by John Buchan
“But what will you do when you get there?”
“I thought of having a crack with Prince Odalchini in the first place. . . .”
“The thing’s impossible,” Dougal cried. “Man, the country is already almost in a state of siege. Juventus won’t let you near the Prince. They’re sitting three-deep round his park wall. They carted me over the frontier yesterday with instructions that I wasn’t to come back if I valued my life — and, mind you, I had their safe conduct.”
“All the same, I must find some way of getting to him.” In Dickson’s voice there was a note of dismal obstinacy which Dougal knew well.
“But it’s perfectly ridiculous,” said Dougal. “I wish to Heaven I had never come here. You can’t do a bit of good to anybody and you can do the devil of a lot of harm to yourself.”
“I can see the place and some of the folk, and give you that business advice you said you wanted.”
“You’ll see nothing except the inside of a guardroom,” Dougal wailed. “Listen to reason, Mr McCunn. I must be in Vienna to-morrow, for I have to sign a contract about paper for Mr Craw. Stay quietly here till I come back, and then maybe we’ll be able to think of a plan.”
“I can’t,” said Dickson. “I must go at once. . . . See here, Dougal. Do you observe that ring?” He held up his left hand. “I got it two years back come October on the Solway sands. ‘I’ve gotten your ring, Sire,’ I says to him, ‘and if I get the word from you I’ll cross the world.’ Well, the word has come. Not direct from Prince John, maybe, but from what they call the logic of events. I would think shame to be found wanting. It’s maybe the great chance of my life. . . . Where more by token is his Royal Highness?”
“How should I know?” said Dougal wearily. “Not in Evallonia, but lurking somewhere near, waiting on a summons that will likely never come. Poor soul, I don’t envy him his job. . . . And you’re going to stick your head into a bees’ byke, when nobody asks you to. You say it’s your sense of duty. If that’s so, it’s a misguided sense not very different from daftness. My belief is that the real reason is that you’re looking for excitement. You’re too young. You’re like a horse with too much corn. You’re doing this because it amuses you.”
“It doesn’t,” was the solemn answer. “Make no mistake about that, Dougal. I’m simply longing to be back at Blaweary. I want to be on the river again — I hear the water’s in fine trim — and I want to get on with my new planting — I’m trying Douglas firs this time. . . . I don’t care a docken for Evallonia and its politics. But I’m pledged to Prince John, and in all my sixty-three years I’ve never broken my word. I’m sweir to go — I’ll tell you something more, I’m feared to go. I’ve never had much truck with foreigners, and their ways are not my ways, and I value my comfort as much as anybody. That was why I tried to get an aeroplane, for I thought it would commit me and get the first plunge over, for I was feared of weakening. As it is I’ll have to content myself with the car and that sumph Peter Wappit. But some way or other I’m bound to go.”
Dougal’s grim face relaxed into an affectionate smile.
“You’re a most extraordinary man. I’ll not argue with you, for I know it’s about as much good as making speeches to a tombstone. I’ll go back to Evallonia as soon as my business is finished, and I only hope I don’t see your head stuck up on a spike on Melina gate-house.”
“Do you think that’s possible?” Dickson asked with a curious mixture of alarm and rapture.
“Not a bit of it. I was only joking. The worst that can happen is that you and Peter will be sent back over the border with a flea in your ear. If Juventus catches you they’ll deport you as a harmless lunatic. . . . But for God’s sake don’t get into the same parish as Mastrovin.”
CHAPTER VI. ARRIVALS AT AN INN
Sir Archibald Roylance drove a motor-car well but audaciously, so that he disquieted the nerves of those who accompanied him; his new servant McTavish drove better, and with a regard for the psychology of others which made a journey with him as smooth as a trip in the Scotch express. The party left Unnutz early in the morning before the guests of the Kaiserin Augusta were out of bed, and since they had many miles to cover, Archie insisted on taking McTavish’s place for a spell every three hours. All day under a blue sky they threaded valleys, and traversed forests, and surmounted low passes among the ranges, and since the air was warm and the landscape seductive, they did not hurry unduly. Lunch, for example, on a carpet of moss beside a plunging stream, occupied a full two hours. The consequence was that when they came out of the hills and crossed the Rave and saw before them the lights of the little railway station of Zutpha, it was already evening. Clearly not a time to pay a call upon Prince Odalchini, who did not expect them. Archie inquired of McTavish where was the nearest town, and was told Tarta, where the inn of the Turk’s Head had a name for comfort. All the party was hungry and a little weary, so it was agreed to make for Tarta.
The car took a country road which followed the eastern side of Prince Odalchini’s great park. Passing through Zutpha village, Archie, whose turn it was then to drive, noticed a number of youths who appeared to be posted on some kind of system. They stared at the car, and at first seemed inclined to interfere with it. But something — the road it was taking or the badges on the front of its bonnet — satisfied them, a word was passed from one to the other, and they let it go. They wore shorts, and shirts of a colour which could not be distinguished in the dark.
“Juventus,” Archie turned his head to whisper. “We’ve come to the right shop. Thank heaven the lads don’t want to stand between us and dinner.”
Soon the road, which had lain among fields of maize and beet, turned into the shadow of woods, and was joined by many tributary tracks. Archie, who had a good sense of direction, knew the point of the compass where Tarta lay, and had an occasional glimpse of the park paling on his right to keep him straight. He was driving carelessly, for the road seemed deserted, and his mind was occupied in wondering what kind of fare the Turk’s Head would give them, when in turning a corner he saw a yard or two ahead a stationary car, drawn up dangerously in a narrow place. He clapped on his brakes, for there was no room to pass it, since its nose was poked beyond the middle of the road, and came to a standstill in a crooked echelon, his off front wheel all but touching its running board.
Archie, like many casual people, was easily made indignant by casualness in others. On this occasion surprise made him indignant in his own language. “You fool!” he shouted. “Will you have the goodness to shift your dashed perambulator?”
One man sat stiffly at the wheel. The other was apparently engaged in examining a map with the assistance of the headlight. It was the latter who replied.
“Peter,” he said, “they’re English. Thank God for that.”
The map-student straightened himself, and stood revealed in the glare of the big acetylene lamps as a smallish man in a tweed ulster. He took off his spectacles, blinked in the dazzle, and came deferentially towards Archie. His smile was so ingratiating that that gentleman’s irritation vanished.
“That’s a silly thing to do,” was all he said. “If my brakes hadn’t been good we’d have had a smash.”
“I’m awful sorry. Peter lost his head, I doubt. You see, we’ve missed our road.”
Something in the voice, with its rich Scots intonation, in the round benignant face, and in the friendly peering eyes stirred a recollection in Archie which he could not place. But he was not allowed time to drag the deeps of his memory. Alison from the back seat descended like a tornado, and was grasping the stranger’s hand.
“Dickson,” she cried, “who’d have thought of finding you here? You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
The little man beamed.
“‘Deed, so are you, Miss Alison. Mercy, but it’s a queer world.”
“This is Sir Archie Roylance. You know him? Aren’t you a neighbour of his?”
Dickson extended a grimy hand.
“Fine I know
him, though I haven’t seen him for years. D’you not mind the Gorbals Die-hards, Sir Archibald, and Huntingtower where you and me fought a battle?”
“Golly, it’s McCunn!” Archie exclaimed.
“And not a day older—”
“And that,” said Alison, waving a hand towards the back of her car, “is my cousin Janet — Lady Roylance.”
Dickson bowed, and, since he was too far off to shake hands, also saluted.
“Proud to meet you, mem. This is a fair gathering of the clans. I never thought when I started this morning to run into a covey of friends.” The encounter seemed to have lifted care from his mind, for he beamed delightedly on each member of the party, not excluding McTavish.
“But what are you doing here?” Alison repeated. “I thought you were ill and at some German cure place.”
“I’ve been miraculously restored to health,” said Dickson solemnly. “And I’m here because I want to have a word with a man. You know him, Miss Alison — Prince Odalchini.”
“But that’s what we’re here for too,” the girl said.
“You don’t tell me that. Have you tried to get inside his gates? That’s what I’ve been seeking to do, and they wouldn’t let me.”
“Who wouldn’t let you?”
“A lot of young lads in short breeks and green sarks. My directions were to go to a place called Zutpha, which was the proper way in. I found the lodge gates all right, but they were guarded like a penitentiary. I told the lads who I was seeking and got a lot of talk in a foreign language. I didn’t understand a word, but the meaning was plain enough that if I didn’t clear out I would get my neck wrung. One of them spoke German, and according to Peter what he said was the German for ‘Go to hell out of this.’ So I just grinned at them and nodded and told Peter to turn the car, for I saw it was no good running my head against a stone dyke. So now I’m looking for a town called Tarta, where I can bide the night and think things over.”
“But what do you want with Prince Odalchini?”
“It’s a long story, and this is not the place to tell it. It was Dougal that set me off. Dougal Crombie — you remember him at Castle Gay?”
“Dougal! You have seen him?”
“No farther back than the day before yesterday. He’s in Vienna now. He came seeking me, for Dougal’s sore concerned about this Evallonia business. Jaikie is in it, too. He had seen Jaikie.”
“Where is Jaikie?” Alison asked, her voice shrill with excitement.
“Somewhere hereabouts. Dougal says he’s a prisoner and in the hands of the same lads that shoo’ed me away from the Prince’s gates.”
Here Archie intervened. “This conference must adjourn,” he said. “We’re all famishing and Mr McCunn is as hungry as the rest of us. Dinner is the first objective. I’ll back my car, and you” — he addressed Peter Wappit—”go on ahead. It’s a straight road, and the town isn’t five miles off. We can’t talk here by the roadside, especially with Alison shrieking like a pea-hen. If Juventus has got the wind up, it’s probably lurking three deep in these bushes.”
The hostelry of the Turk’s Head drew its name from the days when John Sobieski drove the Black Sultan from the walls of Vienna. Part of it was as old as the oldest part of the Schloss, and indeed at one time it may have formed an outlying appanage of the castle. In the eighteenth century, in the heyday of the Odalchinis, it was a cheerful place, where great men came with their retinues, and where in the vast kitchen the Prince’s servitors and foresters drank with the townfolk of Tarta. It still remained the principal inn of the little borough, but Tarta had decayed, and it stood on no main road, so while its tap-room was commonly full, its guest-rooms were commonly empty. But the landlord had been valet in his youth to the Prince’s father, and he had a memory of past glories and an honest pride in his profession; besides, he was a wealthy man, the owner of the best vineyard in the neighbourhood. So the inn had never been allowed to get into disrepair; its rambling galleries, though they echoed to the tread of few guests, were kept clean and fresh; the empty stalls in the big stables were ready at a moment’s notice for the horses that never came; there was good wine in the cellars against the advent of a connoisseur. It stood in an alley before you reached the market-place, and its courtyard and back parts lay directly under the shadow of the castle walls.
The newcomers were received like princes. The landlord was well disposed to English milords, the class to which, from a glance at his card, he judged Archie to belong. Janet and Alison were his notion of handsome gentlewomen, for, being swarthy himself, he preferred them blonde; the two chauffeurs looked respectable; Dickson he could not place, but he had the carelessness of dress which in a Briton suggested opulence. So there was a scurrying of chambermaids in the galleries and a laborious preparation of hip-baths; the cars were duly bestowed in one of the old coach-houses, and the landlord himself consulted with Archie about dinner. McTavish and Peter were to be accommodated with their meals in a room by themselves — in old days, said the landlord, it had been the sitting-room of the Imperial couriers. The ladies and gentlemen would dine at the hour fixed in the grand parlour, which had some famous ancient carvings which learned men journeyed many miles to see. They would have the room to themselves — there were no other guests in the house. . . . He departed to see to the wine with a candlestick as large as a soup tureen.
The dinner was all that the landlord had promised. There was trout from the hills — honest, speckled trout — and a pie of partridges slain prematurely — and what Archie pronounced to be the best beef he had eaten outside England — and an omelet of kidneys and mushrooms — and little tartlets of young raspberries. It was a meal which Dickson was to regard as an epoch in his life; for, coming after the bare commons of Rosensee, it was a sort of festival in honour of his restored health. They drank a mild burgundy, and a sweet wine of the Tokay clan, and a local liqueur bottled forty years ago, and the coffee with which they concluded might have been brewed by the Ottoman whose severed head decorated the inn’s sign.
“Dickson,” Alison asked solemnly, “are you really and truly well again?”
“I’m a new man,” was the answer. “Ay, and a far younger man. I aye said, Miss Alison, that I was old but not dead-old. I’ve an awful weight of years behind me, but for all that at this moment I’m feeling younger than when I retired from business. They tell me that you’ve been to Dr Christoph too, Sir Archibald?”
“He’s a warlock,” said Archie. “I had got as lame as a duck, and he made me skip like a he-goat on the mountains. I daren’t presume too far, of course, or the confounded leg may sour on me. I got the most foul cramps the other day after a hill walk.”
“Same with me,” said Dickson. “The doctor says I may be a well body till the end of my days if I just go easy. I’m not very good at ca’ing canny, so no doubt I’ll have my relapses and my rheumatic turns. But that’s a small cross to bear. It’s not half as bad as the gout that the old gentry used to get.”
“Everybody,” said Archie, “has gout — or its equivalent. It’s part of man’s destiny. Chacun à son goût, as they say in Gaul.”
The miserable witticism was very properly ignored. It was Alison who brought them back to business. “I want to hear what Dougal said,” she told Dickson. “I came here because Jaikie wrote telling me to. I haven’t a notion where he is — I thought he was on his way home by this time. Archie and Janet came to keep me company. We’re all bound for the same house — if we can get in. Now tell me — very slowly — everything that Dougal said.”
Dickson, as well as he could, expounded Dougal’s reading of Evallonian affairs. There was nothing new to his auditors in the exposition, for it was very much what they already knew from McTavish.
“What I don’t understand,” said Alison, “is what Dougal thought you could do, Dickson.”
“I suppose,” was the modest answer, “that he wanted a business-like view of the situation.”
“But how could you give him that when you
know so little about it?”
“That’s just what I told him. I said that before I could help to redd up the mischief I had to discover exactly what the mischief was. That’s why I came on here.”
“You’re a marvel,” said Alison with wide eyes. “I didn’t know you were so keen about Evallonia.”
“I’m not. I don’t care a docken about Evallonia. But, you see, I’m under a kind of bond, Miss Alison. You’ll mind the night in the Canonry when I saw Prince John off in a boat. He gave me this ring” — he held up his left hand—”and I said to him that if ever I got the word I would cross the world to help him.”
“He sent for you?”
“Not exactly. But the poor young man is evidently in sore difficulties, and I — well, I remembered my promise. I daresay he’ll be the better of a business mind to advise him. Dougal, I could see, thought me daft, but I’m sane enough. I don’t particularly fancy the job, for I’m wearying to get home, but there it is. I thought I’d first have a crack with Prince Odalchini and get the lay-out right. And then—”
“Then?”
“Then I must find Prince John, and the dear knows how I’ll manage that.”
A glance from Alison prevented Archie from saying something.
“It’s more important,” she said, “that you should find Jaikie.”
“I daresay that will be the way of it,” Dickson smiled. “He’s a prisoner, and at Zutpha to-day I thought I would soon be a prisoner too, and would run up against Jaikie in some jyle.”
“Jaikie,” said Alison, “told me to come here, for he needed me. That means that sooner or later he’ll be here too. They can’t prevent us getting into the House of the Four Winds if we’re Prince Odalchini’s friends. It isn’t war yet.”
“It is not a bad imitation.” A new voice spoke, and the four at the table, who had been intent on their talk, turned startled faces to the door. A tall man had quietly insinuated himself into the room, and was now engaged in turning the key in the lock. He had a ragged blond beard, and a face the colour of an autumn beech leaf: he wore an ill-cut grey suit and a vulgar shirt; also he had a Brigade tie.
