Читать книгу The New Road - Munro Neil - Страница 3

Table of Contents

With the down for the first time shaved from his face, young Æneas stood in the draughty passage, turning his cocked hat in his hands till the nap had a cow’s-lick on it. Chagrin it was that kept the tutor fidgeting outside the door of the study, where at this hour he ought by rights to have a couple of pupils on the march with him and Cæsar’s sturdy lads through Gaul. It is one of the solemn days in life for a man when he starts to use a razor: now that the curly down was gone, and Æneas had seen in his glass a youth as boyish as he always shamefully felt himself to be, he rued the rash act that seemed to rob him in a moment of his manhood. He had come for the evening lesson with his pupils, feeling somewhat like a man half-naked in a dream, but, like the usual dreamer in these circumstances, hopeful no one might observe his own confusion at the absence of a beard—a small one at the best: he had come prepared at most for the bantering of Margaret Duncanson, eager to have it past; and now the skirmish was postponed! That was to make a double call upon his courage, and the supply he had flogged up for this rencounter was already vanished—gone from the field in a shameful rout, and the enemy not yet in sight.

Feeling that new-recovered velvet chin of his with nervous fingers, he stood in the dark of the lobby swithering what he should do next. The house was full of the smell of celery; Drimdorran had some curious Lowland whims, and dined at the hour of four from the first day he became a laird; faint rumours of the kitchen wafted up the stairs at times, to hang about all evening like the mists upon Glen Aray. At the lobby-end—far-off, for the house was long and the passage stretched from wing to wing of it—a voice was booming from Drimdorran’s closet room; Drimdorran never boomed with greater satisfaction to himself than after waking from the noisy doze which always followed on his dinner. Some one was in his room with him—not Margaret, his daughter, nor his ward, young Campbell, Æneas’s other pupil; at times a grown man’s voice broke in on a different key on the laird’s delivery; he had an outside visitor.

Except for this familiar sound from old Drimdorran’s business quarters, that night the passage might have been a gully of the wood abandoned to the dark, and vegetable odours; the quiet that held the dwelling was the quiet of suspense and expectation even though Drimdorran boomed.

“They have gone out; I wonder where they are?” thought Æneas, and walked along the passage. It had upon its flags a runner carpet—yet another of Drimdorran’s Sassenach concessions,—and his footsteps made no sound. At the top of the service stair which led from the under-world of stanchioned windows where Drimdorran’s celery soup was cooked, a man stepped out with a lighted candle and drew back, alarmed, when he ran against the tutor.

“King of the Elements, Master Æneas, but I got there the start!” he gasped. “You have chased the breath of me into my breast! This is a house that frightens me—so full of things in waiting. Shadows! Sounds! My loss that I ever left the Islands! In the name of the Good Being now, what did you on your face? I did not know one bit of you, and you before with such a noble whisker!”

“Coma leat sin!—Never mind that, just man!” said Æneas, also in the Gaelic. “What am I but looking for two rangers? Didst thou by chance see any sight of my scholars and they a-wandering?”

The Muileach, as they called him from the isle of Mull he came from, was Drimdorran’s man, and had learned in that employ to be discreet in seeing anything. He shook his head, a hand about the candle for the draughts, and said: “I have put no eye on them since dinner, Master Æneas”—but there he stopped, being friendly with the tutor, threw a glance across his shoulder to be sure they were alone, gave a pull at his nose and whispered in the loof of his hand, “It might be them, when I think of it, I saw at the mouth of evening down beside the river.”

Some dash of the conspirator, a twinkle in his eye, annoyed the tutor. “So?” said he shortly; “I’ll take a turn that road and maybe come on them,” and he walked out at the porch into the darkness.

It was little more than a step to the clean, cool night from the celery-scented lobby of Drimdorran House, but every step in life has its own particular fate attending it, and Æneas Macmaster, though he could not guess it, gave a twist to his seeming destiny on the moment he had crossed the threshold.

He was fairly launched upon the great adventure of his life.

Drimdorran House, with two or three hundred years of weather in its bones, stood on the slope that rose to the north above the river. Immediately about it lay its garden, sheltered from the east by clumps of high-grown firs and a belt of holly round them. From the windows of the house its owner, at a glance, could see his whole estate—not great, but snug and compact, tucked in a warm fold of the valley, in the very bosom of MacCailein’s land, with finest grazing of the parish stretched for half a mile along the river bank, and on the other side two profitable farms. Upon that green expanse of arable and pasture land a single tree had never been encouraged, save a scrog of beech and alder Duncanson the laird had put as a kind of screen between his outlook and the dovecote tower, which stood, three stories high, more like a place of ancient strength than a pigeon-house, upon the river’s brim. As yet the planting was too young to hide the tower in any sense, except, as it might seem, from its former tenants. Never a bird was harboured now in the dovecote, where, in the time of Paul Macmaster, Æneas’s father, they had swarmed. No one rued their absence less than the laird himself, who had made great ado with them and helped to breed some droll fantastic kinds of them with ruffs and pouter bosoms when Paul was still the laird, and he was Paul’s commissioner. Many an hour they spent there in the dovecote loft; the little lower-story window would be lit till midnight sometimes, when these two were waiting for a pigeon-post; on the leg of a homer-pigeon came to Duncanson the news of Sheriffmuir. The fancy for them must have been most strong in Paul Macmaster; for, when he was dead, and Duncanson became the laird, he counted what it cost in grain upon the stalk to feed them, and could never thole the cooing of a dove again. So he locked the dovecote up, and set the beech and alder round it, yet even in its abandonment its presence someway marked the glen more palpably than did the mansion-house.

So much for the place by daylight, but this was a September night when Æneas Macmaster stepped out on the lawn of what should have been the house of his inheritance, from the sound of the usurper’s booming and the smell of his celery soup, and early though the night was yet, it was as black as a porridge-pot. There had been rain all day, so that the Aray roared at the cataracts below Carlunan Mill, but now the night was dry; a wind, most melancholy, burdened, to his bookish fancy, with the griefs of time and change, mourned in the fir plantation; to the east, beyond MacCailein’s castle policies, he could hear the sea billow thundering.

No light was in the glen except from the house he quitted, where some windows, looked back on from a little distance when he reached the garden foot, appeared as yellow squares stuck high up on the arch of night. One of them he knew to be the window of Drimdorran’s closet; none of them was Margaret’s. He felt that the best thing he could do would be to walk into the town and wait for an explanation of the truancy until the morrow’s morning, but at two-and-twenty years of age it is always something else than the best in policy that commands our acts, and Æneas, with one hand feeling at his chin and the other at times thrust out before him till he had come to his second eyes, passed through the fringe of shrubbery about the garden limits, and out across the fields to the river-side. By the time he reached it he had got a little of the howlet’s vision, and the dovecote and its scraggy thicket were to be perceived as bodies massive, blacker than the night.

It was with something like dismay he saw, for the first time in his life, a light in the little window on the ground-floor of the tower!

There was nothing, based on thinking, beyond the Muileach’s crafty hint, to make Æneas ascribe the disappearance of his pupils and the lighted window to one common chain of circumstances, but that notion instantly took full command of all his movements. For the first time, since he quitted his uncle’s house in the town an hour ago, he lost the uncomfortable sense of nakedness, and felt more like the man he was before he shaved. This recovery exhibited itself in a feeling of moral indignation that he should waste his time on a ninny like young Campbell and a girl with so little self-respect as to skip the march through Gaul with Cæsar for the sake of a clandestine hour in an abandoned pigeon-house.

At first his inclination was to leave the scraggy grove that drew the night wind through its rustling tops with the swishing sound of a tide on sand, and made a pattering among the alder leaves, but the chance of discounting Margaret’s anticipated bantering on his changed appearance—once again remembered with a twinge—by breaking with tutorial dignity upon her hiding, was too precious to be resisted. On an impulse that a moment of reflection would have quelled, he strode across the river gravel laid a score of years ago so thick on the path that led to the dovecote that even yet the grass had not won through it, and he hammered loudly on the door.

There was no answer from within, nor the slightest sound of movement.

A wild-bird with a doleful whistle rose a little way off by the water-side, and swept across the valley towards Drimdorran House, whose windows seemed more unbelievably aloft in space than ever. All the other watery windy voices of the night were blent for the moment in a deep sonorous hum, as if Glen Aray had become a bagpipe drone to which this searcher in the darkness had his ear; a gust of rising wind was blowing from Dunchuach.

Æneas stood back a pace, and, lifting up his head, peered at the tower, whose rounded form stretched high above him like a lighthouse. A just conception of its size had never been conveyed to him before; it was the first time he had stood close up beside its white-harled walls, and in the gloom they looked immense, mysterious, invested with some immaterial essence as of ancient secrecy and dead men’s frustrate plans. It had been immemorially old when his own folk owned Drimdorran, yet it showed no symptom of decay, or Duncanson, no doubt, had long since made an end of it with a blast of powder, for its useless presence roused his visitors to curiosity and speculation.

A second time he rapped in vain, then groped to find the sneck. His thumb fell on it as by custom, and he pushed the door, to find, with some astonishment, the place all dark within. All dark and tenantless! He could not doubt that he had seen a light a minute or two ago, from the little window, and he assumed that whosoever used it had ascended to the upper flights, but the thought immediately gave way before the sure conviction that in the circle of the chamber he was now encroached on there was apprehension cowering, and a lantern or a candle in its hand.

Distinctly he could smell the greasy odour of a tallow wick!

It was ever Æneas Macmaster’s singular conviction that he was a hopeless coward, since a property inherent in his blood gave startling meanings to events which, when approached with trepidation, were disclosed as trivialities that should not fright a child; and it seemed to him, as he stood on the flags of the dovecote floor, that it was time to be taking his feet with him (in the Gaelic phrase of it), and putting the door between him and this mystery.

Nevertheless he bided, fumbled through his short-tailed coat, and got a tinder-box wherefrom he struck a light that wanly glowed on the pallid face of Margaret Duncanson. She stood in agitation by a seed-bin, with an open lantern in one hand and the key of the dovecote in the other.

“I guessed it would be you,” said Æneas quietly, taking the lantern from her hand and lighting it anew. “You have six-and-thirty ways of being foolish, and every one of them’s more idiotic than the other: what puts you on an escapade like this, and I to be waiting for you yonder with the Commentarii?”

She was a littlish woman, black-avised, a year or two perhaps his junior, with eyes like sloes, not strictly speaking by the letter beautiful, but beautiful enough to be going on with, as Roderick said about his first shape at a fishing-skiff. Her head was bare, as if she had just run over from the house.

“Oh!” she gasped, with a hand on her heaving chest, “you have given me two horrible experiences! I thought at first you were my father, and then when you struck the light I thought you were a stranger! I went almost into a swound; if I live to a hundred years I’ll never be nearer one. How did you think of coming here?”

Æneas pointed to the window sunk in a five-feet depth of wall; she saw at once how it had betrayed her, looked about her hurriedly, picked up some empty sacks and stuffed them in the opening.

“What a fool I was not to think of that!” said she with agitation. “Nothing would have quicker brought my father down upon me!”

“And what, if I may ask, are you doing here?” said Æneas.

“Looking about me, only,” she replied, recovering a pertness that was obviously her nature. “I was determined to see the inside of the doocot. Here have I been staring at it every day since my infancy, and this is the first occasion I have put a foot inside the door.”

“It’s surely a fancy that could be gratified at a more convenient season,” said the tutor gravely, “and with less of the clandestine element. Any day, I’m sure your father would have given you the key.”

She made a grimace which brought an unbroken coal-black line across her face by the joining of her eyebrows. “I had to find it for myself,” she answered. “He had mislaid it. In any case, he said he was not going to have me break my neck on these rotten steps. And now that I am here, I find it was hardly worth my trouble; there’s nothing wonderful to see, and in the last half-hour I have ransacked the place from top to bottom.”

Æneas cast an inquiring glance at the wooden steps which led to the hatch above them.

“They’re not so bad,” said she.

“You would get the wind about you, anyway,” said Æneas. “It must be cold up there, blowing through a hundred pigeon-holes.”

“Not it! As snug as a cellar; every pigeon-hole in the tower is boarded up inside.”

With the lantern dangling from a finger, he surveyed the kind of cell to which Miss Margaret’s escapade had led him. It must have been the storeroom of the dovecote in its active period; the great corn-bin filled up a part of it; there was a pile of sacks half-filled with mildewed grain, and others wholly empty; creels, spades, and other tools were flung about; the lantern, too, he found was to be included in the plenishing—Margaret had found it hanging on a staple. Upon the chamber and its properties the dust of years was thickly settled; to stir in the trash of the floor was to raise a cloud that floated like a smoke in the lantern’s beams. He felt begrimed, uncomfortable; some repugnance of the place came over him; he wanted to be gone.

Most of all he thought of the place as an inappropriate setting for the personality of Margaret Duncanson, whose airy summer gown demanded something finer in the way of background; whose sprightliness ill accorded with the sombre air of this forsaken vault, that somehow made her less attractive than she was for usual. He had lost the consciousness of the change on his appearance, and was only brought back to an uneasy apprehension of her mockery by the interest with which she stared at him, now that her fears were past. There was a glint of mischief in her eyes, but she cunningly said not a word on the topic he had expected her to make much of; that was Margaret’s most disconcerting power to mortify—she always chose some different way from what he had expected.

“That’s a night lost!” he said at last. “You’re accounted for, but where is William?”

She flushed, and laughed uneasily. “And is he truant too?” she asked. “Never mind! I have something here of interest to show you; I found it with the doocot key,—isn’t that the ravishing creature?”

It was a little silver snuffbox, which she opened with the pressure of a finger so that he could see inside the lid of it the miniature of a girl. Indeed the portrait justified Margaret’s admiration; it pleased the casual glance immediately, and opened up some curious charms to the more intent examination. Holding it up to the lantern lozen, Æneas devoured its every feature—the little tilted chin, the lips a bit apart in what might either be a smile or an inward breath of something on the verge of tears, the forehead swept by waves of auburn hair that had in parts the copper hue of winter breckans, the throat that seemed even in the paint to have the animation of a voice that would be sweet, the gradual white shoulders just escaping from the shelter of a crimson cloak. What hit most strongly at the sentiment of Æneas was a kind of pause in the expression; in some moment of suspended eagerness the woman had been taken, and something of rebellion cried from her parted lips and in her lifted eyes.

“My goodness!” he cried out, “it is a jewel! The heart of me is half divided between the fellow who could paint it and the darling who could give him such a chance. It’s Holbein, honest man! with something of the mountain breeze in him, and it puts me out of taste with all yon round fat faces that they have in Amsterdam! Where on earth did you get it?”

“Do you think she is beautiful?” Margaret said, paying no attention to his question.

“Beautiful,” said he, “is but a word; I could not rightly tell you what she is unless I played the fiddle.”

“What raptures! And I’ll swear she’s dead a hundred years!”

“No, nor fifty, by the execution,” said the tutor.... “What is that?”

He straightened up with a jerk, as if he had been stabbed between the shoulders. He turned his head to the side a little. He listened with suspended breath. Not the most trivial sound was to be heard within the tower in which the stillness of the grave was reigning, nor anything outside beyond the dry clash of the beech-tops, whelmed in the hum that came at intervals from every twig and leaf together when a fresh gust struck the planting.

“I could swear I heard the scuffle of a step,” he whispered. “Did you?”

Margaret shook her head. She was as grey as sleet, and terror was in her eyes. The tip of her tongue played nervously between her lips.

“You should not have been here! You should never have come here!” she gasped in an under-breath. “I hate the very look of you! If my father finds us here he’ll kill me! O Lord! haven’t I been the silly woman!”

“Listen, Margaret; listen!” he enjoined her, slipping the snuffbox into his pocket and clutching her arm. “I’m certain I heard someone outside!”

She began to weep in a singular way that puckered up her face and sent the tear-drops down her cheeks and all without a sound, like a woman dumb.

“There! There it is again! There’s someone walking round the doocot,” said Æneas.

There was no mistake about it; plainly they could hear the footsteps on the gravel, appallingly deliberate and stealthy.

“It’s you! It’s you!” she charged him, gulping sobs. “You came here like a fool, and somebody’s following you.”

“Nonsense!” he whispered. “Nobody, I’m sure, saw me—the night’s like pitch;” and he was shaken not a little at the pickle in which his being there involved her. “I’ll tell you who it is,” he hurried on with a comforting inspiration, “it’s Will.”

She moaned. “Whoever it is,” she said, “it’s certainly not Will; he couldn’t possibly be here. I know in every vein of me it’s father, and oh! how on earth could he discover?”

“The light in the window,” whispered Æneas.

“Aren’t we the fools!” she exclaimed. “He’ll be in this moment! Blow out the candle!”

It went out at a puff from Æneas just as a hand began to fumble with the iron door-latch.

The door itself came slowly inward; they could hear the hinges creak, and the cold wind fanned them. The darkness of the chamber and the dark outside were one in hue, and whoever stood in the doorway was invisible, but they heard the breathing and it was a man’s. He never said a word, but stood for half a minute on the threshold, once only uttering a sigh. It was, of all the strange experience, the most dauntening of things, that sigh, which seemed to gush up from the depth of misery. Margaret’s fingers sunk into the flesh of her companion’s arm till he winced with the pain of it. He could hear the beating of her heart—or could it be his own, so stormy?

A moment later and she would have screamed, but the figure in the doorway turned; the hinges squealed again; the iron latch fell into its catch with a clatter, and the footsteps crunched across the gravel, this time less deliberate. Then the wind resumed its prevalence.

Still greatly dashed, the tutor took to flint and steel again and lit the lantern when it seemed the visitor had no intention of returning, and found a great relief imprinted upon Margaret’s countenance.

“Thank God he didn’t speak!” said she. “That would have finished me.”

“Strange!” said Æneas musingly, like one apart; “I would have better liked to have a voice to him.”

“No! no!” she said, “not I! I dreaded it! Do you think he suspected any one was here?”

“He knew it perfectly!” said Æneas ruefully,—“if he had a nose upon the face of him. What way did I not think of pinching out the candle! This one fairly stinks.”

They stood for twenty minutes more imprisoned in their cell, deliberating on a score of possibilities about that baffling visitation. No vagrant reputation of the neighbourhood was overlooked—the chance of gangrels, thieves, or spies,—but always they came back upon that disconcerting sigh which gave some tone to the experience not in key with any theory they could advance. One thing Margaret was blissfully convinced of—that it had not been her father. “Had it been he,” said she, “and knew that any one was here, nothing under heaven would have turned him back!”

Æneas at last went out, leaving her the lantern, muffled till the door was closed behind him. He circled round the tower; traversed the path a little, questioned the night with every sense, and then returned to tell her that the way was clear. They could not flee the place too quickly!—When the door was locked behind them, over her head she drew her cloak and ran across the grass like one demented. Before he could decide what next to do the dark had swallowed her.

“Fair wind to her!” said he; and turned about, and started for his lodging. He had not gone a hundred yards when a reflection stopped him—he had still the snuffbox! Five minutes later he was in her father’s house again, to find her speaking with the Muileach in the lobby at whose end Drimdorran still was booming.

Without a word for him she snatched the snuffbox from his hand and dashed upstairs.