Читать книгу Trouble in the Glen - Maurice Walsh - Страница 4

Table of Contents

The tall, lean veteran of twenty-nine—but he looked older—leant on the red garden gate, and looked through a screen of young fruit trees at the white, flat-fronted, slate-roofed cottage forty yards away at the end of a concrete path. Red and yellow tulips flamed along both sides of the path.

“One, two, four—yes—seven—no eight—apple trees, and two cherries,” murmured the veteran. “They’ve grown some. Let me see! Three Bramley Seedlings gone a bit to wood, a Lane, a James Grieve, that spire is a Charles Ross, and two too-delicate Orange Pippins; and the cherries are Morello, I think—’cos the blackbirds leave ’em alone, sometimes. You got a hell of a fine memory, Gawain!”

The Bramleys were gorgeously pink-and-white in full bloom, the dessert trees just burgeoning, but the cherry trees had already cast their blossom. The lengthening lace shadows of afternoon slept on the grass, and the grass had a brown sole to show that it recently had had its first after-winter cut. Bees were planing busily amongst the blossoms, and making lazy sounds.

A lank, long-jointed individual, probably male, was using an edging-shears along the margin of a tulip bed, but without enthusiasm, and as he snip-snipped he was murmuring grumblingly to himself:

“Dom’ the grass whatever! It is tougher nor a pig’s ear—”

“No toiler of the soil, yon! Why don’t he take his jacket off?” said the man at the gate who had called himself Gawain.

The lank man straightened nine or ten kinks in his backbone, and turned slowly. His long-jawed face was of that sallow pallor that refuses to tan; his eyes were the mildest blue; and a wisp of sandy moustache drooped listlessly over a melancholy mouth. But he had a long, interrogative nose, and one sandy eyebrow quirked antically.

“I’m no’ dreamin’—or am I?” he said mildly. “It was a voice I kent long ago.”

The visitor pointed a stern finger.

“If that grass got a last cut in October, someone would not be cursing the order o’ nature this fine Spring day.”

“Ay so, indeed! But how was a man to know that Spring would come again?”

“A man couldn’t, of course—not these times,” agreed the other. “Would this be Blinkbonny Cottage by any chance?”

The lank man dropped his edging tool carelessly, stepped sheer-legged over the tulip bed, and came down the path, slow-striding and loose-kneed.

“Blinkbonny it is,” he said, “and I mind seeing your face somewhere—a nightmare I had. Wait you! Don’t tell me. By Hector! It isn’t—it is: Sir Gawain Micklethwaite, Bart., Wing-Commander-be-chance from foreign parts. Man-oh-man!”

“Mr Luke Carnoch, I presume?” said the other. “War-lord in Glen Easan, aren’t you?”

“That’s the Major’s fun. Give us your hand.”

These two had known each other for twenty years, and had not met for four. The two hands, big and bony, clasped and held over the garden gate, and the two tall, angular men looked at each other unsmilingly. But they were not gloomy men. Luke Carnoch cloaked a lively mind behind a melancholic exterior, and Gawain Micklethwaite had come out from under the shadow of three terrible years.

“How are you all—how’s good-wife Kate?” the visitor enquired.

“I’m bearin’ wi’ her—just about!”

“And Davy Keegan?”

“The Major! Fine—fine! But his new leg’s no dom’ use to him.”

Gawain Micklethwaite hesitated, and then spoke slowly. “And our little majesty?”

Luke Carnoch did not smile, nor did his eyes light up. He said evenly:

“She is no worse, I will say that.”

“You have said enough,” said Gawain gravely.

“Ay! but summer is coming.” Luke gestured a hand. “She’ll be in her sunroom day after to-morrow—if this weather holds.”

The hand-gesture directed attention to a green-painted, wheelless omnibus set close against the gable-end of the cottage, its many windows curtained brightly in flowered chintz.

“Manalive!” said Luke suddenly. “I’m no’ holding you outside the gate. Come away up! They’re lookin’ for you.”

“Wait! There’s Kate.” Gawain’s hands came down firmly on the top bar of the gate, and gripped.

A youngish, tall woman—they were all tall in this place—had come through an open white door at the head of three sandstone steps. She was wearing a long white linen coat over a man’s flannel trousers, and franciscan sandals on slender stockingless feet. She stood a moment, head-high at gaze, threw a hand up, leaped the three steps, and came swinging down the path: a fine figure of a woman, with a near-ugly face and red hair: an adequate, wise woman, and acquainted with life. Before her marriage to Luke Carnoch she had been District Nurse.

Her husband sidled out of her way, and her rich Glasgow brogue caressed Gawain.

“Gawain my darlin’! is it your ain self?”

Is it the same self? wondered Gawain.

Her freckle-backed hands came down on his on the gate; and her strong-boned face stilled as she looked into his eyes. So they stood and looked at each other, and everything was still about them. The blossoming trees made no stir, the laced shadows on the grass were asleep, and the pine trees, down the slope behind the house, paused in their sighing. Then a white cloudlet, high up, moved across the sun, and a sadness—not a gloom—came on the day. And the woman spoke almost in a whisper.

“It was bad while it lasted, Gawain?”

“Bad enough,” said Gawain quietly. He could not hide from this experienced woman the malaise of mind that had weighed on him after that terrible campaign in the Jungle, the malaise that had kept him away from Scotland until the cloud lifted.

“But you are all right now, my dear—almost?” she said softly.

He moved his hands, caught hers firmly, and gave them back to her.

“No almost about it, and keep your hands to yourself, you red-headed devil!”

“That’s the way to talk to her,” commended her husband.

Gawain moved a hand to unlatch the gate but she stopped him.

“Wait! I was afraid one time a woman had nobbled you in a reduced condition. No?”

“No. She married an Australian that one.”

“Fine! There was a woman in my mind for you, but I’m not sure any longer.”

“Tell her shut her big mouth,” advised Luke, moving off towards his edging tool.

Kate Carnoch’s hand moved towards the latch, but Gawain stopped her in turn.

“Wait you! Our little Alsuin, she’s none better, I hear?”

“She’s none the worse either,” she told him in a quiet voice. “You’ll see for yourself.”

“And her father?”

“Davy was quiet for a long time, but once he gets used to his leg and puts a fly on the water he’ll be all right.” She moved a hand and her eyes watched him. “But where is he going to fish?”

“Fish in them thaar waters, ma’am,” Gawain said.

“Another man’s fish now—or don’t you know?”

“Fish belong nowhere—”

“There’s a new laird in the glen, my lad—and he knows not Joseph.”

“Our own Scots glen—never!” His arm swept wide. “Never!”

Behind Blinkbonny half-a-dozen little fields—two of them sown—sloped down to a belt of larch in new green, backed by a bulk of deciduous trees just burgeoning. A strong wall, topped by barbed wire, ran away right and left on the near margin of the larch belt. To the left of the cottage the wooded slope broke down into a wide notch, and through that notch, not half-a-mile below, the green sea-water of narrow Loch Easan sparkled under the westering sun; and beyond the loch, a steep ridge, red-gold in the bloom of the whin, rose into the sheer craggy uplift of Stob Glas grey and green against the fragile Spring sky. Blinkbonny! Luke Carnoch’s house was well named.

The evening thrushes were not yet singing, the rooks were far afield, and, through the afternoon stillness, from far away, came the pulsing sigh of running water. That was where the Aanglas River came cascading down from the upper glen. It was, indeed, fishing country.