Читать книгу Trouble in the Glen - Maurice Walsh - Страница 9

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David Keegan resettled his shoulders comfortably, and looked up at the ceiling where the firelight gleamed ruddily and shadows wavered.

“I’ll have to go back a bit, but not far,” he began leisurely. “Two-three years ago a thing happened in Glen Easan that has happened often all over the Highlands: the last of a hundred lairds sold his estate, lock-stock-and-barrel, and a foreign man bought it. The name of that foreign man is Mengues, which is a sept name of Clan Menzies, and he wears the tartan of white and red, and for a badge has chosen the Larch, that his forbears brought to Scotland two hundred years ago.”

“A foreign man, quoth you?” Gawain said.

“His name is Sanin Cejador y Mengues. His grandfather, plain Sandy Menzies, went out, a young man, to Chili—or Peru. I get them two places mixed—the long thin one it is!”

“Chili—no! Peru—Hell! I don’t know either.”

“It might be Ecuador! Anyway, Sandy Menzies went out to that coast, and made money as money is made, and married a woman of the place claiming pure hidalgo blood, which is always pure even if with a brushful of Aztec—”

“Inca, darn it?”

“Inca or Indian, but pure Spanish all the same. And Sandy had a son, who made some more money, and married likewise. And that son’s son, with all the money there is, came home to Scotland a couple or so years ago. He’s the new laird of Glen Easan.”

“Let foreign man stand, blast him!” said Gawain.

“But home to Scotland, mark you! for a drop of Scots blood is aye dominant. He claimed that he was a sept of Clan Menzies, with a chief’s blood in his veins, and he acted accordingly. Maybe his nostalgic old grandfather had given him golden-age notions of clans and clan-chiefs; or he might have read Rudyard Kipling on the rights, duties and privileges of a transplanted squirearchy amongst Sussex peasants; or, maybe, he had ruled peon serfs in a patriarchal sort of way; but no one at all could have told him what had befallen a kindly industrial baron who had tried to impose a new culture on an old Western Isle. Anyhow, whatever, here he was in the Tigh Mhor, a kindly, paternal chief, with money galore and a will to spend it. And no one hindered him. For why should they? Wasn’t he doing good, and rubbing no one the wrong way—yet.”

“A patronising sort of cuss?” suggested Gawain.

Lukey stirred on his hassock. “I wouldna say that—no I wouldna!” he said musingly. “He was proud by nature—ye ken? After the manner born, and, man, I liked him fine—and he did a lot of good.”

“Even a Highlandman will stand a share of pride if there’s a bit good to show for it,” said Keegan quirkily. “And there was. Laird Mengues asphalted that road out there; he got a regular bus service running through to the harbour, and added a cubit’s length to the pier; he slated black houses, and put a new roof on the school, and had plans ready for a parish hall; he put in the electric light for anyone that wanted it, and dam’ few did; he brought in a decent tup or two, and a polled Angus bull to improve the scrub stock; and he raised no rents—”

“He couldna do that,” Lukey put in.

“In some cases he could, but he didn’t. And then, Mr Carnoch, you threw your spanner in the works—”

“Dom’ the spanner!” protested Lukey. “Just a few hot words under great provocation. Mind that! the very greatest provocation.”

“They were fighting words, you ould devil, and I’ll let Mick here be the judge.”

“So will I—he’s a friend o’ mine,” said Lukey hopefully.

“You’ll be surprised,” Keegan said. “Listen, Mick! It happened three months ago, early on the fishing season. The Tigh Mhor was full of visitors—it usually was—it is now. The new laird is hospitably minded, with aristocratic leanings, and he likes his guests out of the top drawer. He gets ’em, too, for folk out of the top drawer are notably hungry and thirsty these times. And he had one real, buck-aristocrat for the first of the salmon fishing: an Aryan Prince, scion of Aryan Princes away back to the time of the great gawd Buddh, autocrat to a couple o’ million of some lesser breed without the law. Let him be nameless, but he was the genuine article, of the very highest caste—even if he was a shade off-colour. And he wanted to catch a salmon in the approved way—”

“He couldn’t fish worth a dom’!” Lukey said.

“But he was willing for to learn, and he tried his damndest. And that being so, no ordinary ghillie would do to handle him. No, sir! He was delivered into the hands of the Head-Steward, one Mr Lukey Carnoch, who was supposed to know fishing, approved or otherwise, as he never knew his prayers. And there you have him.”

“Look, Mister Bart.!” said Lukey appealingly. “I did my best by the Prince laddie—an’ I’m no’ sayin’ he was a bad lad at all. I took him out on the water in a bit skiff, where he couldn’t snarl in the bushes or break a barb-and-tip on the stones, and I gave him the rudiments of layin’ a fly on the water in a decorous way. Hour after hour I wrought wi’ him, and then a miracle—a bluidy miracle—happened. There was the fly—a big eight-o Mar Lodge—trailin’ deep, and the line loose, and the Prince beginnin’ to reel in, when dambut! a fish in a thoosand hooked himself. I’m tellin’ you! hooked himself as solid as the gates o’ hell. And sich a fish! I saw him—ten times I saw him in the next half-hour! I was as near to him as you. A cock fish, clean run as a new shillin’, an’ if he was not thirty pounds—”

“Half that, and he’s still a good fish,” Gawain said.

“Thirty pun’ and no’ an ounce less! Hadn’t I the gaff within an inch o’ his navel. Goad! I endanger my ’mortal soul when I think o’t.” And Lukey, in chagrin, gulped his glass empty.

“You see, Mick? Not a scrap of penitence! And note that our Prince wrastled that whale for half-an-hour—and that’s a good long time for a novice. And behold! there was our good friend, Carnoch, sometimes praying and more times cussin’, and all the time bellowing instructions, ‘Let him run, my bonnie prince—give him more line, your darlin’ majesty—keep your point up, your high royalness—gently now, gently, your holy reverence! Lord in glory, dinna give him the butt for a whilie yet! Holy Goad! take in the slack an’ we have him, my princely gent—!’ ”

“Allowin’ for a small ex-aggeration, I’m denyin’ nothing,” Lukey admitted. “My advice was judeecial, I will say that, and, moreover, most of the time, I was playing that bonny fish with the skiff—back an’ fore, and up and down, and round and round till I had a megrim in my head—”

“Surely! and at the end of half-an-hour you had your fish at the boat-side, and your gaff ready. And then?”

“Look, Bart.!” Lukey’s hands appealed, and his voice was anguished. “The fish was spent, and the white showin’; but seein’ the boat close at hand it did the usual thing, gave a bit of a splutter and a final run, but with no power to it. ‘Ease him off, Misther Prince!’ says I like that, ‘an’ we have him next time—the best fish in ten seasons.’ But what did he do the—! Na! I’m not sayin’ it again. ‘Come to heel!’ says he. ‘Come to heel, you—!’ A foreign word that sounded bad. And he up and gave one almighty lift an’ tug an’ heave to tear a mountain up by the roots. Och—och—och—!”

“Och—och, and ochone, indeed!” said Keegan. “For there was the great fish gone, an eight-o Mar Lodge in his gob, and three yards of trace trailing after.”

“Ay! he was well hookit,” said Lukey.

“And then, my dear Sir Gawain Micklethwaite, Bart., a certain irate Highlander, famed for his courtesy, spake the unforgivable words. You’d never guess?”

“Not Lukey—he wouldn’t!”

“He did. The serf Carnoch said to an Aryan Prince: ‘You lost him now, you big black pugger!’ ”

“Them’s the very words,” said Lukey, “and not a word more.”

Gawain sat up. His mouth opened, and shut again with a click. There was awe in his voice.

“My God, Dave! He never said that?”

“The very words: ‘You big black pugger!’ ”

“He was no’ that white, whatever,” palliated Lukey.

“There you are!” said Dave. “He simply cannot see the enormity of his words. To call a Prince of the highest caste a black so-and-so is the final offence. A black! a hubshi! a nigger! Blood only can wipe that out.”

Gawain pointed a violent finger at Lukey. “How is the scoundrel alive?”

“Because he kept hold of the gaff, and smashed the butt of the rod an inch from his head. And then our gamecock Prince hopped the unspeakable Carnoch, and the two went down on the gun’le, and over into the water—”

“I saved him from droonin’, whatever,” said Lukey.

“Like hell you did! The Prince played water polo in Edinburgh, and you can’t swim twenty yards. You got a good grip of him, and he hauled you to shore willy-nilly, and you popped his head under more than once.”

“Was I wrong to cool the temper in him?” said Lukey indignantly.

“Wrong but judicious, old boy! You cooled him all right. They emptied two gallons of water out of him. It was February weather, and the cold should have killed him, but the ragin’ heat of insult and indignation would melt ice; he lived to tear a passion to rags; and a certain dastardly culprit got the order of the boot then and there. It could be that Sanin Cejador y Mengues—”

“Hold it!” interrupted Lukey. “The laird was not at home that day. It was that factor-secretary, Dukes, put me off—”

“And the laird backed him up—naturally. As I was saying, it could be that Sanin Cejador y Mengues was raging, too, at the reflected slur on his pure hidalgo blood, for, if there be anything in ethnology, some great-great-grandmother of his was of a virtue not uneasy with an Inca buck. But how do I know? All I know is that Lukey got his—ordered off the policies, ordered off the whole estate, ordered to vacate this house—”

“I’m still here, I am,” Lukey said, “and you’ll be noting the same, Bart.—and a dom’ nice friend you are!”

Gawain ignored him. “You spoke of blood, Dave! Was the grieved party mollified by the dismissal of a mere underling?”

“Evidently not. He came looking for Lukey, but Lukey was not here at Blinkbonny. Lukey was up at Ardaneigh trying to pacify the boys, and there the Prince sought him. You see, all the ghillies, keepers, watchers, stalkers were recruited off the estate, and when they heard what had happened king-peg Carnoch they walked straight out. They had a meeting that night at Dinny Sullavan’s, and Lukey was preaching what he calls moderation to deaf ears. Into that angry pack, many of them back from war, an angry Prince propelled himself, not to be cowed by any bunch of menials of the sweeper caste.” Dave’s voice coaxed Lukey. “What happened then, Lukey?”

“Nothin’,” said Lukey shortly. “Nothing at all! The young man came to his senses—that’s all!”

“There you are, Mick! Lukey won’t talk. No one will. A Highland characteristic since the days of Prince Chairlie, but of no meaning any more. But whatever happened, the Aryan Prince disappeared—”

“In the usual moss-hag?”

“I assumed so. But I kept an ear lifting, and heard a careless tongue make remark of a fishing boat that went out with the morning tide—and there was no fishing. And about a week afterwards I read an item in the social column of the Irish Times. Yes! It said that Prince So-and-so of So-and-so was staying in the Shelbourne Hotel after a brief fishing holiday in Scotland. Brief is right. He hasn’t come back for more. And that’s all.”

Gawain lit a cigarette, and blew smoke towards his friend. “No, it isn’t all,” he said. “What did Mengues do next?”

“Do not blame Mengues too much. He came to manhood where peonage was still possible, and, maybe, saw things as he would see them in Chili—or Peru—or it might be Ecuador. He stood by his factor’s dismissal of the fellow, Carnoch, and, through the same Dukes, sent an ultimatum to his rebellious myrmidons: Come back at once, or stay out for good! And they practically told him: If Lukey is out we’re out, and you can go to hell or South America. He did neither. He is a man of some character, and stayed put.”

“And he had a bite too?”

“He had, but there was nothing desperately vital that he could do—or, perhaps, wanted to do. As you know, the crofters, including Lukey, have security of tenure under an old Land Act. But he turned his back on them, abandoned all his pet schemes, and put the running of the estate into this Dukes’ hands—lost all interest, as it were.”

“Dukes is his factor?”

“Not quite. The real factor—agent I would call it—is a firm of solicitors in Greyport, and Dukes is a son of the senior partner. But he took control when he got the chance, and the first thing he did, the laird willing, was to shut the South Gate and close that road out there. And that’s how things stand at the moment.”

David Keegan sat up and reached his empty glass to Lukey.

“Will it be punch this time?” enquired Lukey on his feet.

“Next time. I’m tired of talking, and it is your turn now.”

“Dom’ the word!” said Lukey.