by John Buchan
Then suddenly the mist cleared. The diary was nothing but jottings and confused reflections, so the sequence of his moods could not be exactly traced, but it was plain that something tremendous had happened . . .
It seemed to have come suddenly late at night, for he noted the hour — one thirty — and that he had been walking the Embankment since eight. Hitherto he had had a dual consciousness, seeing Pamela and himself as sufferers under the same doom, and enduring a double torture. Love and fear for both the girl and himself had brought his mind almost to a delirium, but now there descended upon it a great clarity.
The emotion remained, but now the object was single, for his own death dropped out of the picture. It became suddenly too small a thing to waste a thought on. There were entries like this: “I have torn up the almanack on which I had been marking off the days till June tenth . . . I have been an accursed coward, God forgive me . . . Pamela is dying, and I have been thinking of my own wretched, rotten life.”
He went on steadily with his work, because he thought she would have wished him to, but he never moved far from a telephone. Meanwhile, the poor child was fighting a very desperate battle. I went round to South Audley Street as often as I could, and a white-faced Mollie gave me the last bulletins. There was one night when it seemed certain that Pamela could not see the morning, but morning came and the thread of life still held. She was delirious, talking about Charles mostly, and the mountain inn in the Tyrol where they were going for their honeymoon. Thank God, Charles was not there to listen to that!
He did not go near the house, which I thought was wise, but the diary revealed that he spent the midnight hours striding about Mayfair. He was waiting for her death, waiting for Mollie’s summons to look for the last time upon what was so dear . . .
He was no longer in torment. Indeed, he was calm now, if you can call that calm which is the uttermost despair. His life was bereft of every shadow of value, every spark of colour, and he was living in a bleak desert, looking with aching eyes and a breaking heart at a beautiful star setting below the sky-line, a star which was the only light in the encroaching gloom to lead him home. That very metaphor was in the diary. He probably got it out of some hymn, and I never in my life knew Charles use a metaphor before.
And then there came another change — it is plain in the diary — but this time it was a wholesale revolution, by which the whole man was moved to a different plane . . .
His own predestined death had been put aside as too trivial for a thought, but now suddenly Death itself came to have no meaning. The ancient shadow disappeared in the great brightness of his love.
Every man has some metaphysics and poetry in his soul, but people like Charles lack the gift of expression. The diary had only broken sentences, but they were more poignant than any eloquence. If he had cared about the poets he might have found some one of them to give him apt words; as it was, he could only stumble along among clumsy phrases. But there was no doubt about his meaning. He had discovered for himself the immortality of love. The angel with whom he had grappled had at last blessed him.
He had somehow in his agony climbed to a high place from which he had a wide prospect. He saw all things in a new perspective. Death was only a stumble in the race, a brief halt in an immortal pilgrimage. He and Pamela had won something which could never be taken away . . . This man of prose and affairs became a mystic. One side of him went about his daily round, and waited hungrily for telephone calls, but the other was in a quiet country where Pamela’s happy spirit moved in eternal vigour and youth. He had no hope in the lesser sense, for that is a mundane thing; but he had won peace, the kind that the world does not give . . .
Hope, the lesser hope, was to follow. There came a day when the news from South Audley Street improved, and then there was a quick uprush of vitality in the patient. One morning early in May Mollie telephoned to me that Pamela was out of danger. I went straightway to the City and found Charles in his office, busy as if nothing had happened.
I remember that he seemed to me almost indecently composed. But when he spoke he no longer kept his eyes down, but looked me straight in the face, and there was something in those eyes of his which made me want to shout. It was more than peace — it was a radiant serenity. Charles had come out of the Valley of the Shadow to the Delectable Mountains. Nothing in Heaven or earth could harm him now. I had the conviction that if he had been a poet he could have written something that would have solemnised mankind. As it was, he only squeezed my hand.
VII
I went down to Wirlesdon for the wedding, which was to be in the village church. Charles had gone for an early morning swim in the lake, and I met him coming up with his hair damp and a towel over his shoulder. I had motored from London and had The Times in my hand, but he never glanced at it. Half an hour later I saw him at breakfast, but he had not raided the pile of newspapers on the side-table.
It was a gorgeous June morning, and presently I found Pamela in the garden, busy among the midsummer flowers — a taller and paler Pamela, with the wonderful pure complexion of one who has been down into the shades.
“It’s all there,” she whispered to me, so that her sister Dollie should not hear. “Exactly as he saw it . . . We shall have a lot of questions to answer today . . . I showed it to Charles, but he scarcely glanced at it. It doesn’t interest him. I believe he has forgotten all about it.”
“A queer business, wasn’t it?” Charles told me in the autumn. “Oh yes, it was all explained. There was an old boy of my name, a sort of third cousin of my great-grandfather. I had never heard of him. He had been in the Scots Guards, and had retired as a captain about fifty years ago. Well, he died in a London hotel on June ninth. He was a bachelor, and had no near relations, so his servant sent the notice of his death to The Times. The man’s handwriting was not very clear, and the newspaper people read the age as thirty-six instead of eighty-six . . . Also, the old chap always spoke of his regiment as the Scots Fusilier Guards, and the servant, not being well up in military history, confused it with the Scots Fusiliers . . . He lived in a villa at Cheltenham, which he had christened Marlcote, after the family place.”
THE END
A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY
First published in 1933, this novel features a motley cast of characters, Great War intrigue, a race against time and evil and sacrifice for a greater good. The protagonist is gentleman and officer Adam Melfort, whose thrilling behind-the-lines war service is narrated in detail, though ultimately he loses his place in society and the regiment, being convicted of a crime he did not commit. Melfort embarks on daring missions in the service of his country, including dangerous work behind enemy lines in World War I, perilous espionage in 1920s Germany and a journey to Iceland to rescue an American millionaire.
The first edition
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
TO
EDWARD STEPHEN HARKNESS
“As when a Prince
Of dispers’d Israel, chosen in the shade,
Rules by no canon save his inward light.
And knows no pageant save the pipes and shawms
Of his proud spirit.”
Thus said Jesus, upon whom be peace.
The World is a bridge; pass over
it, but build no house upon it.
The Emperor Akbar’s inscription at Fatehpur-Sikri.
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER I
I
On a warm June evening three men were sitting in the smoking-room of a London club. One was an old man, with a face which had once been weather-be
aten and was now intricately seamed with veins and wrinkles. His bearing, his shoulders trimly squared even at seventy, spoke of the old style of British regimental officer. The second was in his early thirties, a heavy young man, with nothing of the Guardsman about him except his tie. The third might have been any age between forty and sixty, and had writ plain upon him the profession of the law.
The newsboys were shouting in Pall Mall.
“They can’t have got the verdict yet,” said the last. “Jenks was only beginning to sum up when I left. We shall hear nothing for another hour.”
The old man shivered. “Good God! It is awful to be waiting here to know whether Tom Melfort’s boy is to go to prison for six years or ten. I suppose there’s no chance of an acquittal.”
“None,” said the lawyer. “You see, he pled guilty. Leithen was his counsel, and I believe did his best to get him to change his mind. But the fellow was adamant.”
The young soldier, whose name was Lyson, shook his head.
“That was like Adam. There never was a more obstinate chap in his quiet way. Very easy and good-natured till you presumed just a little too much on his placidity, and then you found yourself hard up against a granite wall.”
“How well did you know him?” the lawyer asked.
“I was at school with him and we passed out of Sandhurst together. He was a friend, but not what you would call an intimate. Too clever, and a little too much of the wise youth. . . . Oh yes, he was popular, for he was a first-class sportsman and a good fellow, but he had a bit too much professional keenness for lazy dogs like me. After that he went straight ahead, as you know, and left us all behind. Somebody told me that old Mullins said he was the most brilliant man they had had at the Staff College for a generation. He had got a European war on the brain, and spent most of his leave tramping about the Ardennes or bicycling in Lorraine.”
“If this thing hadn’t happened, what would you have said about his character?”
“Sound as the Bank of England,” was the answer. “A trifle puritanical, maybe. I used to feel that if I ever did anything mean I should be more ashamed to face Adam Melfort than any other man alive. You remember how he looked, sir,” and he turned to the old man. “Always in training — walked with a light step as if he were on the hill after deer — terribly quick off the mark in an argument — all fine and hard and tightly screwed together. The grip of his small firm hand had a sort of electric energy. Not the kind of man you would think likely to take the wrong turning.”
“I am not very clear. . . . What exactly happened?” asked the old man.
“Common vulgar forgery,” the lawyer replied. “He altered a cheque which was made out to his wife — part of her allowance from a rich great-uncle. The facts were not in doubt, and he made no attempt to dispute them. He confessed what he had done, and explained it by a sudden madness. The funny thing was that he did not seem to be ashamed of it. He stood there quite cool and collected, with a ghost of a smile on his face, making admissions which he must have known were going to wreck him for good. You say he was wrapt up in his career, but I never saw anyone face a crash more coolly. . . . The absence of motive puzzles me. Were the Melforts hard up? They never behaved as if they were.”
“Adam was supposed to be fairly well off. He was an only son, and his father died years ago. But I fancy his lady wife made the money fly.”
“I saw her in the witness-box,” said the lawyer. “Pretty as a picture and nicely dressed for the part. She gave her evidence in a voice like music and wept most becomingly. Even old Jenks was touched. . . . Poor little soul! It isn’t much fun for her. . . . Who was she, by the way? Somebody told me she was Irish.”
“She was Camilla Considine,” said Lyson. “Sort of far-away cousin of my own. Adam first met her hunting with the Meath. I haven’t seen a great deal of them lately, but I shouldn’t have said that the marriage was made in Heaven. Oh yes! She was — she is — angelically pretty, with spun-gold hair and melting blue eyes — the real fairy-tale princess type. But I never considered that she had the mind of a canary. She can’t be still, but hops from twig to twig, and her twigs were not the kind of perch that Adam fancied. They each went pretty much their own way. There was a child that died, you know, and after that there was nothing to hold them together. . . . Adam had his regimental duties, and, when he got leave, as I have said, he was off to some strategic corner of Europe. Camilla hunted most of the winter — she rode superbly, and there were plenty of people ready to mount her — and in London she was always dancing about. You couldn’t open a picture-paper without seeing her photograph.
“No,” he continued in reply to a question, “I never heard any suggestion of scandal. Camilla lived with rather a raffish set, but she was not the kind of woman to have lovers. Not human enough. There was something curiously sexless about her. She lived for admiration and excitement, but she gave passion a miss. . . . She and Adam had one thing in common — they were both fine-drawn and rarefied — not much clogged with fleshly appetites. But while Adam had a great brain and the devil of a purpose, Camilla was rather bird-witted — a lovely inconsequent bird. God knows how he ever came to be attracted by her! I thought the marriage absurd at the time, and, now that it has crashed, I see that it was lunacy from the start. I reckoned on disaster, but not from Adam’s side.”
“It’s the motive I can’t get at,” said the lawyer. “If, as you say, Melfort and his wife were more or less estranged, why should he risk his career, not to speak of his soul, to provide her with more money? The cheque was made out to her, remember, so she must have been privy to the business. I can imagine a doting husband playing the fool in that way, but I understand that they scarcely saw each other. He didn’t want money for himself, did he? Had he been speculating, do you suppose?”
“Not a chance of it. He had no interests outside soldiering — except that he used to read a lot. . . . I daresay Camilla may have outrun the constable. Her clothes alone must have cost a pretty penny. . . . No, I can’t explain it except by sudden madness, and that gets us nowhere, for it’s not the kind of madness that I ever connected with Adam Melfort. I can see him killing a man for a principle — he had always a touch of the fanatic — but cheating, never!”
The newsboys’ shouting was loud in Pall Mall. “Let’s send for the last evening paper,” said the lawyer. “It ought to have the verdict. . . . Hullo, here’s Stannix. He may know.”
A fourth man joined the group in the corner. He was tall, with a fine head, which looked the more massive because he wore his hair longer than was the fashion. The newcomer flung himself wearily into a chair. He summoned a waiter and ordered a whisky-and-soda. His face was white and strained, as if he had been undergoing either heavy toil or heavy anxiety.
“What’s the news, Kit?” the younger soldier asked.
“I’ve just come from the court. Two years imprisonment in the second division.”
The lawyer whistled. “That’s a light sentence for forgery,” he said. . . . But the old man, in his high dry voice, quavered, “My God! Tom Melfort’s boy!”
“Leithen handled it very well,” said the newcomer. “Made the most of his spotless record and all that sort of thing, and had a fine peroration about the sudden perversities that might overcome the best of men. You could see that Jenks was impressed. The old chap rather relishes pronouncing sentence, but in this case every word seemed to be squeezed out of him unwillingly, and he did not indulge in a single moral platitude.”
“I suppose we may say that Melfort has got off easily,” said the lawyer.
“On the contrary,” said the man called Stannix, “he has been crushed between the upper and the nether millstone.”
“But on the facts the verdict was just.”
“It was hideously unjust — but then Adam courted the injustice. He asked for it — begged for it.”
Lyson spoke. “You’re his closest friend, Kit. What in God’s name do you make of it all?”
Stannix thirs
tily gulped down his drink. “I wish you had seen him when he heard the sentence. You remember the quiet dreamy way he had sometimes — listening as if his thoughts were elsewhere — half-smiling — his eyes a little vacant. Well, that was how he took it. Perfectly composed — apparently quite unconscious that he was set up there for all the world to throw stones at. Think what a proud fellow he was, and then ask yourself how he managed to put his pride behind him. . . . Mrs Melfort was sitting below, and when Jenks had finished Adam bowed to him, and looked down at his wife. He smiled at her and waved his hand, and then marched out of the dock with his head high. . . . I caught a glimpse of her face, and — well, I don’t want to see it again. There was a kind of crazed furtive relief in it which made my spine cold.”
“You think . . .” the lawyer began.
“I think nothing. Adam Melfort is the best friend I have in the world — the best man I have ever known — and I am bound to back him up whatever line he takes. He has chosen to admit forgery and go to gaol. He drops out of His Majesty’s service and his life is ruined. Very well. That is his choice, and I accept it. . . . But I am going to say something to you fellows which I must say, but which I will never repeat again. I sat through the trial and heard all the evidence. I watched Adam’s face — you see, I know his ways. And I came to one clear conclusion, and I’m pretty certain that Ned Leithen reached it too. He was lying — lying — every word he spoke was a lie.”
‘“I see!” said the lawyer. “Splendide mendax!”
