Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  “The minister? What’s he like? And what could he want with him?”

  “He’s a dacent auld body that gangs his ain gait like Tam Nickson and meddles little wi’ Hungrygrain. . . .”

  Nanty’s anxiety made him take the lead.

  “We must follow him,” he whispered fiercely. “And one of us must go to the manse and see what is there. Yon proud gentleman does not stroll out by night with pistols at his waist for nothing. You, Bob, must try the manse, for you know the road and you know the minister. Come on, Jock, for there’s not a moment to lose. There’s light enough to fight by. Any minute my poor Harry may come by his death.”

  Bob nodded, and with no more ado turned down the path towards the stream, with a final injunction of “Tam Nickson’s, mind ye, afore it’s light.” Nanty seized Jock’s arm and dragged him up the steep bank of the dene, where their nailed shoes gripped better than Sir Turnour’s riding boots.

  “Canny, Nanty, my man,” Jock grumbled. “I wish you would practise the logic you teach. Belses is in Hungrygrain House — we know that. Wyse cannot have arrived many hours ago. Is it likely they would have arranged a meeting at midnight several miles away? Be reasonable, man. Yon baronet’s a stickler for all the forms, and a tried hand at the game. What about seconds and the other decencies? I hate the fellow like poison, but he’s no hedge-murderer.”

  “God knows what he is. Our business is to follow him, and not take our eyes off him till we know his purpose.”

  “I’ve got it,” said Jock. “He’s staying at the inn and is on his way back after a breath of fresh air. He’s a wise man to go armed in a den of thieves like Yonderdale. . . . But maybe Belses is at the manse? No, it’s not possible. What would a spark like him be doing with a country minister? Or he’s at the inn? Maybe Cranmer turned him away from his door.”

  The mention of the manse caused Nanty to halt in his tracks with a momentary thought of following Bob. It was a fortunate impulse, for it prevented him from blundering into a party of four men who had begun to descend the track from the edge of the dene. They were moving fast, with heads down like hounds on a trail. The ground was open, with little cover, and there was only one chance of concealment. Jock darted to the left up the hill, and Nanty, obeying a different instinct, slipped downward to the shelter of a clump of elders.

  Things happened fast. Jock was seen, a man shouted, and the four fanned out to cut him off. Out of the tail of his eye Nanty saw this before he reached the elders. Some ancient impulse, born of boyish games of hide-and-seek, made him attempt a diversion. He too shouted and waved his arms; he saw that he was observed, and that the pursuers had turned towards him. He saw nothing more, for he dared not turn his head. Some of the hounds were on his trail, and his sole purpose was to outdistance them. He raced up the stream side, with only his ears to tell him of the pursuit.

  Spare living had kept his body lean and hard, and he had always been notably light on his feet. But never in his life had he been in danger from other human beings, and at first his heart fluttered in his throat. He had no doubt about the danger; his instinct told him that these men behind him, whoever they were, were bent on evil. He had broken on purpose into an unhallowed sanctuary and its custodians would not forgive him. At first he choked as he ran, and his fear seemed to clog his breathing. . . . And then suddenly the suppleness of his limbs gave him confidence. The sounds behind him came no nearer. His stride lengthened, for the ground was firm and open, and he found that he leaped a tributary gully like a deer. . . . Something else heartened him. He was conscious of being in a new world, a world which he had always revered and dreaded, where his duty was not with books and papers, but with primitive hazards and crude human passions. It was a professor of logic who was thus pitchforked into the primeval, and it lay with him to prove that a scholar could also be a man.

  But where was he running? The mischief was that he knew nothing of the ground, and at any moment might land in a cul-de-sac. The dene had begun to narrow ominously and might soon be a chasm. Was that why the pursuit was so sluggish? Was it shepherding him into a fatal corner? He had been running near the water’s edge, and now he began to draw farther uphill. In a gap lit by the moon he thought he saw his enemies behind, stumbling and slow but resolute as weasels. The undergrowth was growing thicker and would cripple his speed. At all costs he must find a place less encumbered, or his youth and swiftness would be of no account. Or better still, could he put the hounds at fault?

  He was now on a little knuckle of rock well above the stream, and in front it appeared as if crags were beginning to crowd in upon it. There was some sort of path by the water’s edge and the pursuit was still on it. They must be confident that that way there lay no escape, that they had him in front of them penned on a single narrow track. Could he increase that confidence? He picked up a stone and flung it far ahead so that it seemed to have been loosened by his feet. He heard it plash in deep water. Twenty yards on he did the same, and then dropped in the fern, looking down upon the waterside path. He was staking all upon his theory of the mind of his pursuers. Suddenly forty feet below him they came into sight, two men running steadily by the stream’s edge. They must believe that in a few hundred yards they would have him cornered in some nook of cliff. . . . He let them pass, crawled upward through the bracken, and made for a patch of light which was the open hill.

  There was a broken-down dyke which separated the dene from the moor, and as soon as Nanty had crossed it his spirits rose. He had no fear now, no nervousness; these heavy-footed countrymen could never come up with him; he had the whole world before him and legs that could not tire. The moon was nearing its setting, but the land was still bright, and all Yonderdale was clear below him. He halted for a second to get his bearings. Behind him was a tree-choked glen, with very far away the dimness of seaward plains. In front was the great hollow of the upper Yonder, the hills steep around it as if sliced by a knife, but, from the altitude at which he stood, revealing further round-shouldered tops huddled towards the north. And almost at his feet he made out the demesne of Hungrygrain, with one light burning low in the house, perhaps from an open door.

  Nanty prospected his road, for it would be very dark after moonfall. He must make a circuit round the glen head, and come back on the north side to Tam Nickson’s cottage — he saw the gash in the hill where it must lie. He must reach it before dawn, and that meant three or four miles in black darkness, but he could not miss it so long as he followed the crest of the hill, for the burn which ran by its door was the only tributary of the Yonder from the north. He was in a mood of high exhilaration, for these uplands, sweet with spring herbs, intoxicated him like that sunlit sea over which he had sailed in the afternoon. He was in a clean world, the world of youth and spring, and his heart shouted to it. He wanted to declaim poetry —

  “Rumoresque senum severiorum

  Omnes unius aestimemus assis. . . .”

  What he did was to canter like a colt over the flats of grass and heather which sloped upward before him to the west. Another tumble-down wall checked him, and he dipped into a tiny hollow through which a trickle of cold water slipped among yellow mosses. He drank from the spring and stood up to clear the drops from his eyes, and as he did so he was aware that he was not alone.

  Had the pursuit circumvented him? The thing moved, whatever it was. Was it human, or a stray ewe or roebuck? It had seen him and feared him — it was trying to escape. The slope made a patch of darkness in which he could discern movement but not form, but the thing emerged from the patch, stumbled, and came to a sudden standstill, as if its strength had failed it. Then came a sound from it, a small miserable sound of weakness or fear.

  Nanty took three steps across the moss and stood beside a recumbent figure. It was a woman, and in the last ebbing of moonlight he saw that she was staring at him with terrified eyes.

  “What ails you?” he said, and his voice was gruff in the extremity of his surprise. “Can I help you? How came you here?”
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  His words wrought a miracle, for it seemed that they were not what she had expected. She rose to her feet; very slim she was, and her head was higher than his shoulder. She peered into his face and saw something there which both comforted and perplexed her, for her voice lost its tension.

  “Who are you? Oh, tell me who you are that travels the Green Dod at midnight? You are a stranger? You do not belong to Yonderdale? Your voice is kind.”

  “I am a stranger,” said Nanty. “But a midnight hill is fitter for a man than a woman. It is you that should explain your presence here.”

  “Alas, I cannot. It is too long and cruel a story. I am in trouble . . . in danger. By your speech, sir, you are from Scotland, and I am part Scotch. I think you are a gentleman. Let me come with you till we are beyond the hills. I will be no drag on you—”

  She started, for a fox barked in a neighbouring cairn, and her movement told Nanty that she had been lately through some extreme terror.

  “Where do you wish to go?” he asked.

  “Out of Yonderdale,” she stammered. “Out of Yonderdale, even if it means out of the world.”

  “I can escort you to the hills at the head of the glen,” said Nanty. “I must beg you to hasten, madam, for I have myself a long road to go.”

  She obeyed like a docile child. She wore the rough country shoes and stockings of a dairymaid, and round her shoulders was a plaid of checked shepherd’s tartan. Nanty observed that she walked like a free woman, not mincing or shuffling, but with firm steps that did not falter as the slope steepened. Once or twice he offered to assist her, but she needed no help, and presently the moon went down, and in the darkness he was aware of her only by the rustle of her movement at his left side.

  His mind was in a not unpleasing confusion. In two days he had stepped out of order and routine into a world of preposterous chances. He had been hunted by those who sought to do him a mischief; he was endeavouring to wrest a malign secret from a moorland fortress; he was trying to save a friend from death; and now in the dark of the moon he was tramping the high hills with an unknown lady. That she was no countrywoman he was certain, for her slim body, her voice, her manner of speaking betokened breeding to one who had seen much of it while he lived in Lord Snowdoun’s household. She was like — now of whom did she remind him? Incongruously enough it was Harry Belses. She had the same soft intonation, the same slight drawling lisp. The thought of Harry would ordinarily have set his mind off on the tack of his duty, but duty had for the moment been ousted by something more compelling.

  Black as the night was, it was not difficult to find the way, for he had his countrymen’s instinct for the points of the compass and knew that he must keep due west to the head of the glen. Also he had the slope to guide him, since he was following the edge of a little tableland. But now and then he was uncertain of his course, and when he turned sharply he jostled his companion’s shoulder. Once he caught her arm and its softness amazed him, for he had never before laid his hand on a woman.

  Presently he was conscious that the steep slopes had bent to the right and that they were turning the uppermost cleugh of Yonder.

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked her.

  “Beyond the hills. There is a village in the next valley — they call it Grassmoor — I shall reach it in the morning.”

  “But what will you do there?”

  “I will try — oh, I do not know . . . I need help, and there may be Christians there. I would have tried to reach Yondermouth, but I was too late — they were before me — I was driven up into the hills—”

  “Then we should part here, for I am going north.”

  “Let me stay with you till it is daylight. I am blindish in the dark, and I might go astray, and return the road I came.”

  Nanty was conscious that she shivered as she spoke, and it could not be with cold, for the air was mild.

  It was that darkest moment of the night which precedes the dawn. Suddenly Nanty had a revelation. Part Scotch! Hamilton of Mells! It could be none other. He knew his companion. It was that Delilah who had made a tool of poor Harry. That woman, half spy and half incendiary, who wove her foul plots in these wilds and found cover in a loutish husband. Jock’s violent words came to his mind. He was tramping the hills with the high-priestess of all evil.

  It was Nanty’s turn to shiver. He did not stop to ask why so potent a conspirator should be a fugitive in the domain she ruled. He only knew that he was alone with a mystery of iniquity, and his flesh crept. There at his left hand went in the darkness something darker than Erebus. He had always been shy of women, and, having an acute sense of sin, he had been abashed by any flagrant wickedness. He shrank from this presence at his side as he would have shrunk from a loathly disease. He had the impulse to rush off on a road of his own, leaving the creature to the unclean spirits of the night . . . Yet her voice was still in his ear, and it had been low and gentle.

  On his right hand the black changed to grey, and a thin wave of pale light ran up the sky. Very fast the grey thinned to a delicate web of blue, and the world beneath him sprang into shape. He saw the contours of the hills, though the valley bottom was still dim, and he realised that dawn would be upon him before he reached Tam Nickson’s cottage.

  “I must be off,” he cried, and was just starting to cover the last mile at a run, when he saw that the morning had also revealed his companion. He stopped short, for what he looked at was not the Messalina of his fancies, but a pale girl with most tragic and beseeching eyes.

  CHAPTER X. Tells of Sunshine and the High Bent

  The waxing daylight cruelly revealed her weariness and dishevelment. The clothes were clearly not her own, but had been borrowed from some servant, yet they could not hide the grace of her figure. Her hair, black as a sloe, was in some disorder, but the head on the slim neck was exquisitely shaped. A delicate hand held the folds of her plaid about her breast. Her face was a broad oval, with a notable breadth between the eyes, and these eyes seemed almost colourless, like deep wells of water.

  As Nanty looked at her, one thought came to him with the force of utter conviction. Jock Kinloch’s tale was nonsense. This pale woman was not evil. He had pictured to himself meretricious graces, the allure of one skilled in all the arts of sex, and he saw instead an heroic, bewildered child. He forgot his urgent need of haste.

  “You are tired,” he said, and his voice was kind. “You must rest before you can go on. But not here, where we are in view of Yonderdale. We must get behind the ridge. Take my arm — it is only a step or two.”

  She obeyed, and it was plain by her dragging steps that she was very weary. They climbed a few last yards of slope, and found themselves on a hummocky tableland which was the summit of the containing hills. There they were hidden from anyone looking upward from the glen. Once he stooped and picked up something — two curlew’s eggs from a scrape in the bent. “These will make our breakfast,” he said.

  They came to a hollow where the turf was green and fine around a tiny well. He pulled up some heather bushes and made her a couch. “Lie down,” he told her. “Lie flat and let your body go limp. You are bone-weary, for I made you travel these hills like a deer. You must have food. I have some provender with me, and I will make a fire and roast these eggs. But first you will drink this.” He mixed some brandy from a flask with water in a horn cup.

  She drank, and did as she was told, stretching herself on the couch with a little sigh, while he gathered roots and bent for his fire. It kindled with difficulty, for the moisture of the previous day had not yet dried up, and when he raised his head from the smoke he saw that she was sitting up.

  “Will you tell me your name, please?” she said.

  Her face had changed. The brandy had brought back some colour to it, and the eyes were no longer vacant, but anxious and questioning.

  “My name is Anthony Lammas. I am a Scots man, as you guessed.”

  She narrowed her eyes as if in some effort of recollection.

 
“But what are you?”

  “I am a minister of the Kirk, but without a parish. My calling is to be a professor of philosophy in the most ancient of our colleges.”

  “A servant of God! And a philosopher! Oh, but . . . Lammas! Anthony Lammas! Where have I heard that name?” Some link coupled in her memory and brought her to her feet, her eyes suddenly ablaze with excitement.

  “Were you not — a friend — of Lord Belses?”

  “For some years I was his governor and tutor.”

  She clasped her hands, and then held them out to him with a gesture of infinite confidence.

  “Oh, sir, I have been marvellously guided. It was for Harry’s sake that I fled last night — to find help for him, for I could give him none — and by God’s mercy I have stumbled upon his friend. He has always told me that you were his truest friend in the world. He is in deadly peril, sir.”

  “I know,” said Nanty. “That is why I am here.”

  “You know! But you cannot know. No one can know except myself, and Winfortune, and — and my husband.”

  “I know that he has been challenged to fight by Sir Turnour Wyse, and that Sir Turnour does not commonly miss his man.”

  Her face was uncomprehending.

  “I heard some silly tale of a duel,” she said. “But that is a small thing. I have forbade Harry to fight.”

  “It is no small thing. Sir Turnour Wyse has come to Hungrygrain to force a meeting.”

  “It is not possible.”

  “Alas, it is only too possible. I saw him yesterday morning in Berwick. I saw him some hours ago marching through the wood above the Yonder. I came here to protect Harry, and it was while I followed Sir Turnour that I met others who would have disputed my road. I outdistanced them, but was driven far up the hillside, and there I met you. There you have my story. I think you are Mrs Cranmer of Hungrygrain.”