Читать книгу Trouble in the Glen - Maurice Walsh - Страница 5

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The three sandstone steps were hollowed in the middle, in proof of the many footsteps that had mounted them through many generations. At the head of them the open white door led directly into the living-room. It was a long, low room, brightly curtained, and with geraniums in the open windows; and it was cool and shadowed because the afternoon sun had circled away from it. Kate Carnoch leant a shoulder on the jamb, and spoke softly.

“A soger-man hame from the wars, your honour.”

“Let me have a look-and-a-half at the black devil!” said a voice of many inflections.

Gawain Micklethwaite brushed by Kate’s shoulder, and a big, loosely-built man was on his feet out of an armed windsor chair. His right leg made half a stride, his left trailed and came forward with an automatic jerk; and the big man balanced himself with his hands as if on a narrow plank.

“Oh hell!” he said disgustedly.

He was Norse-Gaelic, with a round, unlined, youthful face, grey eyes, and an uptoss of fair hair. His face lacked colour, but he was not a sick man. Gawain strode at him, caught him at the lapels, and thrust him forcefully but carefully back into the windsor chair.

“I can handle you at last,” said Gawain.

His big brown hand ruffled the toss of light hair, and David Keegan caught and held it. The two men looked steadily at each other, and Gawain’s eyes did not flicker once.

“ ’S’all right, Davy!” he said. “It is me myself, all of me.”

“Thank the Lord!” said his friend. “Where do we begin?”

“In the wee sma’ hours,” Gawain said. “At the moment I have an important audience.” He lifted his voice. “Where does the queen hold her court?”

A low, happy tinkle of laughter answered him through a half-open door at the back of the room.

“God is good!” said Gawain deeply. His black eyes lit under his black brows, and he ran his big hands down his hollowed checks in a cleansing motion.

The floor was cork-matted, and he moved silently across, tapped with one finger, and softly pressed open the door into a room full of light.

Blinkbonny was a bigger house than it looked from the front, for it was of generous double-width. This sunny room opening from the day-room had a door in the left wall leading to a bedroom, and in the gable-end a french window giving to the bus sun-parlour. The light came through a low, wide window in the back wall. The casement was open, and delicately-blue curtains moved leisurely in a soft draw of air. Through that wide window one could look down at green Loch Easan wimpling in the sun, and across at the gold-and-grey bulk of towering Stob Glas etched sharply in light and shade.

The whole tone of the room was blue-and-cream, and there was very little white anywhere, for white is strangely depressing within-doors. In the middle of the floor, away from all walls, a wide, plain, brass bedstead winked in the sun. And in that acre of bed, under a blue silken spread, lay little Alsuin Keegan, queen to this knight-at-arms, Gawain. She was eleven years of age, and her back had been in a plaster cast for six months.

She was a brown little lass, as had been her mother who was with God, and she did not look to be at all ill. Her brown hair had a lustre, and so had her brown eyes, and there was a freckle or two across the bridge of her child’s nose, and delicate colour on the childish curve of her cheeks. But the general impression she gave was of a great and equable gravity: the gravity that only a child can have—or a queen—or one already within the Shadow.

Her arms, in open cream sleeves, were outside the coverlet, and her hands, delicately-shaped and not emaciated, were full of a strange vitality as she moved a reading-board aside over a scatter of books.

She made a little controlled gesture of welcome. “Sir Gawain,” she said, and her voice was softer and deeper than silver.

He pushed the door to behind him, stood up straight and tall, and his right hand made a slow gesture that shaped itself into a saltire cross.

“At your service, ma’am!”

As he stood there he did look like a knight-at-arms out of his mail: tall and supple, cool-eyed and bronzed, and his black hair, like a close-fitting casque, cut straight across above a black bar of brow; and, surely, those broad hands were for the swinging of a two-handed sword. Those hands had never swung any sword, but they had flung a fighting plane like a falchion.

Little Alsuin drew in her breath with a soft sigh of contentment, and the look of eager welcome in her eyes moved this man who had hoped that nothing would ever move him again; for he had been mentally sick in an unclean and deadly world, and was afraid of emotion.

He went forward now, took one small hand in his brown paw and bent to it. Her other hand came over his, and she smoothed a cool palm over his hard knuckles. Yes, her hands were cool, but, as he held them, a small thread of temperature came to the surface.

His heart hollowed and filled again. Was this girl-child that he loved on her own lonely road? Was some hellish evil, deep down, gnawing away at the life force? Was their little kingdom of make-believe going the way of all kingdoms?

In her very earliest years they had set up their own little kingdom of make-believe, in which she was Queen without a King, and he her faithful Knight-at-arms. It was a lively kingdom, too, and mixed in its origins, for she had been brought up in the Celtic mythology of King Arthur and the Gaelic one of Cuchulain and Finn. To her that kingdom was as real as the day, and she was wont to send out her own champion amongst the Knights of the Round Table or the Knights of the Red Branch, to return victoriously with the very flavour of Romance about him. That flavour was about him now, and he must hide the aridity that life had become.

He wondered if the little one felt his thoughts through her sense of touch. She was smoothing the back of his hand, and her big serious brown eyes were intent on him. Her voice was softly sober.

“It is all right, Gawain! It is all right, my dear!”

He tried to keep the hurt out of his voice.

“Yes, ma’am! It’s all right, of course. It’s all right.”

The pith had gone out of his knees, and he sat down on the bedside chair, and abandoned his hand to her. And she had not forgotten her old habit of patting with her palm, and softly pulling at his fingers as she talked. And all the time that hellish, thin thread of temperature came through. She gestured aside with her chin.

“It was lovely to get your fine letters,” she said. “I have them all there.”

On the undershelf of her bedside table was a neat packet of letters tied in blue ribbon. Gawain had written them over two years, very carefully and painstakingly, translating ugly war into presentable knightly adventure.

“You had great—great—adventures, Gawain, and sometimes in your letters I could feel the heat, and—yes—much fierceness, and the yellow magician with the queer name frightened me one time. Wasn’t that silly?”

“No, ma’am! I was frightened too,” Gawain told her.

“And no woman at all.” She opened her eyes wide at him. “In all your stories there was no princess—no princess at all, Gawain dear?”

“Not where I was looking, your Majesty.”

She tugged playfully at a finger. “But, indeed, you are not good at looking. It is myself must find a princess for you.”

“And I’ll chop her head clean off,” he warned her. “A queen is good enough for me.”

“But no! You will not know until the right time.” She paused and became serious now, pressing his hand between hers. “Listen, Gawain! I am needing you badly. For three months now I am needing you.”

“If you do not need me I am no use any more,” he said gravely.

“I do need you. There is a trouble on the glen, and this house is not happy. Look!” She gave her chin-gesture towards the window. “You can see the road—my road.”

The road he had come by from the bus-stop at Ardaneigh curved round the house and went on into the gap leading to the sea. He could see a hundred yards of it down a short slope of grass, and then it disappeared between bushy banks. It was an oiled, well-made road, a brown streak across the green, but ragged grass and yellow dandelions had encroached on the margin of it.

Alsuin spoke sadly, and her eyes darkened with the pain of childhood meeting sorrow.

“That was my road, Gawain—and all the people.”

“As they rode down to Camelot,” he murmured.

“But I could look and see—and make stories to myself. It was a lovely road, Gawain—and now it is dead-and-empty. Did you know?”

“A little, but you will tell me.” David Keegan had mentioned in a letter that there was some trouble in the glen, but he had not told how it had hurt this little sick maid. Her voice hurried now.

“I used to see all the little lambs, and hear them ba-a—and the sheep-mothers—and the wise sheepdogs running—and the cattle black and dun—and the people of the crofts, and the men going down to the harbour for the fishing—and I knowing every one of them. And at the turn, just there by the bush, they would be looking up and waving a hand to me—not once did they forget—and I used to wave back to them. But oh me! there’s no one to do it now.” She paused and went on sadly. “And there was the bus—the red bus—twice a day, and it saying toot-toot to me. And now, there is nothing, for three months nothing—only a big—big car hurrying by like a long hound, and saying nothing. Isn’t that all wrong, Gawain dear—isn’t it now?”

“Wrong, indeed, my little one,” he said heavily. Wrong as hell, my lassie! but what can I do about it?

“Look now, Gawain!” went on the eager, sad little voice. “Isn’t it wrong for people to come into the glen and be no part of the glen?”

“Cut off?”

“No, not that—”

“Beleaguered?”

She chuckled then. “That was one of our long words. But no!—not beleaguered either! A man turning his back—shutting the South Gate, and making everyone go the long-long way round to the sea.”

“A tyrant has come into our glen?” Gawain said.

She shook his big hand. “A tyrant! I am not sure. At the beginning he was nice—everyone said.”

“That is how tyrants begin—”

“But it was Lukey that began it. Something he said that was not taken back in time. And then all Ardaneigh got angry, and my dad got angry, and everyone got angry—everyone but Lukey, who was so sorry, but has his pride too. I do not like anger, Gawain—it hurts inside me.”

“It is not a good thing, anger,” said Gawain, who knew.

She put his hand carefully away, folded her own delicate hands below her round chin, and was queenly and wise.

“Anger is bad always. It eats in and in, if it is let—and then one is all lonesome. Look! The Big House behind the gate is lonesome all the time. I know, for sometimes I hear a lady singing to herself in the woods.”

Hell and it hot! “A lady singing to herself might not be lonesome?” Gawain said.

“Her songs are proud and lonesome.”

Gawain thought this was his cue. “I see! She is held—a captive, you would say?”

“But no! for she drives out alone in her big car. Dark she is—dark and red—and she never waves to me—”

“The devil melt her!” said Gawain warmly.

“That is my dad’s voice. You talk too much, sir! Listen! Trouble in the glen I will not have, and I am putting a Task on you—”

“I am on my holiday, ma’am,” protested Gawain, meekly enough.

She gave him an imperious brown eye. “You are, but I am not asking much of you—not for a beginning. You will make yourself invisible like you did in that place—Burma—and go looking round and round, and finding out things for me. I don’t want much at all, darling Gawain!” she said persuasively. “The road open again, and friendliness, and peace. Peace, Gawain dear!”

Peace! You are wanting too much, my darling. Peace! There is this peace and that peace, but desolation is the only lasting one. He bent over Alsuin’s hand. “Have your way, ma’am! I will put on my invisible cloak, and sally out for to behold—”

The inner door was pushed open, and Kate Carnoch came in trundling a dumb-waiter laden with tea-things. Gawain rose to his feet. The evening ritual of Tea was about to begin. Though he had no least inkling of it, he had lightly undertaken a Task that was to lead him far.