Читать книгу While Rivers Run - Maurice Walsh - Страница 21

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A calm hour followed at Croft o’ Drum. Aelec Brands, shouting for Andra and his pair of horses, went about his business; Else MacLean shuffled about hers in kitchen and in byre; and Margaret Brands went about hers too. This led her, in the course of time, to tap at the bedroom door and project a head round the edge of it. Alistair MacIan looked at her backwards over his eyebrows.

“Am I disturbing you?” she inquired.

“Not in a thousand years. Come and talk to a fellow.”

“I want to do some packing.”

“Going away to-day, of course. I am right sorry.” He managed that well and sincerely.

“In spite of colour schemes?”

He chuckled understandingly. “It’s not so red, you know—sort of coppery, isn’t it?”

“Honest-to-goodness red. Sure I sha’n’t disturb you?”

“I wish I could help.”

“That would not be permissible in any case.”

There were a couple of large suit-cases and a leather hat-box, and these she proceeded to fill from a tallboy and dressing-table of old mahogany. Most of the stuff was light and delicately coloured, and all of it had a touch of some faint perfume—or was it freshness? She moved about on light feet, bending, using her hands, pausing with finger to lip: lithe, lissome, unconcerned, and talking frankly most of the time. Some of the talk went this way.

“You are to be imprisoned for another day, I believe.”

“A nuisance, ain’t I?”

“Not you. You don’t know my Uncle Aelec.”

“Uncle Hugh wanted me to meet him as one of the two or three—or nine or ten—worth knowing in this place.”

“That would not appeal to you, of course—you do not think the place worth while.”

“Be fair. I only said the place was slow—no doubt your uncle finds it otherwise.”

“He sure does.” The Americanism was pat. “And you know he lived in a big city for thirty years and was a busy man. There was no need for him to take up crofting as a living, either. That is only an excuse, and Andra MacLean and an occasional hired man do all the work—except in the garden. Fruit—black-currants mostly—is his hobby.”

“And what does he do besides growing fruit?”

“Fish and shoot, for one thing—or is it two things?”

“And then?”

She held her lip at that. “It is not easy to explain to town-mouse——”

“But I am no town-mouse.”

“I understood you lived mostly in New York.”

“Not on your life. How old do you think I am? Knock off four years at Princeton before they threw me out on my ear, and four more knocking about. As a matter of fact, even when I am at home I spend most of the time at Wander Hill—that’s the Country Club.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of your country clubs,” she reflected scornfully.

“But Wander Hill is the real thing—not an excuse for fast moving. There is a sound brand of golf, as your Duncan knows, and the polo is real crackerjack—last year we sent a four to Meadowbrook. I didn’t quite make the team, but I play a hardish game of tennis. And there’s the boxing——”

He caught her smile and grinned a shade ruefully.

“I guess you’ll not let me forget Cousin Don’s pile-driver.” He very much wanted to explain how the disaster had befallen him and how lucky Don had been, but that would be blowing his own horn. He wondered, with unaccountable discomfort, if this young woman knew the origin of the quarrel—and what she thought of it. That brought Norrey Carr to his mind, and he stirred restlessly. Margaret, too, was silent at her packing, and it was the young man who resumed the conversation.

“We got away from the point,” he said. “You have not yet told me what your uncle does besides fish and shoot and grow fruit and watch the hired man work.”

“All that would seem to make him a busy man,” she said, with a gurgle of laughter. “But you at your country club naturally require a multitude of amusements to help you survive sixteen hours of the day. There is more in life than even play and work—much more. Apart from your club, what have you seen of country life? Been much in the wilds?”

He smiled a little banteringly. “Nowhere else—much,” he said easily. “I belong there.”

“You surprise me!” Margaret opened her eyes. “You like the wilds, yet the Highlands bore you. Where have you been?”

“Heaps of places. Say the Tetons, back of the Yellowstone, or the Sierra Madre on the wild fringe of Mexico. That’s the country Eugene Manlove Rhodes writes about. Know him? No! He is a sound man, and knows his men and places. Back there for me, I think. You get colour there and the lack of it, grandeur and a devastating sameness—and oh, boy! the air and the distances. Well, I ask you——”

“How is it, then, that our Highlands do not appeal to you?”

“Anticipation outran realisation, I suppose. You know, ever since I was knee-high I used to hear dad holding forth about his ‘ain countree,’ and I had made a mind-picture that had put it ahead of anything on land or sea. The real thing was very different—had to be—and it deflated me rather. Your moors are unique, I admit, with that grey and purple wash over them, but then your horizon comes bang on top of them. Coming up north, I was shown a patch of low hills—the Grampians—which are about the tallest thing you have in the way of mountains. And I have been on the shoulders of the Andes, behind Valparaiso, fifteen thousand feet up, and a white bonnet a few thousand higher. Then your fishing! You are easily pleased. One of your topnotchers will catch a salmon in a month and make a song of it. I have run a forty-foot cutter in the narrows about Vancouver, and hauled twenty-pounders inboard when I had a mind. That’s a fact, not any boasting of skill, for I’m a dud angler. Shall I go on?”

“Let us have the worst of it,” said Margaret in a small voice.

“Your shooting, then! I have not yet tried for your red deer, and cannot say if it is what it is cracked up to be; but your other stuff, what I have seen of it—grouse, partridge, duck, and such—is tame, just tame. No kick to it, and not a spice of danger compared, say, to mountain lion—or even big-horn—on the Rockies, and the big grizzly of the Kodiak. Do not think that, as the cowboy says, I am shooting my neck to catch your eye. Only trying to give you contrasts as I know them.”

“Of course. You have been considerate and restrained—merely knocked us down, and rubbed our noses in the mud, and walked on us a few times. The only thing that remains is the people. Well?”

“Don’t know much about the people,” said Alistair MacIan warily, his eye on her. He felt that he had had a fair innings, and—well, there was a touch of red in her hair, by Jiminy!

“You have met a few,” Margaret enticed him.

“A few? Well, yes. They are good people, but they seem to live a pretty dead sort of existence. Quiet and staid, you will say. There’s my uncle, now. Sir Hugh Ian MacIan, Baronet! A swashbuckling sort of handle, and to look at him, mouth and jaw, you would think he could bite rod-iron. Yet he is the mildest man imaginable, and spends his time pottering about—fishing some, shooting occasionally, fussing over a village ball-team—cricket, I mean—and for ever, talking about his precious trees.”

“You are good at vignettes. Go on. Whom else do you know?”

“The Fenwick boys are only here on holidays, and their talk is all Navy talk; but there’s Johnny Ross, the keeper. A sound man. Been through the war—East Africa and Palestine—and observed life at unusual angles. I would like to take him out West.”

“And he would not go. Then there’s Mr Webster.”

“Yes, Don does remind me some of folk I know. Knows the East with such absolute finality—take it or leave it—the Japanese guile, and the Chinese honesty, and all that.”

“I fear you do not love your cousin. And Mr Long?”

“Paddy Joe! Not a native. He cuts a good wide swathe anywhere.”

“Then there’s uncle.”

“Met him for the first time last night, but I like what I have seen of him.”

“You should see more of him. Will you run over the women now?”

“No fear! One head at a time is enough.”

“I suppose,” she drew him, “you would say that they do not count—that they are much the same everywhere.”

He looked boldly at the back of her neck as she bent over one of the cases. “I think,” he said, “that you would count anywhere.”

“Trying to make amends,” she thought, with a little run of laughter, and deemed it safer to leave that subject.