislaid that letter, though she knew that she had left it about for a short time. So did Ian, who, though he was never going to see Miss Campbell again, nor would ever write to her or receive a word from her, pounced upon that sheet of paper over which her hand had travelled and which seemed to carry the very sound of her voice, secreted it, and unblushingly declared his complete ignorance of its whereabouts. To such hopeless folly had he come who was shortly to woo Miss Margaret Maclean.

Miss Campbell’s letter, since he always carried it upon him, went with Ian to Glasgow when, in August, Invernacree sent him thither to see his lawyer, as he had projected some time before. And it was in Glasgow that temptation came down upon Ian like a river in spate. Olivia Campbell was at Kilrain, not thirty miles away, out of his homeward path, it was true, but not so greatly out of it. He had hoped never to see her again, never to go within distance of the spell which she had cast upon him. Now—he felt he could not live unless he did. The reason he gave himself for yielding to temptation was this: he had allowed her (since he could not help himself) to see his passion, but he had not told her why he could never contemplate asking for her hand. It was almost an affront to have acted so . . . but he had lost his wits that day on Eilean Soa.

He did not pretend that he had found them again now. He knew that it was mad to go to Kilrain, and could lead to nothing but fresh suffering for himself. Yet he would welcome that . . . And he must make his explanation, justify his silence—or so he told himself. To another voice which said that he could equally well, and far more prudently, write this explanation, he shut his ears. He had little desire to combat the flood setting towards Kilrain; he was only too glad to be carried along by it. By the time he paid his second and last visit to Mr. Buchanan this afternoon his mind was made up, and he had consulted the map upon the lawyer’s wall with entire composure. The detour might have been part of his original plan.

For all that, he had not left the green orchards of Glasgow behind him next morning, his face set north-eastwards, when his blood began to run faster. He knew his self-offered excuse for what it was; he was going to see Olivia Campbell because he could not keep away. And even how she would receive him weighed upon him but little, for she could not prevent him from resting his eyes once more upon her loveliness, though the moment of vision might be short. He could never have gone to Cairns to see her, whether she were like to refuse him admittance or to welcome him; but up in those hills which were neither Campbell nor Stewart territory, she could not entirely forbid his presence. And he fell to imagining the meeting, as, leaving the Clyde behind, he rode by glen or loch side, sometimes mounting, sometimes descending. Every stream which sang along his course or barred it seemed to utter her name, so liquidly sweet to the ear that he could forget the patronymic which followed it.

He halted at three o’clock to bait and rest his horse, for there was no haste, even though he should not reach Kilrain before dusk. It was even better so; he could more easily make enquiries as to Miss Campbell’s whereabouts in the clachan without the risk of coming upon her unawares. He hardly knew what he should find at Kilrain, save goats.

And it was dusk when he came there, up the stony, winding road. It was not too ill a track, for little Kilrain lay upon a minor highroad; otherwise, perhaps, it would scarcely have gained its reputation for “the whey.” A curled young moon, and a star too, shone in the green sky over the rounded summit of Meall na Creige, and there was no wind to stir the pines which fringed that crest. All in the little village seemed within, if not abed, but a light or two still showed at the end by which Ian had entered. Had they not, he would willingly have slept on the hillside, but the sound of his horse’s hoofs on the stones brought an old man to the door of one of the nearest cottages, and of him young Invernacree, representing himself as a benighted traveller, asked if there were an inn to which he could betake himself.

The old man replied in the negative, but offered to take him in himself, adding that he and his daughter were accustomed to do this for the gentry who came there for their health. Asked if there were any of these now visiting Kilrain for that purpose, he at first said that there were none—which was to Ian as though the moon had been struck suddenly out of the sky—but his daughter, correcting him, declared that there was a young lady, a bonny young lady, staying with her woman a little way higher up the hill.

From the tiny room assigned to him Ian could see up the slope, and gazed at the one faintly illumined window at some quarter mile of distance which he imagined—probably wrongly—to be Miss Campbell’s until the light went out there, and the moon, as if waiting for this extinction, sank into the black arms of the pine-trees on the ridge; and all was as quiet in Kilrain as if a very imprudent and unhappy young man had not come to it.