Читать книгу Below the Salt - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 16

Eleanor O’Rawn had made John feel like a tongue-tied courtier, a juvenile Raleigh speechless and dazzled in the presence of Elizabeth, a mere private in the Russian Guards on whom the eye of Catherine had rested unfavorably for a moment. His consciousness of the imperious side of her and of his own complete unworthiness had not proven any defense. He had fallen in love. When she retired to change her costume, he sat in a corner of the drawing room, facing a beautifully bonneted mahogany cabinet filled with rare bits of things. The contents of the cabinet made no impression on him. His mind was filled with what he knew was the rarest and loveliest thing ever created. “I’m a goner,” he said to himself. “She’ll never think of me as anything but a stupid lunk from a country which lacks her royal approval. But she’s so wonderful that I’ll go on loving her just the same. As long as I live.” Recalling a phrase from a classic poem, he added, “I’ll love her till I die.”

The effect she had on him was quite different when she came down for lunch. He found himself pitying her. The blue and white-trimmed dress into which she had changed showed signs of having been carefully repaired. Even to his far from expert eye the length of the skirt was at least a year behind the style procession. Her mood, moreover, was different.

“Would you like to ride this afternoon?” she asked him in a friendly tone. “I’ll lend you my hunter.”

John said hastily: “I’m a beginner. I had never been in the saddle until I went out to the ranch a few weeks ago. Any kind of old crowbait is good enough for me.”

“He’s the best beginner I ever saw,” declared the senator, who had been keeping an eye on them. “John, why don’t you buy a hunter for yourself? You could get good use out of him while you’re here and I’m sure our good friends would provide stabling until we come back. Have I told you, Patrick, that we plan to drop in again after our jaunt through England and Brittany?”

“That’s a promise I’m going to hold you to, Richard. And I know where we could pick up a splendid fellow for John. The one I have in mind would be a bit on the expensive side, I’m afraid.”

John’s mind had been fired by visions of long rides in the company of this golden-haired divinity, during which he might conceivably be able to get on a better footing with her, to win her liking even.

“Let’s go and buy him right away!” he exclaimed.

The girl sighed, and thought, “Oh, to be able to like a thing and say, ‘Let’s go and buy it!’ ”

John was indulging in an inner prayer. “Oh, Lord, make it possible for me to turn my fifty thousand into fifty million dollars. I want to lay it all at her feet!”

“I am interested in your neighbors, the Tostigans,” said Richard O’Rawn when they sat down to lunch.

The Irishman looked startled. “Why, Richard, the Tostigans ceased to be neighbors a great many years ago,” he said. “The place has been empty since the First World War when the last of them died. It’s been falling into rack and ruin.”

It was clear that the American found this information disturbing. “It never occurred to me to ask you about them. I assumed that they were going along as usual. Weren’t they a vital kind of family?”

“Indeed they were. The countryside still talks about them—the black, fighting Tostigan boys.”

“Bad cess to them!” declared Marty Lacey, the one servant of the household, who had prepared lunch and was now serving it. “Such stories my da told about them. He knew them and to his sorrow it was. Eight was the least there ever was of the brothers and they went in a pack. Been there was a fair or a picnic or a dacent little get-together, sooner or later—said my da—the word got passed around. ‘Here come the Tostigans.’ And there they would be, the fightin’ davils, looking for trouble. They would stand together and they would start to yell fit to curdle the blood, ‘Foight! Foight! Foight!’ Sometimes the other men would sort of join up and accommodate them, and then what a smashing of tables there would be, and a spilling of good vittles and a breaking of bottles, and a blacking of eyes!” Lacey placed on the table a platter of fish fresh caught in the river. “It was good riddance to bad rubbish!” he finished.

The senator was rubbing the bridge of his nose and frowning with an expression which might be called unhappy. “They were good stock to begin with,” he said, as though to himself. Then he straightened up. “As a family they go far back. It is my impression that they came to Ireland at the same time as Richard of Rawen.”

“The Tostigans always made that their claim,” answered the Irishman. “There’s no reason to believe they didn’t. Except there are no proofs.”

The senator did not speak immediately. He was saying to himself: “No, there are no proofs. That is always the sad thing about the happenings of the past. There are so seldom any proofs.” He took a morsel of fish on the tip of his fork, and found it fresh and sweet and quite delectable. He waited until the stout-bellied, long-nosed Marty Lacey had left the room. “Do you know, Patrick, that there is Tostigan blood in all of us?”

The head of the O’Rawns stared at his guest with a questioning light in his eyes. “Now how do you happen to know that? Oh yes, it’s true. There’s a reference in the family records to a Leueen Tostigan who married Richard O’Rawn in the year 1531. It was my own father who found it. We were—well, we were rather quiet about the whole thing. We didn’t want what was left of the black Tostigans descending on us in a body and calling us cousins. You may think we were snobbish about it. But, Richard, you never knew the Tostigans and the clamor they made out of everything!”

“The black, rarin’ davils!” said Marty Lacey, coming in with a fresh supply of boiled potatoes.

Patrick O’Rawn placed his arms on the table and turned to lean closer to his guest. “But, Richard, how does it happen that you know? You’ve never seen the document. You’ve never been in Ireland before. I thought myself the sole custodian of that secret.”

“It was just a surmise, a guess,” declared the American visitor. To himself he added, “It was the only possible explanation. It could be nothing else.”

“To give the devils their due, they were always fine fighting men,” went on Patrick O’Rawn. “The two brothers who were the last, Sigurd and Terence—Sigurd was a family name and there seems to have been one in every generation—were killed in the First World War. They died bravely and well, as Irishmen always do. That, I think, is the one thing we should remember about these very distant cousins of ours. They were born to fight and the quiet existence here was too dull for them.”

Richard O’Rawn made no response. His head was lowered and he seemed to be absorbed in his food. But through his mind a series of figures were marching, dark young men who had answered to the names he had never forgotten—Sigurd, the first-born, Harold, William-with-the-Long-Arm, little Patrick.

After a long pause the visitor raised his head. “I’m glad to know about Sigurd and Terence and that they died so bravely.”

The host was perplexed by the oddness of all this. Richard O’Rawn knew nothing about the Tostigans. How could he? This was his first visit to Ireland. There had never been any mention of them in the letters they had exchanged. Why, then, this strange interest he was manifesting in the troublemaking clan who had been such a problem in the neighborhood when he, Patrick, was a boy?

“Perhaps I am wrong in saying that none of them are left,” he said after several long moments of silence. “It’s generally believed that one of them still persists in the ruins of the small tower where the family always lived; and which, by the way, is authentically Norman and goes back, perhaps, to the time of Henry II. I refer, Cousin, to the Tostigan ghost.”

That brought about a quick uplifting of the leonine head of the visitor from America. “A ghost?” he said. “This is very interesting, Patrick, very interesting indeed. Tell me about it.”

“Understand this first of all. I’m Irish and I think I respond to every chord which stirs in the Irish heart. But I don’t believe in the Tostigan ghost. It doesn’t rattle a battle-ax on the top of the old tower or tramp with mailed feet up and down what is left of the stone steps. It sits on a stone outside the tower, a stone which is shaped like a high-armed chair.”

The American was startled into a comment. “The Marshal’s Seat? Was that what it is called? And isn’t it very old?”

“It has always been there and I believe I’ve heard it referred to by that name.” The head of the household asked no more questions of his guest. All this was getting beyond him. He contented himself with telling the story of the last phase of the Tostigan family. “I was in the First World War but I was too young to get to France. The Armistice came before I saw the last of the training camp. When I came home the two Tostigans were dead and there was no one to claim the old place where they had lived. It was thought there were uncles and cousins here and there about the world, in Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States. Heirs were advertised for and there was plenty of correspondence with people in different parts of the world, although nothing much came of it. No one succeeded in establishing a relationship. The courts are now threatening to close the case and take over the land. It’s not especially good land.”

There was a long pause. “I think, Patrick, I shall pay a visit to the tower one of these nights,” said the old man from America. “It’s a most interesting story. When you get to my years, you have a great concern over things which pertain to the past. I can think of nothing I would rather do than exchange a few words with this visitor who sits and contemplates all that is left of what, no doubt, was once a great dream.”

“The broken walls of an old stone rookery?”

“There might have been great dreams when those walls were first raised, Patrick.”

“Will you let me go with you?” asked the host.

“Of course, Patrick. The same blood runs in our veins. We have the same interest in this story.”

“I’d like to go too,” spoke up John.

“And I,” said Eleanor eagerly, from the foot of the table.

Marty Lacey brought in a dish containing toasted Irish raisin bread. “My da lost four teeth in a go with the Tostigans,” he volunteered. “The murtherin’ davils!”