Читать книгу While Rivers Run - Maurice Walsh - Страница 8

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Very completely indeed were the senses knocked out of young MacIan. As the fisherman lifted him by the shoulders, his dark head drooped forward helplessly.

“A thundering clipe to give yourself, boy.”

He turned the limp body gently over, and, with spatulate, knowing fingers, felt first the back of the neck and then the crown of the head. He peered at his fingers in the growing dark. “The skin is not broken, anyway,” he muttered with relief, “and the bone is sound. Praises be for the stiff neck and thick head of the MacIans!”

He straightened up and ran his hand under his old tweed hat, and stood so in thought for a little while. Then he bent over the prostrate youth, gripped him at the shoulders, and, with a careful, powerful, pivoting motion, swung him on the broad cushion of his own back. In the process the legs dangled in an oddly ludicrous manner, like the legs of a marionette.

The fisherman picked a sure footing across the stones, bent below the alders, swished through a belt of whins, and came out on a smooth expanse of pasture—a field that might be green in daylight, but was now wan in the half-dark. A quarter-mile away, on the first swell of slope, a single orange-yellow light looked steadily at him, and towards this he went, smooth-strided—head down, elbows forward, breath drawing easily. His old hat slipped off, and, perforce, he had to let it lie. At the limit of the grey field he came to a wooden gate that let him through on to a cart-road twisting up the slope. Half-way up he passed the gable end of farm steadings, and a dog came round the corner and barked once.

“Right, Fruachan!” said the man throatily, and the dog came to heel and sniffed at the hanging feet.

At the slope-head he entered a wicket-gate in a garden paling, and a gravel path crunched beneath his feet. Before him was a low cottage with a jutting white porch. The porch door was open, and the inner door was open too, so that the light shone on some brilliantly red geraniums on the window shelves. He scraped his feet on the bass and cleared his throat with intention.

“Got my salmon, Uncle Aelec?” cried a light young voice.

“I have that,” said Uncle Aelec. His breath was coming heavily now, but he held it in and made his voice calm. “And the rightful owner of it as well,” he added. “Easy now, Margaret!”

He bent below the lintel and entered the lit, good-sized kitchen-living-room. There was in it the flavour of peat, and a glow amongst white ashes on the open brick hearth.

The cry that greeted Uncle Aelec and his burden was a small one, but no young woman—and particularly no red-haired young woman—can suppress a skirl when one is due.

“There you go now!” he chided. “Shift yon cushion on the settle. Easy now, easy! He is no’ murdered—nor kilt either.”

Very gently he let the limp body slip on to the couch that filled most of the back wall—an old-fashioned, high-backed, horse-hair, mahogany couch, covered with a blue-and-yellow-striped Navajo blanket. The young woman slid a pillow under the limp head, while her uncle straightened out the helpless limbs. The youth lay desperately still, his face clean-cut and white, his eyelashes very black, a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth—still, remote, a little awesome.

“Who is it? Is he dead? Was—was it you?” the questions came quickly.

“Not me, Margaret, lass. He is not dead, anyway. He was breathing in my ear right enough. If you want to know, he is young Alistair MacIan, the laird’s nephew—the Yankee one.” He wiped his warm brow and took two or three deep breaths.

“How still he is—and white! Oh, uncle! look at the blood on his chin.”

“I wager he bit his tongue then. He gave himself the deil’s own dunt. Are you up in anatomy?”

“I have to be.”

“See if his neck is all right. Go on, girl! I want to be sure.”

She knelt by the couch. The young man was in tennis flannels and his neck was bare and finely brown. On that brown neck her strong, small hands were very white. “It—it seems all right,” she breathed.

“The stiff-necked MacIan! I needn’t be afraid.”

“The top of his head—what a lump!”

“Ay! It will be bigger yet.”

“And another here over his ear.”

“That one he deserved, I’m thinking.”

“Did you do that?”

“No, no, my girl! I hadn’t hand or part in it. His own cousin, Don Webster, gave him that one.”

In a few brisk words he told her what had happened, while she, still on her knees, watched the calm face on the couch. “He is badly hurt,” she said at the end. “We must send for Dr Angus, uncle.”

“If we have to, but let us go canny as long as we can. I wonder, now, is this a case where a drop whisky—what do you think, Margaret?”

“I don’t know. Wait! I’ll sponge his face and neck.”

“Right, my lassie! But good whisky in moderation never harmed a body, and we’ll try that as well.” There he was wrong. Even the best whisky is bad for a dunted brain-pan.

She was quicker than he was. While he was at the wall-cupboard, near the fireplace, pouring the amber liquor from an old cut-glass decanter, she was in and out of the scullery at the rear with basin and sponge. He stood over her, glass in hand, pucker-faced in admiration of the deft way her hands moved about the boy’s head.

And then the closed eyes opened calmly and looked into the blue eyes above. It was as if he waked out of a quiet sleep. Alistair MacIan looked steadily for a moment, and then spoke with a half-humorous certainty, “I never did like red hair,” and immediately lapsed into what seemed equable slumber.