Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  Then, feeling something strained in the air, she made a hasty introduction. “Mr Kinloch — Sir Turnour. The son of a country neighbour.”

  Had she said “a country neighbour” it would have been less hard, but the words “son of” seemed to rank the boy far down in the degrees of the negligible.

  Sir Turnour was no fop with a quizzing eyeglass. He regarded Jock with the fresh critical eyes which he would have turned upon a horse or dog. Those eyes took in every detail of the ill-made clothes, the ungainly posture, the nervous lips. They were not hostile. They were not disparaging. But they seemed to look from a great height upon something very lowly.

  He bowed curtly.

  “The gentleman addressed you familiarly,” he said. “Is he perhaps a Scotch cousin?”

  “Oh no. Only a childhood’s friend. Long ago we played together.”

  Sir Turnour smiled with infinite tolerance.

  “I see. As your Scotch poet sings,

  “‘We two have paddled in the burn.’

  It is a claim to acquaintance which should not be denied. Your servant, Mr Kinloch,” and he made him a second bow. “I fear,” he added, turning to his companions, “that there is no time to exchange youthful reminiscences, for I hear the horses on the cobbles. I must see you comfortably bestowed, and would to heaven I could be your fellow-traveller! But I have your promise, Miss Evandale, that you will sit by me when I drive my blue roans next to Richmond, and I shall not fail to exact its fulfilment.”

  He swept the ladies with him, and no one of the three had another glance for the melancholy Jock. Miss Kirsty, blushing divinely, clung closer to Sir Turnour’s arm, and Miss Georgie tossed her towering head-dress. Clearly the girl was powerfully attracted by this new cavalier, and it was not less plain that he was smitten, for the eyes with which he looked down on her face were suddenly drained of arrogance.

  This Jock saw, and it left him white and gaping — not wrathful, but stricken, as one who finds the foundations of life destroyed. It was the bereavement he suffered from, not the insult. But Mr Lammas was furiously angry, and had an unregenerate impulse to run after the stately gentleman and buffet his ears. For the scene he had witnessed had outraged his innermost decencies. The man had not been uncivil, nor had he been contemptuous — far better if he had, for it would have been proof of jealousy, vanity, or some other respectable human emotion. He had scarcely even been condescending. He had simply by his manner blotted out Jock from the world, ignored him as a thing too trivial for a thought. This god-like aloofness was the cruellest insolence that he had ever witnessed, and his heart ached for the boy. The great world had shown itself to the humble provinces and withered them with its stare. Mr Lammas for the moment was a hot Jacobin. He longed to take that world by the scruff, with its wealth and brave clothes and fine, well-fed, well-tended bodies, and rub its nose in something mighty unpleasant.

  Jock still stood limply, like a man who has been struck between the eyes. Mr Lammas dragged him to a chair, and fetched a mug of strong ale from the adjacent taproom.

  “Drink that,” he said fiercely, “and pull yourself together. Don’t stand mooning there like a dying duck.”

  Jock drank, and presently he raised his head.

  “You saw that? I’ve got my congé with a vengeance. . . . ‘Son of a country neighbour!’ . . . Did you ever hear the like? And yon old Jezebel of an aunt girning at me! And Kirsty smiling up at yon fatted calf!”

  His temper rose. “What did she call the fellow?” he shouted. “Sir Something Somebody? Two yards of haberdashery and buxom flesh and a red face atop of them — that’s a woman’s fancy. The devil fly away with the whole sex. . . .” He repented. “No, I won’t ban little Kirsty. She’s still a baby and easy glamoured. But by God I’ll be even with the man.” Then in sheer misery he dropped his head on his arms and wept.

  A horn blew loud in the yard. Mr Lammas jumped to his feet in consternation. “I should go with the coach,” he cried. “And my mails are at the King’s Arms and I have no place bespoken.” . . .

  Jock clutched his arm, and turned on him a distraught face.

  “You can’t leave me, Nanty. For God’s sake stay with me. I beg you in the name of common humanity. I summon you by the Fishers’ Oath. I’m in hell, and if you leave me alone I swear I’ll cut my throat or drop into the harbour.”

  Mr Lammas was in a sad quandary. In two minutes the coach would be gone, and he would have failed in his duty of urgent speed. But could he forsake this white-faced boy whose eyes had the pleading pathos of a dog’s?

  “What’s your hurry, man?” Jock moaned. “Your snuffy old college business can surely wait a day.”

  “I have a private mission as well, and that is of extreme urgency.”

  “Well, you’ve a private mission here in Berwick that’s just as urgent.”

  Mr Lammas came to a sudden resolution. He would take Jock into his confidence, for one of the actors in the play had five minutes back wounded him cruelly, and he would sympathise with Mr Lammas’s errand.

  “That man with Miss Evandale,” he said, “was Sir Turnour Wyse. He is the best whip in England and reputed to be one of the best shots. He has challenged Lord Belses in a private quarrel, and is seeking him to force him to fight. At Lord Snowdoun’s request I go to London to find my dear Harry, and, please God, to save his life.”

  These words wrought a miraculous change in Jock Kinloch. He rose violently and sent the ale-mug crashing to the floor. He seized Mr Lammas’s coat by the lapels and thrust his face close to his. His sorrows seemed to be forgotten in a strong excitement.

  “Wyse!” he exclaimed. “That fellow was Sir Turnour Wyse? And he is after Belses to pistol him. By God, this time I’m on the side of the hare. . . . And you’re for London seeking Belses? You’re in luck, Nanty, for you have come to the right bit and the right man. Would it surprise you to hear that at this moment Belses is a long sight nearer Berwick than London? . . . There’s the filthy coach starting. Let it go and good speed to it, for I’ve done with the whole concern. We’re for a bigger game, Nanty, my lad. I’ll have Eben Garnock at the King’s Arms in half an hour. Back with you there, and get us a room to ourselves. A room, mind you, with a key to the door.”

  CHAPTER V. King’s Business

  Jock Kinloch flung himself out by the entrance which gave on the High Street, while Mr Lammas remained seated till he heard the toot of the guard’s horn which proclaimed that the Highflyer had started on its southward journey. Then he sought the courtyard, from which ostlers, grooms and idle spectators were slowly clearing. There was no sign of Sir Turnour, but his broad chaise was there, and his servant was superintending the last cleaning and polishing operations. Bright as a new pin it shone in the morning sun.

  At this point it behoves the chronicler to get on more easy terms with his hero. The titular dignities of Mr Lammas must be dropped, for they are now out of place in a world in which they have no meaning. To us he shall be Nanty, as he already was to Jock Kinloch and to the humblest bejant of St Andrews.

  Certainly there was nothing of the professor in the young man who jostled his way among the market folk in the High Street and swung into Hide Hill, from which he looked over the shining river to the red roofs of Tweedmouth, and the green pastures which were England. His sober black clothes did not rank him among the sedentary, for his long strides were like those of a hill shepherd, and there was an odd light in his eyes. His feelings were a compound of anger and excitement. The scene at the Red Lion had stirred in him what he had scarcely looked for, a most unphilosophic wrath. That assured baronet represented a world which he had hitherto admired and cultivated, for it was to it he looked for the fulfilling of his ambitions; but now he found that it roused in him the liveliest antagonism, for it had treated a friend like dirt. Was it some Jacobinical strain in him, he wondered, that made his soul revolt against such arrogant condescension? He clenched a fist with which he would joyfully have assaulted Sir Turnour’s comeliness.
. . . But, steadying and cooling his indignation, came the reflection that he had heard news of high practical import.

  In the last twelve hours he had thought of his task as meaning a visit to London, a conference with Lord Snowdoun, and a search for the missing lad in some far quarter of England. Now, if Jock spoke the truth, Lord Belses was somewhere close at hand, and at any moment he might be facing the purpose of his mission. A sudden thought made him quicken his pace. Sir Turnour was dallying in Berwick. Why? The man had come north looking for Belses, to force him to fight, or to make him eat humble pie. Sir Turnour also might be aware of Jock’s news. Some time in the next day or two, somewhere in this neighbourhood, it was his business to rescue the boy from this intolerable bravo. The thought sent little shivers down Nanty’s spine, for the man had looked immensely formidable, but he was conscious, too, that it stiffened his resolution. If he was to go into battle, let it be against this baronet, and all the cruel, glittering world for which he stood.

  He mounted to his bedroom in the massive stone hostelry of the King’s Arms. There was no sign of Mr Dott, but he found the landlord, and arranged for privacy in a little chamber on the first floor which was a withdrawing-room used by the Whitader Club at their monthly dinners. Then he descended to the street, where three minutes later Jock appeared in company with Eben Garnock. The Chief Fisher was a man a year or two on the wrong side of fifty, huge in frame, at once massive and spare, with a great grizzled beard which almost covered his broad chest. His eyebrows, too, were thick and grizzled, and from the caves beneath them eyes of an intense blue looked out upon the world. They were notable eyes, for they were at once calm and vigilant. Nothing would either escape or perturb them. His forehead was a full round dome, and when he removed his cap it combined with the baldness of his head to give him an air of solemn, brooding sagacity. But Nanty knew that that mountainous face could quicken readily into a mountainous humour, and he could picture Eben wrestling with North Sea gales, his beard tossing on the wind, taming the elements to domesticity, half elder of the Kirk and half pirate from a Norway wick.

  When the three were seated in the little room, with the door locked and the key on the table, Nanty felt a sudden shyness which he had never known at Senatus meetings. His boyish upbringing told, and he realised that he looked upon Eben Garnock with a respect which he did not feel for any of his learned colleagues. These belonged to his familiar life, and he met them on equal terms; but Eben ruled in a strange world in which he was the merest novice — a world, moreover, in which for a time he must now dwell. So he left it to the Chief Fisher to begin. But Eben was a man of sparing speech, and he was occupied in filling and lighting a deep-bowled pipe. So there was a short silence, while Jock looked out from the window on the main courtyard.

  “There’s the man who was at breakfast,” he reported. “The town-clerk, I mean. I wonder where he is bound for.”

  Nanty looked out, and saw Mr Dott seated in a high red gig with yellow wheels. In the shafts was an animal, one of whose near progenitors must have been a carthorse. His brown satchel was under his arm, and his air was that of a country doctor suddenly called in ill weather to visit a distant patient, a combination of distaste and dutiful resolution.

  “I know, for he told me. He is going on legal business to a house called Hungrygrain in the Cheviot hills.”

  Jock cried out, and Eben, having got his pipe going, looked sharply at Jock.

  “He’ll find some wild things there,” said the latter. “Hungrygrain! If that isn’t the queerest chance! Yonderdale’s no place just now for a poking lawyer, and he has as much hope of doing business as a snowball of rolling through hell. He’ll likely take some mischief. A decent soul, too. I wish it had been possible to warn him.”

  “What is wrong with Hungrygrain besides the name?” Nanty asked.

  Jock laughed. “If you could tell me that you would tell me something that Eben would like very greatly to know. Aye, and his Majesty’s Government, too. . . . We’d better get to work, for there is no time to waste. All the cards go on to the table, Nanty Lammas — for Nanty, you are in this ploy, and St Salvator’s and the logic class-room are at the other side of the moon. There are no secrets between us, for we are all Free Fishers. Eben has empowered me to speak, for I have more of the gift of the gab than him. Well, the first thing I have to say to you is that this is King’s business, and devilish high business. Three days back Eben was closeted with the Lord Advocate and with other folk that shall be nameless, and he got his orders. It’s not the first job he has done for his Majesty, though it may be the kittlest, and he did me the honour to pick me along with Bob Muschat, for he wanted somebody who had some pretension to gentility. Ay, gentility,” he added bitterly, “though yon cedar of Lebanon up at the Red Lion might not allow the claim.”

  The broken-hearted lover seemed to have disappeared. Jock spoke with assurance and a crisp vigour.

  “And you’re in it, too, Nanty, as Providence has ordained, and your St Andrews business must go hang. You saw my father last night, and I’ll warrant your talk wasn’t only about college property. Was it about Belses?”

  The other nodded.

  “I guessed as much. Now let us have your story, and then you’ll hear ours. I have a notion they’ll fit together like the squares on a dambrod.”

  Nanty repeated the gist of what Lord Mannour had told him, while Jock listened with sundry exclamations, and Eben silently with eyes on the floor.

  “And I thought the fellow was my enemy,” was Jock’s comment. “And I had worked myself into a fine glow of hatred, as I told you on the Pittenweem road. Now I could love him like a brother. The man’s a victim to be pitied.”

  “And to be rescued.”

  “Ay, please God, to be rescued. You say that that red-faced baronet is seeking his blood? Well, I’m seeking his, or my name is not John Kinloch, and that simplifies my purpose, though it complicates the job. He is still in Berwick?

  “I saw his chaise twenty minutes ago in the Red Lion yard.”

  “Then it’s possible that he knows what we know — that he is close on his quarry. God, there’ll soon be rough work at Hungrygrain.”

  “Hungrygrain?”

  “Just Hungrygrain. That is where my Lord Belses is at the moment. It’s a bleak, God-forgotten spot among whaups and peesweeps and peatmosses. But there have been queer ongoings there for many a day, and at this very hour there are queerer still. And now there’s converging upon that moorland bit a dour country writer, who’ll likely get his throat cut, and a fine gentleman in buckskins who seeks satisfaction for his wounded honour. He’ll maybe get more satisfaction than he likes. It’s a bonny kettle of fish, and it will soon come to the boil.”

  “We must get the poor boy out of the place before his pursuer gets there.” Nanty was on his feet, for his immediate duty seemed plain.

  “Sit you down,” said Jock. “The thing is not so simple as that. You have still to hear our side of the business — the King’s side. My father told you that Belses was being made a fool of by a woman. Well, that woman is the pivot of the thing. Mrs Cranmer they call her.”

  “Mr Dott’s client.”

  “A bonny client! Now what takes a woman like Mrs Cranmer to have for her doer a Scots writer from a forsaken hole like Waucht?”

  “Mr Dott said she was kin to the Hamiltons of Mells and had some farms on Waucht side.”

  “So? If there’s Scots blood in her, that makes her the more dangerous. But, whether or not, there’s no question of her power for ill, and it would seem that she comes between Ministers and their sleep. What kind of a character did my father give her?”

  “He said she was young and handsome, and a religious enthusiast, and tainted with Jacobinical views.”

  “Aye. That’s the character she has with most people, and that’s the kind of candle that attracts a poor moth like Belses. I wonder if my father knows more, or my Lord Snowdoun. Maybe not, for the Cranmer case is not yet a Cabinet matter, I unde
rstand — still in the stage of proof, and not ripe for judgment. Maybe it is still secret between the Advocate and the military and the Free Fishers.” He looked towards Eben, who gravely nodded.

  “Rid your mind of that picture, Nanty, my man,” he went on; “the innocent sweet lady, a thought highflying in her politics, the kind of siren to capture a young man of sensibility. Put something very different in its place. Put a woman who hates this land of Britain with a cold hatred — who will stick at nothing to get her ends — who can play a desperate game with the patience of Job and the subtlety of Monsieur Talleyrand and the courage of Lucifer — who does not know the meaning of love or honour or friendship — who will use every gift of mind and body for a black purpose. Have you got that clear, for it’s gospel truth? Eben has seen some of the proofs of it, and they damn her to the lowest hell.”

  Nanty shuddered. “My poor Harry!” he muttered.

  “Well may you say your poor Harry. He is nothing more than a cat’s-paw. To have the son of my Lord Snowdoun, the manager of Scotland, dangling at her petticoat tails is a sort of evidence of respectability, you see, and she misses no point in the game.”

  “That game — what is it?” Nanty asked.

  “It’s easy told. Britain, as I have often heard you say, is fighting for her life and for the liberties of Europe. We have plenty of ill-wishers at home to stir up trouble, and the more trouble here the weaker our stroke will be on the battlefield. That’s an axiom, as you logicians say. We are fighting the greatest military genius of all history, and that does not leave us much margin. Whatever happens, it will be a damned near thing. So any knowledge of our plans that may get to the enemy is worth a hundredfold more than in an ordinary war, the margin, as I say, being so close. That is what this beldame is doing. She has spun her web up and down the land, even in high places, and the silly flies walk in. She had made a great bureau of treason to foster revolution at home and to send damning confidences abroad.”