Читать книгу The New Road - Munro Neil - Страница 6

Table of Contents

From sound sleeping Æneas was wakened at a dark hour of the morning by the rattling of sand on glass. He jumped from bed; threw up the window; stuck his head out; saw a figure standing in the gutter of the lane.

“He’s wanting you this instant, Master Æneas,” said the Muileach hoarsely. “Take my excuse for wakening you with a fistful of the gravel.”

“Who wants me?” said Æneas, and still with some of his sleep upon him.

“Who but Himself—Drimdorran? My loss! but we have had the night of it! He’s yonder like a man that would be in the horrors, tramping the boards, Master Æneas, tramping the boards! And not a drop of drink in him, no more than’s in myself, though cold’s the morning and I all trembling.”

“What hour is it?” asked Æneas, shivering; indeed the morn was bitter cold.

“Five hours of the clock,” said the messenger. “Sorry am I to turn ye out like this before the bird has drunk the waters, but the man is raging for ye, and when it comes to the bit with him, there is no one in the leeward or in the windward, or in the four brown boundaries of the deep, can hold a candle to him!”

Æneas drew in; threw on his clothes, and having given to the man a glass of morning bitters, left a sleeping house and took to the road with him, benumbed with wonder. Not one word of satisfaction could he get from the excited messenger, only that Drimdorran House was not yet bedded and the master clamant for his presence. They went up by the brawling river through the woods that roared with wind. In the sky was not one twinkle of a star, but when they reached the open glen, upon the dark as high as ever was the light of half a dozen windows.

At the sight of them, high-hanging, something struck Drimdorran’s man; he stopped upon the road and slapped himself upon the haunch with an exclamation. “Men and love!” says he, “if I have not clean forgot the lady’s letter till I saw her window yonder.”

“What is’t?” said Æneas, and had a billet thrust into his hand.

“Margaret gave it to me,” said the Muileach. “She followed me like the wind through half the grounds, and put it on to me as spells and charms and crosses that I was to give it to yourself, and oh! the burraidh that I am, did I not clean forget it in my thirst down yonder!”

“She’s not up at this hour?” said Æneas, unbelieving.

“She has not put her wee round head to pillow!” said the Muileach.

Æneas had just one moment in the lobby of the house to turn the billet outside in and read one frantic line: “For God’s sake not a word to him about the dovecote!” when Duncanson, with a flannel wrapped about him, sodden-eyed for the want of sleep, and a cheek on him like rusted bone, came out upon him from the closet.

“You’re there,” said he harshly, with a girn upon his face; “come this way!” and Æneas, shaking in his shoes, went in behind him, looking at the back of the old one’s neck, for every hair was bristling on it.

The room was like an oven, from a fire piled high above the hobs with sizzling timber; it was lit as for a wake with a dozen candles, three upon the mantle, three upon the desk, the rest on brackets. For ordinar that business-room, as Æneas saw it once a month when he came in to get his wages, was as cold as charity, and as prim’s a vestry; now was it all disorder, and bestrewn with papers that had sluiced across the open desk-flap to the floor. Duncanson, slipshod, ungartered, shut the door with calculated thoroughness, swished through the mess himself apparently had made by tearing out the desk’s contents in some impatient frantic search, and on the hearthstone turned upon Æneas a granite visage.

“I want an explanation, sir,” said he in a voice that choked with passion. “What is this my daughter tells me of your taking William to the town upon a gowk’s errand?”

Æneas would have hardly known the man in any other situation! It was not only that the sloven dress, the bald high head without its periwig, with turgid veins upon the temples, the brindled tufts above the ears, were new to him, but that the manner and the voice were so transformed. Drimdorran hitherto in all their meetings, that were rare indeed and formal, ever was the sleek well-mannered gentleman (a bit aloof) who boomed in magisterial tones with an averted absent eye, as if his eloquence was strengthened by an inward contemplation of the sort of man he thought he was: his very post with Islay was maintained in measure by his reputation for a gentlemanly presence and a suave though confident address.

And now he was a bubblyjock—a frenzied turkey, gobbling his words; a chin like to an adze, and the high points of his parchment face like rust!

“Well, sir! Well, sir!” he cried out, clenching his fists and stamping, “I’m waiting for your story!” for not a word at first could the tutor say to him.

A moment since, and Æneas was in a panic, but this bullying approach called up his pride and self-possession. At once he understood, in part at least, the situation—Margaret had sacrificed him, and it was for him to take the blame for her misdoing. But as yet he was not clear about the nature of her story to her father; caution must be exercised. He blandly took a chair.

“The thing can be explained,” said he, and wondered where on earth the explanation was to come from.

“I warrant it will take explaining!” screamed Drimdorran. “You make my daughter, sir, the instrument of some scheme of yours, and got her to send off my ward on a pretence that you desire his presence somewhere else at eight o’clock than here, where you are paid to come and learn him. He went to the town in search of you by her instructions: you were not there——”

“I missed him by ten minutes,” broke in Æneas, now seeing the way more clear before him.

“You did sir, did ye! Where was ye?” shot Drimdorran at him.

“At Ninian Campbell’s house,” said Æneas, too quick for caution.

“At Ninian’s—was Ninian there?”

“Most of the time, sir,” answered Æneas; and the old man thrust a finger at him. “Ye are a liar, sir!” he shouted. “Ninian was here, in this room, at the very hour for which you trysted William in the town.”

“I know,” said Æneas. “All the same, I met him in his house later.”

Drimdorran twitched the flannel wrap with nervous fingers, fumbled in some inner pocket, and produced a horn from which he ladled snuff into his nostrils like a man who hardly knew what he was doing. It seemed to calm him somewhat; in a tone more settled yet with something crafty in his eye, he put the very question that the tutor had been dreading.

“Was you, by any chance, with Margaret?”

“With Margaret! Not I!” said Æneas boldly, surprised to find so critical a stage in his examination could so easily be passed by simply lying. He looked for some sign of relief at this on the father’s countenance, but on the contrary he found dismay. It looked as if the man was on the point of whimpering!

“You will not bamboozle me, sir!” he protested furiously. “I am not so blind! You were in this house, I learn, at the usual hour you meet your pupils; you went out when you found they were not here—as no doubt you had been aware,—and you were back again. What were you doing, sir, in the interregnum?”

“I was on some strictly private matters of my own,” said Æneas, no longer even anxious to be civil, and at that Drimdorran made three scuffling steps from the hearthstone to him with the squeal of a rabbit trapped, as if to catch him by the throat.

Up started Æneas with a front of resolution, and the nostrils of him flaring, which perceiving, Duncanson stopped short and stood a moment swaying on his feet like one that had a stroke. The notion came to Æneas as he stood looking at him, he had never rightly seen the man before, but always in a mask or a veneer, made up of clothes and studied manners; this creature, stripped of all that gave to him the semblance of a person schooled and prudent, stood stark-nakedly revealed a savage, club or dagger only wanting to give murder to his passion. Under eaves as coarse as heather were his eyes recessed and glinting like an adder’s.

With a dry gulp of the throat he pulled himself together, turned sudden on his heel, and sought his desk to scrabble with a hand among the papers. He brought one out of a pigeon-hole and ran a finger down its lines.

“The term of your engagement as young Campbell’s tutor ends next week,” said he—“to be precise, on Thursday the twenty-fifth. I have had no instructions from his lordship to extend—so far as I am concerned, it is an end to your incumbency,—it is neither for his son’s advantage nor for mine that you should any longer come about my house. I will report to his lordship, and you need not put yourself to the trouble of coming back to implement the week that is to run of your engagement. Your money will be sent.”

“My terms,” said Æneas, as cool as ice, “were made with Islay.”

“They were,” said Duncanson, sneering, “and much against my will. But I was here to keep an eye on your deportment, and it does not please me.”

“I’ll write to him in the first instance,” said Æneas. “This sudden stoppage of my office calls for more explanation.”

Drimdorran turned on him with a voice that was hoarse with fury. “If it comes to that,” said he, “there will be several other points demanding explanation. I have made no charge against ye on another matter that I would be loth to lay before his lordship,—I found last night that some one had been tampering with my keys and with this desk,” and he slapped an open hand upon it. “No, no! I make no charges, mind!” he cried as Æneas started blurting out denials. “I’m only telling you; you’ll see at once it looks gey bad against you! My keys were lifted from a room upstairs; my private desk was rummaged, to what purpose detrimental to his lordship’s private interests I canna say. They were replaced, I found, about the very time that you came back.”

“It seems a small affair to make so much ado about,” said Æneas, with more composure than he felt, and realising now how justified was Margaret’s terror lest her escapade should be revealed.

“Ado! Ado!” Drimdorran shouted, jumping to his feet. “By God, sir, I could have ye jyled for less. It’s not a small affair to pry in lockfast places, I’ll assure you!”

“Small enough, being only a supposition, to haul a man from bed at this hour of morning,” Æneas retorted, and now he fairly sweated in the suffocating heat to which the old man’s fury seemed contributory. He turned to leave the room. “The matter can be settled in a better air and at a wiser hour,” he said, upon the threshold. “I’ll see you when I talk it over with my uncle.”

He got outside the door with Duncanson behind him pressing so close he felt his breathing.

“If I were you,” said Duncanson, “I would consider about consulting any one regarding such a thing. I make no public charge against you, mind, except that you have been neglectful of your duties in this instance, and have tricked your pupils.”

“That’s a point, sir, that I’ll ask you to remit to my own judgment,” said Æneas quietly.

“Please yourself,” said the old man, “only I’ll advise you not to say too much about it to the mealmonger,” and with a bang he shut the closet door.

The tutor groped his way along the passage, more furious within himself at this last insult to his uncle than with all that had preceded. He had just got to the exit from the house when he heard light running steps behind him; stopped, and found his elbow grasped by Margaret.

“Oh, Æneas!” she whispered in a voice of the greatest tribulation, “what happened?”

It was the first time she had ever called him by his Christian name, and that, in some way, instantly dispelled the angry feeling that he had to be her victim. He was sorry for her—that she should be child to such a man.

“Do not vex yourself,” he said to her softly. “You are quite secure. He does not know.”

“But he is furious; I heard him shouting to you! And what a night we have passed! He has been like one deranged. Oh, Æneas! I meant to tell him everything, but when I saw his state I daren’t.”

“Indeed,” said Æneas ruefully, “it is a pickle we are into. You have put back the keys?”

“The keys, but not the box,” she answered. “I had the keys restored before you came that last time, and since then I have not had a chance to put the box back.”

“I think he has not missed it yet,” said Æneas. “At all events, he has not charged me with it; that’s about the only insult that he spared me. Upon my word the man is crazy! And now I’m on my warning; my tutoring is at an end.”

On hearing this she fell to silent weeping, hanging to his arm. The fanlight of the door let in the break of morning, and they were revealed to one another something like to phantoms grey and bloodless.

“Oh!” she said with passion, “you must think me an abandoned wretch! It was because I could not rid myself of William any other way, and I was keen to see the doocot, that I told him you were waiting for him in the town. And now my father thinks the thing was planned between us to get rid of Will. It is not fair to you—I’ll tell him everything.”

“Margaret!” her father’s voice came bawling from the lobby, “are ye there?”

“Tell him nothing,” Æneas whispered; he could see that shout already shake her resolution. “I can thole his anger: what’s the odds to me?”