Читать книгу The Road to Nowhere - Maurice Walsh - Страница 15

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The three men moved up into the heather below the track and squatted in a triangle; and Rogan Stuart felt in himself an unusual comforting warmth that these two should take him into fellowship as a matter right and proper.

The sun poured on them; the warm air flowed over them; in that wide-flung panorama of sea and mountain they were like three standing-stones amongst all the grey stones lifting out of the heather. Into the great stillness that enclosed them their voices went out and died, for it was the heart of the day when no bird sings, no fish plays, when the crow of a distant cock is weighted with a devastating loneliness, when life dulls down under the dominance of the slow sun.

Paddy Joe’s voice was a quiet lift and fall. ‘Sorry am I to tell you that that big house over there beyond the water was erected—erected is the word—by a countryman of my own—out of the North.’

‘Oh well,’ said Rogan excusingly.

‘He got small good out of it. He was one of these here famous business magnates who scrape their wealth in the brutal places of the earth, in wheat and wine and oil—and bloody sweat. And at the long last he came home and built that house—and died; and maybe God was more merciful to him than many a man would be.

‘He died, whatever, and his wealth flowed in other channels—or the same. This thing and that thing was disposed of in due process of law, but yon house stuck in the hands of the trustees; for, mind you, the English sportsmen and the French nuns and Hindoo princes, who would be buying, are austere people and know what a house should be. That house is built of red Belgian brick, and the corners and astragals and stepped gables are of yellow French brick—a bastard cross of Dutch and Scots Baronial styles. That’s the sort of house that’s in it. Still an’ all, one man had such a liking for this glen and the people in it that he rented the house from year to year, and he’s there yet, though the house is no longer his to rent: Sir Jerome Trant, Baronet. Wait, now!

‘Sir Jerome Trant was what you might call a British proconsul in a small way—West Indies, East Malaya, the islands of the South Seas—and, his galley service over, he drifted back here to his native soil, still a youngish man, not a day over fifty this minute—and a decent sort of man as well, and a sound drinker. Not wealthy—no proconsul is since the days of Warren Hastings—but he has his virtues, and I misdoubt if his son Ambrose is one of them. He lost his wife early on, and she left him Ambrose. You saw Ambrose this morning, Rogan Stuart, riding cowboy. What’s this you called him—“an amiable hound”?’

‘Did nothing but grin. He refrained——’

‘You’ve hit the nail on the head. That’s the lad. All his life—but once—he refrained—refrained from persisting. He tried planting in Penang, where good men survive and make money and a name; he tried pearling out of Cape York; and recruiting black labour in the Solomons; and smuggling vodka into Oregon; and he made his one big kill on a ranch in Arizona—one of these dude ranches run to give the Easterners a kick. Between the three of us he was as near a remittance man as be damned—but not quite, for he lacked the negative virtues. Howsumdiver the dude ranch must have suited his style, for he did there the one definite thing of his life: got himself a wife.

‘Elspeth Conroy was her name. That is a Gaelic name, and it means daughter of kings, and, by all accounts, she was the daughter of a cattle king or an oil king—at any rate a money king. She fell for Ambrose—his good looks, his breeding, his amiability, how do we know? Anyway she married him, came over to the old country, and, according to precedent, set out to acquire house and estate. There they be, over yonder! She owns that house, she owns the fishing of the bay and the rivers that fall into it from away back by Loch Aonach; ben and glen and stream, she owns them all. The land is no longer ours, Rogan Stuart.’

While these two looked at each other understandingly Alistair laughed. ‘And she smote him with a south paw,’ he said, and turned to Paddy Joe. ‘You certainly have been routing about in local history. And is Ambrose still ... ?’

‘They call him Amby—every one,’ said Paddy Joe.

‘That settles it.’

‘Don’t know—just guessing. I never set eyes on him or her; they came back from a trip to North Africa yesterday—with a small house-party, I believe. But look you, this day is not done yet—but never mind. What I want to point out may give you a line on them. Listen! Though she was in the devil’s own tantrum this morning and behaved unkindly to a stranger taking his ease, yet, from what I have heard, she cannot be adjudged either hard or bitter; and Tom Whelan, the harbour-master, says she is a darling girl and the heart o’ corn.’ He looked at Rogan speculatively, smiling. ‘There’s nothing about you would send a girl up in the air?’

‘There must be,’ said Rogan gloomily. One thing he knew: he had no power with women.

Paddy Joe rose to his feet. ‘Now ye are as wise as myself, and your talking makes me thirsty. Stay where you are, Rogan Stuart. See to the vessels and utensils, youngster—I’ll be back in a minute.’

He went up the shore some fifty yards to a fold in the slope where a small trickle of water came slipping down between fox-tongue ferns and made a miniature fall over the beetle of a rock. There he lay on his breast just above the little trickle, pulled up a sleeve, and inserted a long arm behind the apron of falling water. One by one he brought forth three dark dripping bottles, and again groped in the cache.

‘One—two—four, and the boy is honest for once; but if you couldn’t trust him with nectaire honey how could you trust him with lager beer—and the weather that’s in it?’

When he got back to the tent Alistair was ready with three glasses and a cap-lifter.

Paddy Joe, out of the tail of an eye, watched Rogan drink. The lad knew how. Men who are incontinent might be apt, on a thirsty day like this, to quaff two-thirds of the glass at the first pull; but the civilised and cultured man would take no more than a round sip to savour the liquor and attune the palate, and after that—well, all depended on the depth of the flagon and the capacity a man was blest with.

‘Slainthe!’ toasted Rogan. ‘You fellows are good to me—especially after the mess I’ve made. Here’s hoping nothing will come of it.’

‘Fate had a trout in the frying-pan for you this morning,’ said Paddy Joe cryptically.

‘Here is to whatever comes,’ toasted Alistair. He lifted his glass and paused to listen. ‘And it’s coming now, old-timers.’