Читать книгу The New Road - Munro Neil - Страница 5

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Æneas had left his uncle’s house with an intention to go up the glen again and make a search about the dovecote neighbourhood; it hovered in his mind that possibly some wastrel band of cairds was harbouring near Carlunan, and might have among them the intruder on the tower. Yet he had hardly reached the causeway when there flashed on him the popular repute of Ninian Campbell, who had, earlier in the day, been asking for him. That curious man, for whom the darkness of a strath, the sleep of towns, could hide no secret, might, in a sentence, dissipate the mystery!

Ninian was a Campbell only for expedience—his father was Macgregor of Dalvoulin in Balwhidder, who, when the Gregorach were shaken out of all their ancient holds like weevils from a seaman’s biscuit, and their very name proscribed, had found protection with MacCailein and a home in Shira Glen. This clemency was not without design; Macgregor of Dalvoulin paid for his security in wits. He wore the myrtle badge at Sheriffmuir, but also plied a craftier war, and long-sustained, by night and day, and disconcerting, with Clan Campbell’s enemies, most of whom were now his own. In the place of his adoption he was known as “Iain Beachdair”—John the Scout. He throve amazingly, and had a tack of some extent between Glen Shira and the braes of Cladich. Ninian, when his father died, took up the beachdair business, but dignified and cloaked a little by the sounding name of Messenger-at-Arms, though such a thing as a citation never soiled his hands. He was Macgregor to the bone—a gentleman with curious toleration for the broken lawless folk whose fortunes as a laddie he had shared—the scurry in the mist, the night-long watches, skulkings in the heather; even in his burgess days he could not see a drove of cattle passing but his eye would lift. Many a time Lord Islay got him on the hill with the gun below his oxter, only to shake a finger at him with “Ah, Ninian! ye’ll never lose your taste for venison!” “Indeed,” would Ninian say, no more abashed than if he had been stalking weasels, “here’s a man that never yet turned his back to a haunch of that same nourishment. Good sport, Islay, for the day with both of us!”

Such a man as Ninian was worth his weight in gold as an instrument of governmental strategy. He knew the Highlands as he knew his pocket; below Loch Ness, at least, there was no pass or cave or clachan where he had not as a boy been wet and cold and weary, or sat about a fir-wood fire, or cried out the triple hoot of the cailleach-oidhche—the night-hag owl—to warn his folk of something dangerous stirring. As Messenger-at-Arms, with a badge he never showed, he was for ever on the road upon MacCailein’s business, gathering hints and tracking rumours; the jealousies and pacts of clans, the private character of chiefs and chieftains, were better known to him than anybody; his was the skill that foiled them often in their plans.

It was his habit to be always out at night. “That is the time,” he would say, “for people of my name and occupation. It is in the night that things worth while will aye be happening in the Highlands. There’s nothing to be learned in daylight except that the girl is beautiful or otherwise, and people all mean well.” The dark for him was full of meanings, intimations; things dim in daytime, tangled and confused, assumed a rational order then.

This curious faculty in Ninian it was that, coming to Æneas’s recollection, sent him in a hurry to the house the beachdair occupied in town from harvest-end till spring. So keen he was to have his curiosity assuaged that he forgot, to start with, that no matter how he put the case, there was a danger that Miss Margaret’s escapade would be revealed: when this occurred to him, the purpose of his call on Ninian seemed scarcely wise. Nevertheless, he followed out his inclination, which, to tell the truth of it, was influenced in a measure, though he did not let his mind dwell on it, by the fact that Ninian had a daughter!

She was in the house alone when he was shown into it by a servant-lass—a piece of luck, as he first esteemed it, which he had not looked for, though it soon took on a different complexion. Her father, earlier in the evening, had been summoned out on business, and she expected his return at any moment.

Æneas waited willingly; there could not be a better chance to improve an acquaintance with the lady who, since he had left her at her door three weeks ago at two o’clock on a moonlight morning, had occupied his mind much more than he himself was well aware of, and all the more remarkably since in the interval she had been unusually invisible. There was a reason why the parting in the moonlight morning should engage his mind and make him now uneasy as he took the seat she proffered; harmless practice with a merry aunt had had exactly that result his uncle looked for,—Æneas some time ago had learned that women were not quite so terribly austere as he had thought at first and that even a frolic interchange of gallantries had a good deal more of spice in it when exercised with others than with Annabel. It was not a quite unpractised hand who, as the convoy from a ball, for Janet Campbell, boldly sought a Highland convoy’s fee in the shape of a parting salutation in the moonlight, and got her palm across his cheek!

The tingle of that buffet stayed with him for days; he felt it now as he sat in her parlour-room, and all his puzzling about the dovecote incident was swamped in a flood of new sensations.

It was the first time he had seen her in her own surroundings, which conferred upon her all the charm of novelty. She seemed a different being from the wide-hooped, tightly-bodiced partner he had sailed with down Macglashan’s room, so simply dressed now, so demure and purpose-like, as if the house were meant to be her natural setting, that he took a new disgust at his own effrontery.

Not a word, of course, was said about that lamentable error, but her face, for usual pale, had a flush that spoke of some commotion, though she quickly took to her tambouring-girr, and stitching wildly, dashed into a conversation miles remote from the topic of the unlucky ball. He felt he was not forgiven, and he cursed anew his folly, seeing, as he fancied, half alarm and half reproof in her grey eyes, however level and unflinching, placed upon him.

He did not see her in detail so much as, in a fashion, take her presence in by other senses—the sound of her voice with its tang of Gaelic lending softness to her careful English sentences, all trimly finished even to the “g’s” his lowland aunt could not be bothered with; the little scratchings that her needle made upon her thimble; her breathing, which, in awkward pauses in their conference, seemed to indicate an agitation that he felt himself; a perfume, fugitive and pleasant, as of cool spring wells, that hung about her garments.

This hint of wells, and mornings cool and fragrant, all at once began to give to her a character which he had never thought before was shared by human beings with the landscape he delighted in—surprise, variety, and stimulation; she was like a day upon the wild high moors in spring, and when she spoke it was the creamy gurgle of the April burns.

He took a look at her again, enchanted, when her eyes were on her occupation, hardly knowing what he talked of.

“I haven’t seen you for so long!” he said with recklessness. “You have been busy? Do you never come out?”

“Oh yes!” she answered, “every day. I was at your uncle’s house this afternoon.”

His face went crimson! The visitor his aunt had spoken of was not imaginary; Janet was the girl!

He felt abashed, remembering Annabel’s interpretation of her caller’s fidgeting, though fidgeting was none of Janet’s traits to-night, however much they were his own. The calm was all with her, with him the gale of agitation, and now it swelled into a whirlwind blast in which his wits seemed blown away like perished leaves and swirling in the air. It is, indeed, a staggering hour when youth with no experience of these tempests of the breast is lifted from its feet by powers invisible with which it has been playing, thinking them no stronger than a woman’s breath. That squall upon the instant levelled every dyke of self-possession, took him from himself, and gave him to the force that rules the world!

Like a man that grabs a hat blown down the road before him, he groped, one moment, wildly, for that splendid confidence he had but recently,—no use! the storm had swallowed it! And not without some warnings, premonitions—he had shut his eyes to them deliberately, but now he knew the very razor was compelled by a dangerous interest in Janet Campbell, though he had been too timorous to admit it to himself!

Commingled with a great elation, such as always comes to healthy youth when thrown in battle with the elements, was mixed a sense of shame that he should have the girl at an advantage through that revelation of his aunt. And still he was terrified to think that Annabel might be mistaken!

All this commotion filled some moments only, if one counted passion-hurricanes by time, which would be folly: he was much older when he spoke again without a quiver in his voice, to show the girl that she was separated only by about the thickness of a waistcoat from the stress of weather.

“I did not know you had been calling,” was all he said, and to himself it sounded very thin. “And oh!” he thought, “I had the daring to put arms about her!”

“Yes,” she said, “I called,” and suddenly grew very red again as she bent above her work.

His education had not quite cleared out the rustic lout in him; a silly boldness took the hold of him again, and “I’m vexed I was not in,” said he.

“And I was almost glad you weren’t,” she rejoined, and showed confusion in her manner.

“Why not?” he asked. “And I had almost kissed her!” he reflected with amazement to himself.

“For a private reason,” she replied soberly. “It is of no consequence! I think I hear my father.”

To Æneas, even, this relief was opportune; so many doubts and guesses seized him at the evidence of her perturbation that her father’s entrance was welcome, though immediately it roused the awkward thought that even the discreetest reference to the dovecote and its problem was become impossible. In Janet’s presence it would feel indecent to pursue the subject, which had someway lost importance in the last few minutes.

Ninian came in upon them bustling, like a man full-charged with news, and only pulled himself together when he found he had a visitor.

He was, in a way, a young man still, to have a grown-up daughter; hardly over forty, with a step like a dancing-master, and a swing about his every movement betokening that he had some fancy of his limbs, whereof so many people at that time of life appear to lose the relish. The movement of his members seemed a pleasure to himself, as to a mountain cat or stag; it looked as if he never would be weary. A little under middle height, and lean about the flanks to which his square-cut coat was closely shaped, he had, withal, a frame that looked exceedingly robust, and even powerful—a square deep chest, and a leg with a tumble-home (as the sailor says) above the rounded brawn. A charge of horse, it might appear, would scarcely stagger him; he was a cliff.

In his face, that was weathered to the hue of nuts, clean shorn, and slightly pitted, there was manifest a bold and confident sagacity; his hair, dark red, was drawn back from his temples, and knotted with a ribbon at the nape; his eyes appeared to have a living of their own apart from all the rest of him—deep-set, and keen, and black, they were his most conspicuous feature; nothing could escape, as it might seem, their penetration.

“What! is it thyself that is in it, Æneas?” he cried in the phrase of Gaelic though he spoke in English, an oddity of speech that always gave his utterance a foreign sound. “Did I not say to myself in the street, outbye, ‘There is some one waiting on me!’ I knew it by my feet! Stop you, till I throw off my gentleman!” and plucking at the belt about his middle, he loosed a slim dress sword that on his coming in had poked its nose between his skirts.

“Now lie ye there, my lad!” said he, and flung it in below the table. “As sure as death, my dear, I canna stand their slender ones, their point-and-parry ones, their Sunday swords; give me a good broad leaf and a basket to it, or a snedded stick of oak!”

“But still you would have it on this evening—you that never wears a sword except for a bravado,” said his daughter quietly, and still at stitching.

“That was for Drimdorran’s eye,” said he, with a laugh. “He hates the very look of weapons; it seems to put him aye at disadvantage, perhaps because it shows him that he’s dealing with a gentleman. That’s the gentleman of me for Duncanson!” and he kicked the tool below the table, till it snarled back, clattering.

“Did ye bring yon, Æneas?” he asked, with a sudden turn upon his guest.

“Did I bring what?” asked Æneas.

Ninian wheeled round upon his daughter: “Did you not go for it, m’eudail, as you promised?” he implored.

“I went,” she answered, “but Æneas was not in, and I felt so foolish upon such a message that I came away without a word to his aunt about it.”

“What was it?” Æneas asked, much damped at the suggestion in the daughter’s speech that the cause of her agitation in his uncle’s house was something that her father understood. He would have liked it otherwise.

“I’ll not be long in telling you that,” said Ninian, standing to his feet and throwing out a chest of resolution, as if to give him courage for a task he felt ridiculous. “It’s yon Molucca bean.”

“Molucca bean?” repeated Æneas, perplexed.

“Ye know, yourself,—your father’s—peace be wi’ him! Yon Molucca bean—the Virgin nut that came from Barra to your family. With the silver clasps, ye mind?—the plump, round, brown fellow that would lie, like, in the loof of a hand. For God’s sake, Æneas, do not tell me ye have gone and lost it! I’m sorely needin’ it.”

“I have you now!” said Æneas. “Of course! the bean my father had.”

“The same!” said Ninian. “My grief! that your father had not got it with him in Glenshiel! It would have been a different story yonder!”

“I think,” said Æneas, “that I have it somewhere,” and Ninian, clapping on a chair in front of him, leaned in, and fixing him with a glance that defied amusement, said, coaxing, “Ye will give me the loan of it, loachain? What am I but going on a journey to the North? I said to herself that’s sewing there, ‘If it’s the bens and the mountain moors for me again among yon devilish clans, I must have a backing with me, and the very best I ken is Paul Macmaster’s Virgin nut.’ Did I not this very evening send this lady over to your house to ask you for it? But her courage faltered, and the half of her Macgregor too! Mo nàire!—my shame upon you, daughter!”

“You can have it with all goodwill,” said Æneas; “but what is the good of it?”

At that was Ninian embarrassed; he puckered up his lips, as if to whistle, drew down his lids a bit to hide for once unsteady eyes. The man was plainly feeling shame to tell his purpose with the bean; he started once or twice a stammering word, and stopped, and hummed and hawed, and finally with a “pshaw!” turned round upon his girl with a blameful aspect, charging her with having botched his errand.

“No wonder you are black affronted, like myself,” said Janet soberly. “Æneas must think you daft to put your trust in giseagachd—in freits and talismans. In front of his Lowland aunt I could not say a word about your Virgin nut, it seemed so foolish.”

She turned to Æneas. “What my father wants it for,” she said, “is for an amulet. He thinks there will no harm come to him on his business in the North if he has that thing about him.”

“Neither there will! Neither there will!” her father burst out confidently. “I don’t believe, myself, there’s anything at all in it, except some old wife’s story, but there’s aye a chance. And I would be the better for it in my pocket in among the rogues of Badenoch.”

At this display of superstition Æneas could have burst out laughing, any other place than here in Janet’s presence and in her father’s room, but not a blink of his amusement did he show. He had forgotten all about this wizard property in the bean from Barra.

Ninian was delighted to be promised that the charm would be handed to him on the morrow, and to cover his confusion at having been discovered with such a weakness, broke into a voluble account of a commission he was just about to start upon. ’Twas he who had been in Drimdorran’s closet whence Æneas had heard the booming; he had been getting his instructions for a journey to the North. There had been trouble with some lawless clans. Arms were being smuggled in from Spain and Holland. The Highland Watches were considered in some quarters dubious servants of the king. Blackmail was rife as ever. Worst of all, there was the opposition to the Road.

“George Wade’s red sodgers, as ye ken,” said Ninian, “have been for years at the makin’ o’ the Big Road that is goin’ to put the branks upon the Hielanman—a bonny job for sodgers! It’s killin’, as ye might say, the goose that lays the golden eggs, for, wi’ this road across Druim-Albyn, fighting will be by wi’t in the Hielands and the trade o’ war will stop. But that’s the way of it—the Road is cut already through from Crieff to nearly Lovat’s country; I trudged a bit o’ the lower part o’ it myself last summer; most deplorable!—the look o’ things completely spoiled, and walkin’ levelled to a thing that even cripples could enjoy. A body might as well be on the streets! I’m tellin’ you that Road is goin’ to be a rut that, once it’s hammered deep enough, will be the poor Gael’s grave! There’s plenty o’ them wideawake to see it; from the start they hindered Geordie’s shovellin’ brigade. But now the Road’s goin’ through Clan Chattan country, the devil himsel’s to pay! Every now and then there is a skirmish wi’ the sodgers. A bit of a bridge or a culvert that is finished clean and ready on the Saturday is all to smash between the kirks on Sunday. Boulders like a house for size come stottin’ down the hillside, landin’ on the road. The very rivers take a fancy, through the night, to start stravaigin’, and where do ye think should they stravaig but over the brawest parts o’ Geordie’s track? Oh yes, they’re clever fellows yonder! clever fellows!”

He smacked his lips upon his admiration for their cleverness, and then became the Messenger-at-Arms.

“The Government is fair distracted, and of course it has to fall back on Himsel’—MacCailein. It’s his idea that the trouble on the Road is not the wanton capers o’ a lot o’ unconnected gangs, but managed by a bond, wi’ someone cunning at the head, and indeed I wouldna say mysel’ but something’s in that notion. All for your private ear, this! Not a word to nobody! Whatever o’t, Drimdorran sends for me this mornin’, and claps me down a letter from Lord Islay. He was himsel’ so much against the tenour o’t that he wouldna even read it to me. I’m to go North and take a look about me.... Nothing more or less than beachdair business—you understand yourself!” and he gave a sly grin to Æneas. “I can see it’s no wi’ old Drimdorran’s will I’m goin’; it’s too much of the Royal recognition for his lordship, but he daren’t go against his master. But here am I, whatever of it, takin’ to the hills for it on Monday; I wish I had a smart young fellow wi’ me, like yoursel’, to keep an eye behind me, but anyway you’ll not forget yon nut!”

“You’ll have it, sure!” said Æneas. “I’m thinking that I have so much of luck just now I can afford to give a lend of it,” and thereupon the other gave a disconcerting start and took to pacing on the floor with his hands plunged deep in his great wide waistcoat pockets.

“I’m not so sure of that,” said he. “Ye’re in the black books of Drimdorran, someway; that’s a thing I found this very evening. A ruddy fury’s on him; he could twist your neck!”

“In heaven’s name, for what!” cried Æneas, astonished.

A disconcerting pause in her father’s manner instantly sent Janet from the room, and Æneas, too, got on his feet, alarmed at something in the other’s manner.

“At any rate, ye’ve put his birse up!” Ninian said. “What made ye miss your evening lesson?”

“I was there at the usual time,” said Æneas; “it was my pupils who failed me.”

Ninian looked sharply at him out of half-shut eyes and changed the conversation. It was with thankfulness his visitor went with the object of his call untouched on.