Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  “Champagne,” said Vernon. “I prescribe it.”

  “But you’re making far too much fuss about me,” I protested. “I can easily dine downstairs with you.”

  “I think you ought to dine here. You’ve put yourself in my hands and I’m your medical adviser.”

  He saw me start my meal before he left me.

  “Do you mind if I say good-night now?” he said. “You ought to get to bed pretty soon, and I have some work I want to do after dinner. Sound sleep and pleasant dreams.”

  I dined excellently, and after a single pipe was resolutely put to bed by Beaton the butler. They were benevolent despots in this house who were not to be gainsaid. I was sufficiently weary to be glad to go to sleep, but before I dropped off I wondered just a little at the nature of my reception. There were no other guests, Beaton had told me, and it seemed odd that a boy of nineteen alone in this Gothic mausoleum should show so little desire for human companionship. I should have expected, even if I were not allowed downstairs, to have had him come and talk to me for an hour or so before turning in. What work had he to which he was so faithful? I remembered that Charles had mentioned that he was a bit of a swell at his books, but, as Charles himself had been ploughed for Pass Mods, that might mean very little. Anyhow, there was something morbid about a conscience which at nineteen forced its possessor to work in vacation time after dinner. He had been immensely hospitable, but obviously he had not wanted my company. That aloofness which I had remarked at Lady Amysfort’s ball had become a heavy preoccupation. His attitude had been courteously defensive; there had been a screen which robbed his kindness of all geniality. I felt quite distinctly that there was something in or about the house, something connected with himself, from which I was being resolutely excluded.

  I slept well, and was awakened by Beaton bringing my early tea. He had undrawn the curtains and opened one of the windows, and a great flood of sunlight and spring airs was pouring through. The storm had passed, and April was in her most generous mood. My ankle felt lumpish and stiff, but when Beaton examined it he pronounced that it was mending nicely. “But you can’t press on it to-day, sir,” he added. “Mr. Vernon won’t let you move to-day. . . . Breakfast will be laid in the sitting-room, and Mr. Vernon’s compliments and he proposes to join you at nine o’clock. I will return and bandage the ankle and assist you to rise as soon as Prayers are over.”

  Presently, as I lay watching a ridge of distant hill seen through the window and trying to decide what it could be, the sound of singing rose from some room below me. It must be Prayers. The old-fashioned hymn tune reminded me of my childhood, and I wondered how many young men of to-day kept up the fashion of family worship when alone in a country house. And then I suddenly remembered all about the Milburnes, for they had been my mother’s friends.

  Humphrey Milburne had been a rich Lancashire cotton-spinner, whose father or grandfather — I forget which — had been one of the pioneers of the industry. I don’t think he had ever concerned himself greatly with business, for his métier had always been that of the devout layman who is more occupied with church affairs than any bishop. He had been a leader of the Evangelical party, a vigorous opponent of ritualist practices, and a noted organizer of religious revivals. Vague memories of him came back to me from my childhood, for my own family had been of the same persuasion. I had a recollection of a tall, bearded man who, on a visit to us, had insisted on seeing the children, and had set me on his knee, and had asked me, a shivering, self-conscious mite, embarrassing questions about my soul. I remembered his wife, Lady Augusta, more clearly. She was a thin little woman who never seemed to be separated from a large squashy Bible stuffed with leaflets and secured by many elastic bands. She had had a knack of dropping everything as she moved, and I had acted as page to retrieve her belongings. She had been very kind to me, for to her grief she had then no children. . . . I remembered that a son had at last been born—”a child of many prayers,” my mother had called him. And then came a vague recollection of a tragedy. Lady Augusta had died when the boy was an infant, and her husband had followed within the year. After that the Milburnes passed out of my life, except that their nurse had come to us when I was at Oxford, and had had much to say of young Master Vernon.

  My vague remembrance seemed to explain my host. The child of ageing parents and an orphan from his early years — that would account for his lack of youthful spontaneity. I liked the notion of him I was acquiring; there was something quaint and loyal in his keeping up the family ritual — an evangelical athlete with the looks of Apollo. I had fancied something foreign in his air, but that of course was nonsense. He came of the most prosaic British stock, cotton-spinning Milburnes, and for his mother a Douglas-Ernott, whose family was the quintessence of Whig solidity.

  I found Vernon waiting for me in the sunny sitting-room, dressed in rough grey homespun, and with an air of being ready for a long day in the open. There was a change in him since the night before. His eyes were a little heavy, as if he had slept badly, but the shutters were lifted from them. His manner was no longer constrained, and the slight awkwardness I had felt in his presence was gone. He was now a cheerful communicative undergraduate.

  “Beaton says you had a good night, sir, but you mustn’t use that foot of yours. You can’t think of London to-day, you know. I’ve nothing to do except look after you, so you’d better think of me as Charles with a nephew’s privileges. It’s going to be a clinking fine day, so what do you say to running up in the car to the moors above Shap and listening to the curlews? In the spring they’re the joiliest things alive.”

  He was a schoolboy now, looking forward to an outing, and we might have been breakfasting in Oxford rooms before going out with the Bicester. I fell into his holiday mood, and forgot to tell him that I had long ago met his parents. He lent me an ulster and helped me downstairs, where he packed me into the front of a big Daimler and got in beside me. In the clear spring sunshine, with the park a chessboard of green grass and melting snow, and the rooks cawing in the beech tops, Severns looked almost venerable, for its lines were good and the stone was weathering well. He nodded towards the long façades. “Ugly old thing, when you think of Levens or Sizergh, but it was my grandfather’s taste, and I mean to respect it. If we get a fine sunset you’ll see it light up like an enchanted castle. It’s something to be able to see the hills from every window, and to get a glimpse of the sea from the top floor. Goodish sport, too, for we’ve several miles of salmon and sea trout, and we get uncommon high birds in the upper coverts.”

  We sped up by winding hill-roads to the moors, and there were the curlews crying over the snow-patched bent with that note which is at once eerie, and wistful, and joyful. There were grouse, too, busy about their nesting, and an occasional stone-chat, and dippers flashing their white waistcoats in every beck. It was like being on the roof of the world, with the high Lake hills a little foreshortened, like ships coming over the horizon at sea. Lunch we had with us, and ate on a dry bank of heather, and we had tea in a whitewashed moorland farm. I have never taken to any one so fast as I took to that boy. He was in the highest spirits, as if he had finished some difficult task, and in the rebound he became extraordinarily companionable. I think he took to me also, for he showed a shy but intense interest in my doings, the eagerness with which an undergraduate prospects the channels of the world’s life which he is soon to navigate. I had been prepared to find a touch of innocent priggishness, but there was nothing of the kind. He seemed to have no dogmas of his own, only inquiries.

  “I suppose a lawyer’s training fits a man to examine all kinds of problems — not only legal ones,” he asked casually at luncheon. “I mean he understands the value of any sort of evidence, for the principles of logical truth are always the same?”

  “I suppose so,” I replied, “though it’s only legal conundrums that come my way. I was once asked my opinion on a scientific proof — in the higher mathematics — but I didn’t make much of it — couldn’t quit
e catch on to the data or understand the language.”

  “Yes, that might be a difficulty,” he admitted. “But a thing like a ghost story, for instance — you’d be all right at that, I suppose?”

  The boy had clearly something in his head, and I wondered if the raw magnificence of Severns harboured any spooks. Could that be the reason of his diffidence on the previous evening?

  When we got home we sat smoking by the library fire, and while I skimmed the Times Vernon dozed. He must have been short of his sleep and was now making up for it in the way of a healthy young man. As I watched his even breathing I decided that here there could be no abnormality of body or mind. It was like watching a tired spaniel on the rug, too tired even to hunt in his dreams.

  As I lifted my eyes from the paper I saw that he was awake and was looking at me intently, as if he were hesitating about asking me some question.

  “I’ve been asleep,” he apologized. “I can drop off anywhere after a day on the hills.”

  “You were rather sleepless as a child, weren’t you?” I asked.

  His eyes opened. “I wonder how you know that?”

  “From your old nurse. I ought to have told you that in my boyhood I knew your parents a little. They stayed with us more than once. And Mrs. Ganthony came to my mother from you. I was at Oxford at the time, and I remember how she used to entertain us with stories about Severns. You must have been an infant when she left.”

  “I was four. What sort of things did she tell you?”

  “About your bad nights, and your pluck. I fancy it was by way of censure of our declamatory habits. Why, after all these years I remember some of her phrases. How did the thing go? ‘What fidgeted me was the way his lordship ‘eld his tongue. For usual he’d shout as lusty as a whelp, but on these mornings I’d find him with his eyes like moons and his skin white and shiny, and never a cheep the whole blessed night, with me lying next door, and a light sleeper at all times, Mrs. Wace, ma’am.’ Was Mrs. Wace a sort of Mrs. Harris?”

  He laughed merrily. “To think that you should have heard that! No, she was our housekeeper, and Ganthony, who babbled like Sairey Gamp, made a litany of her name. That’s the most extraordinary thing I ever heard.”

  “You’ve outgrown that childish ailment anyhow,” I said.

  “Yes. I have outgrown it.” My practice with witnesses made me detect just a shade of hesitation.

  At dinner he returned to the subject which seemed to interest him, the exact nature of the legal training. I told him that I was an advocate, not a judge, and so had no need to cultivate a judicial mind.

  “But you can’t do without it,” he protested. “You have to advise your client and pronounce on his case before you argue it. The bulk of your work must be the weighing of evidence. I should have thought that that talent could be applied to any subject in the world if the facts were sufficiently explained. In the long run the most abstruse business will boil down to a fairly simple deduction from certain data. Your profession enables you to select the relevant data.”

  “That may be true in theory, but I wouldn’t myself rate legal talent so high. A lawyer is apt to lack imagination, you know.” Then I stopped, for I had suddenly the impression that Vernon wanted advice, help of some kind — that behind all his ease he was profoundly anxious, and that a plea, almost a cry, was trembling on his lips. I detest confidences and labour to avoid them, but I could no more refuse this boy than stop my ears against a sick child. So I added, “Of course lawyers make good confidants. They’re mostly decent fellows, and they’re accustomed to keeping their mouths shut.”

  He nodded, as if I had settled some private scruple, and we fell to talking about spring salmon in the Tay.

  “Take the port into the library,” he told Beaton. “Sir Edward doesn’t want coffee. Oh, and see that the fire is good. We shan’t need you again to-night. I’ll put Sir Edward to bed.”

  There was an odd air of purpose about him, as he gave me his arm to the library and settled me with a cigar in a long chair. Then he disappeared for a minute or two and returned with a shabby little clasped leather book. He locked the door and put the key on the mantelpiece, and when he caught me smiling he smiled too, a little nervously.

  “Please don’t think me an ass,” he said. “I’m going to ask a tremendous favour. I want you to listen to me while I tell you a story, something I have never told to any one in my life before. . . . I don’t think you’ll laugh at me, and I’ve a notion you may be able to help me. It’s a confounded liberty, I know, but may I go on?”

  “Most certainly,” I said. “I can’t imagine myself laughing at anything you had to tell me; and if there’s anything in me that can help you it’s yours for the asking.”

  He drew a long breath. “You spoke of my bad nights as a child and I said I had outgrown them. Well, it isn’t true.”

  II

  When Vernon was a very little boy he was the sleepiest and healthiest of mortals, but every spring he had a spell of bad dreams. He slept at that time in the big new night-nursery at the top of the west wing, which his parents had built not long before their death. It had three windows looking out to the moorish flats which run up to the fells, and from one window, by craning your neck, you could catch a glimpse of the sea. It was all hung, too, with a Chinese paper whereon pink and green parrots squatted in wonderful blue trees, and there seemed generally to be a wood fire burning. He described the place in detail, not as it is to-day, but as he remembered it.

  Vernon’s recollection of his childish nightmares was hazy. They varied, I gathered, but narrowed down in the end to one type. He used to find himself in a room different from the nursery and bigger, but with the same smell of wood smoke. People came and went, such as his nurse, the butler, Simon the head keeper, Uncle Appleby his guardian, Cousin Jennifer, the old woman who sold oranges in Axby, and a host of others. Nobody hindered them from going away, and they seemed to be pleading with him to come too. There was danger in the place; something was going to happen in the big room, and if by that time he was not gone there would be mischief. . . . But it was quite clear to him that he could not go. He must stop there, with the wood smoke in his nostrils, and await the advent of the something. But he was never quite sure of the nature of the compulsion. He had a notion that if he made a rush for the door at Uncle Appleby’s heels he would be allowed to escape, but that somehow he would be behaving badly. Anyhow, the place put him into a sweat of fright, and Mrs. Ganthony looked darkly at him in the morning.

  Those troubled springs continued — odd interludes in a life of nearly unbroken health. Mrs. Ganthony left because she could not control her tongue and increased the boy’s terrors, and Vernon was nine — he thought — before the dream began to take a really definite shape. The stage was emptying. There was nobody in the room now but himself, and he saw its details a little more clearly. It was not any apartment in Severns. Rather it seemed like one of the big old panelled chambers which he remembered from visits to the Midland country houses of his mother’s family, when he had arrived after dark and had been put to sleep in a great bed in a place lit with dancing firelight. In the morning it had looked only an ordinary big room, but at that hour of the evening it had seemed an enchanted cave. The dream-room was not unlike these, for there was the scent of a wood fire and there were dancing shadows, but he could not see clearly the walls or the ceiling, and there was no bed. In one corner was a door which led to the outer world, and through this he knew that he might on no account pass. Another door faced him, and he knew that he had only to turn the handle for it to open.

  But he did not want to, for he understood quite clearly what was beyond. There was a second room just like the first one; he knew nothing about it except that opposite the entrance another door led out of it. Beyond was a third chamber, and so on interminably. There seemed to the boy to be no end to this fantastic suite. He thought of it as a great snake of masonry, winding up hill and down dale away to the fells or the sea. . . . Yes, but there
was an end. Somewhere far away in one of the rooms was a terror waiting on him, or, as he feared, coming towards him. Even now it might be flitting from room to room, every minute bringing its soft tread nearer to the chamber of the wood fire.

  About this time of his life the dream was an unmitigated horror. Once it came while he was ill with a childish fever, and it sent his temperature up to a point which brought Dr. Moreton galloping from Axby. In his waking hours he did not, as a rule, remember it clearly; but during the fever, asleep and awake, that sinuous building, one room thick, with each room opening from the other, was never away from his thoughts. It amazed him to think that outside were the cheerful moors where he hunted for plovers’ eggs, and that only a thin wall of stone kept him from pleasant homely things. The thought used to comfort him when he was awake, but in the dream it never came near him. Asleep, the whole world seemed one suite of rooms, and he, a forlorn little prisoner, doomed grimly to wait on the slow coming through the many doors of a fear which transcended word and thought.

  He became a silent, self-absorbed boy, and, though the fact of his nightmares was patent to the little household, the details remained locked up in his head. Not even to Uncle Appleby would he tell them, when that gentleman, hurriedly kind, came to visit his convalescent ward. His illness made Vernon grow, and he shot up into a lanky, leggy boy. But the hills soon tautened his sinews, and all the time at his preparatory school he was a healthy and active child. He told me that he tried to exorcise the dream through his religion — to “lay his burden on the Lord,” as the old evangelical phrase has it; but he signally failed, though he got some comfort from the attempt. It was borne in on him, he said, that this was a burden which the Lord had laid quite definitely on him and meant him to bear like a man.

  He was fifteen and at Eton when he made the great discovery. The dream had become almost a custom now. It came in April at Severns about Easter-tide — a night’s discomfort (it was now scarcely more) in the rush and glory of the holidays. There was a moment of the old wild heart-fluttering; but a boy’s fancy is more quickly dulled than a child’s, and the endless corridors were now more of a prison than a witch’s antechamber. By this time, with the help of his diary, he had fixed the date of the dream; it came regularly on the night of the first Monday of April. Now the year I speak of he had made a long expedition into the hills, and had stridden homeward at a steady four miles an hour among the gleams and shadows of an April twilight. He was alone at Severns, so he had had his supper in the big library, where afterwards he sat watching the leaping flames on the open stone hearth. He was very weary, and sleep fell upon him in his chair. He found himself in the wood-smoke chamber, and before him the door leading to the unknown. . . . But it was no indefinite fear that now lay beyond. He knew clearly — though how he knew he could not tell — that each year the something came a room nearer, and was even now but twelve rooms off. In twelve years his own door would open, and then —