Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  “Good evening,” he said pleasantly. “How are you, Roylance? Proser — that’s the landlord — is a friend of mine and told me you were here.” He smiled and bowed to Janet, and then he stopped short, registering extreme surprise on a face not accustomed to such manifestations. “Cousin Alison! My dear, what magic spirited you here?”

  “Thank God!” Alison exclaimed fervently. “I’ve been thinking of you all day, Ran, and longing to get hold of you. This is Mr Dickson McCunn, who is a friend of Jaikie — you remember Jaikie at the Lamanchas? I don’t know why you’re here — I don’t quite know why any of us are here — but here we are, and we must do something. By the way, you were saying as you slunk in — ?”

  “I was observing that the present state of affairs was a rather good imitation of war. How shall I put it? The Monarchists control the centre of Evallonia and the capital and can strike there when they please. Juventus is in power round the whole circumference of the country. They control its outlets and inlets — a very important point.”

  “That’s why they are besieging the castle here?”

  “Not besieging. Keeping it under observation. There has been as yet no overt act of hostility.”

  “But they are taking prisoners. They’ve pinched Jaikie.”

  Mr Glynde’s nil admirari countenance for a second time in five minutes registered surprise.

  “Jaikie?” he cried. “What do you mean?”

  “He is in the hands of Juventus. He has been seen in captivity. Do you know anything about him?” Alison’s voice had the sharpness of anxiety.

  “I had the pleasure of meeting your Jaikie a few days ago up in the hills. I encouraged him to pay a visit to Evallonia. I helped to entertain him at luncheon with Prince Odalchini, when we tried to make him prolong his visit. You see, I had taken a fancy to Mr Jaikie and thought that he might be useful. I was to meet him that evening, but he never turned up, so I assumed that he was tired of my company, and had gone back across the frontier as he intended. It seems that I have misjudged him. He is a prisoner of Juventus, you say? That must be the doing of his friend Count Paul, and it looks as if all parties were competing for his company. Well, it may not be a bad thing, for it gives us an ally in the enemy’s camp. You look troubled, Alison dear, but you needn’t worry. Count Paul Jovian is not a bad sort of fellow, and I am inclined to think that Jaikie is very well able to look after himself.”

  “I’m not worrying about Jaikie, but about ourselves. I came here because Jaikie sent for me, and that means that he expects to meet me. He named Prince Odalchini’s house. But how are we to get into it, if Juventus spends all its time squatting round it?”

  “I think that can be managed,” said Mr Glynde. “You have greatly relieved my mind, my dear. If Jaikie means to come to the House of the Four Winds, he will probably manage it, and he may be a most valuable link with the enemy. You must understand that Juventus is by no means wholly the enemy, but may with a little luck become a friend. . . . By the way, just how much do you know about the situation?”

  He proceeded by means of question and answer to probe their knowledge, directing his remarks to Alison at first, but later to Dickson, when he perceived that gentleman’s keenness.

  “I must tell you one piece of bad news,” and his voice became grave. “I have just heard it. Prince John was in hiding in a certain place, waiting for the summons, for everything depends on his safety, and all precautions had to be taken. But his enemies discovered his retreat, and he has been kidnapped. We know who did it — Mastrovin, the most dangerous and implacable of them all.”

  He was puzzled to find that the announcement did not solemnise his hearers. Indeed, with the exception of Dickson, it seemed to amuse them. But Dickson was aghast.

  “Mercy on us!” he cried. “That’s an awful business. I mind Mastrovin, and a blackguard murdering face he had. I must away at once—”

  “It is the worst thing that could have happened,” Mr Glynde continued. “They may kill him, and with him the hope of Evallonia. In any case it fatally disarranges the Monarchist plans. . . . What on earth is amusing you, Roylance?” he concluded testily.

  Archie spoke, in obedience to a nod from Alison.

  “Sorry,” he said. “But the fact is we got in ahead of old Mastrovin. We were at Unnutz, and saw what he was up to, so we nipped in and pinched the Prince ourselves.”

  “Good God!” Mr Glynde for a moment could only stare. “Who knows about that?”

  “Nobody, except us.”

  “Where have you put him?”

  “At this moment he is upstairs having his supper along with Mr McCunn’s chauffeur. His present job is to be my servant — name of McTavish — passport and everything according to Cocker.”

  For the third time that evening Mr Glynde was staggered. He rose and strode about the room, and his blue eyes had a dancing light in them.

  “I begin to hope,” he cried. “No, I begin to be confident. This freak of fate shows that the hussy is on our side.” He took a glass from the sideboard and filled himself a bumper of the local liqueur. “I drink to you mountebanks. You have beaten all my records. I have always loved you, Janet. I adore you, Alison, my dear, and I have been writing you some exquisite poetry. Eructavit cor meum as the Vulgate says — now I shall write you something still more exquisite. Roylance, you are a man after my own heart. Where are you going?” he asked, for Dickson had risen from the table.

  “I thought I would go up and have a word with His Royal Highness.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind. Sit down. And drop the Royal Highness business.” Mr Glynde pulled a chair up to the table and leaned his elbows on it. “We must go very carefully in this business. You have done magnificently, but it’s still dangerous ground. You say nobody knows of it except ourselves. Well, not another soul must know of it. Mastrovin is out to kill or spirit away Prince John — he must believe that the Prince is lost. Casimir and the Monarchists must believe that Mastrovin is the villain and go out hot on his trail — that will have the advantage of demobilising the Monarchists, which is precisely what is wanted at present. The Prince must be tucked away carefully till we want him — and when and how we will want him depends on the way things go. Oh, I can tell you we have scored one mighty big point which may give us the game and the rubber. But he can’t stay here as your servant.”

  “It’s a pretty good camouflage,” said Archie. “He’s the image of a respectable English valet, and I’m dashed if he hasn’t picked up a Scotch accent, like the real McTavish. You’d have to examine him with a microscope before you spotted the Prince. He’s a first-class actor, and it amuses him, so he puts his heart into it.”

  “Nevertheless it is too dangerous. You people will be moving in the wrong circles, and sooner or later he’ll give himself away, or somebody will turn up that has known him from childhood. Luckily he hasn’t been much in Evallonia since he was a boy, but you never know. We must bury him deeper. . . . Wait a moment. I have it. He shall go into my circus. You may not know that I’m a circus proprietor, Alison dear — the Cirque Doré — Glynde, late Aristide Lebrun — the epochal, the encyclopædic, the grandiose. We are encamped in the environs of Tarta, and every night sprigs of Juventus, who are admitted at half-price, applaud our performances. The Prince shall join my staff — I will devise for him some sort of turn — he will be buried there as deep as if he were under the Rave. It will be a joyful irony that the enemies who are looking for him will applaud his antics. Then some day, please God, we will take him out of tights and grease-paint and give him a throne.”

  Mr Glynde had become a poet, but he had not ceased to be a conspirator. “To-morrow morning,” he told Archie, “you will inform the landlord that you are sending your chauffeur home by road with your car. The cars will take your baggage to Zutpha, while you will walk there at your leisure through a pleasant country to catch the evening train. Proser is a good man, but it is unkind to burden even a good man with too much knowledge. Roylance’s c
hauffeur will not again be heard of. I will arrange about your baggage and the cars.”

  “And what about us?” Archie asked.

  “Before the evening — well before the evening, I hope — you will be in the House of the Four Winds.”

  The party took an affectionate farewell of the landlord next morning, their baggage was piled into the cars, luncheon baskets were furnished, and Proser was informed that they meant to drive a mile or two till they cleared the town, and then to spend the day walking the woods on the left bank of the Rave, and catch the evening train at Zutpha. The cars would go straight to the railway station. There was no sign of Mr Randal Glynde.

  McTavish, however, had been well coached. They crossed the Rave Bridge, passed the common where Jaikie had first met Count Paul, and plunged into a thick belt of woodland which covered all the country between the foothills and the river. Here there was no highway but many forest tracks, one in especial much rutted by heavy wagons and showing the prints of monstrous feet. The reason of this was apparent after a mile or so, when a clearing revealed the headquarters of the Cirque Doré. It was not its show-ground — that was in the environs of Tarta — but its base, where such animals were kept as were not immediately required. It was guarded by a stout palisade, and many notices warning the public that wild beasts lived there, and that they must not enter.

  Mr Glynde was awaiting them, and one or two idlers hung around the gate. Archie caught, too, what he thought was a glimpse of a green shirt. Randal received them with the elaborate courtesies of a circus proprietor welcoming distinguished patrons. The chauffeurs of the two cars he directed how to proceed to Zutpha. “They will return by another road in due course,” he whispered to Alison, “but it is altogether necessary that they should be seen to leave this place.”

  Of what followed no member of the party had a very clear recollection. They were taken to a tent less odoriferous than the rest, and provided with white caps on which the name of the circus was embroidered in scarlet. “We give a matinée to-day,” said Randal, “an extra performance asked for by Tarta. It will be in a dance-hall, and the programme is in Luigi’s hands — gipsy dances and songs and fiddling, for we are no mere vulgar menagerie. You will accompany the artistes back to Tarta. Trust me, you will not be suspected. The Cirque Doré has become a common object of the seashore.”

  So Archie and Janet, Alison and Dickson, joined a party which crowded into an old Ford bus, and jolted back the way they had come. The dance-hall proved to be a building not far from the Turk’s Head, and it was already packed when the company arrived and entered by a side door. Randal deposited the four in a little room behind the stage. “You will lunch out of your baskets,” he told them, “while I supervise the start of the show. When it is in full swing I will come back.”

  So while fiddles jigged a yard or two off and the feet and hands of Tarta citizens applauded, the four made an excellent meal and conversed in whispers. The circus cap was becoming to Alison and Janet, and it made Archie look like a professional cricketer, but on Dickson’s head it sat like an incongruous cowl out of a Christmas cracker. “A daft-like thing,” he observed, “but I’m long past caring for appearances. I doubt,” he added prophetically, “that there’ll be a lot of dressing-up before we’re through with this business. It’s a pity that I’ve the kind of face you cannot properly disguise. Providence never meant me to be a play-actor.”

  Randal did not return for a good hour. He seemed satisfied. “The coast is clear,” he said, “and I’ve just had word from my camp that everything is all right there. Now we descend into the deeps, and I’m afraid it will be rather a dusty business. You can leave the circus caps behind, and put on your proper headgear. I hope you two women have nothing on that will spoil.”

  He led them down a rickety wooden stair into a basement in which were stored many queer properties; then out of doors into a small dark courtyard above which beetled the walls of the castle. In a corner of this was a door, which he unlocked, and which led to further stables, this time of ancient stone. There followed a narrow passage, another door, and then a cave of a room which contained barrels and shelves and smelt of beer.

  “We are now in the cellars of the Turk’s Head,” Randal expounded. “Proser knows this road, and he knows that I know it, but he does not know of our present visit.”

  From the beer cellar they passed into a smaller one, one end of which was blocked by a massive wooden frame containing bottles in tiers. Randal showed that one part of this frame was jointed, and that a section, bottles and all, formed a door. He pulled this back, and his electric torch revealed a low door in a stone wall. It was bolted with heavy ancient bolts, but they seemed to have been recently in use, for they slipped easily back. Now he evidently expected it to open, but it refused. There was a keyhole, but no key.

  “Some fool must have locked it,” he grumbled. “It must have been Proser, and I told him to leave the infernal thing open. I’m extremely sorry, but you’ll have to wait here till I get a key. It’s filthy dirty, but you won’t suffocate.”

  They did not suffocate, but they had a spell of weary waiting, for the place was pitch-dark and no one of them had a light. Dickson tried to explore in the blackness, and ran his head hard against an out-jutting beam, after which he sat down on the floor and slept. Archie smoked five cigarettes, and did his best to keep up a flow of conversation. “This is the Middle Ages right enough,” he said. “We’re making burglarious entry into an ancient Schloss, and I feel creepy down the spine. We didn’t bargain for this Monte Cristo business, Janet, when we left Geneva. And the last thing I heard that old ass Perrier say there was that the mediæval was out of date.” But by and by he too fell silent, and it was a dispirited and headachy company that at last saw the gleam of Mr Glynde’s torch.

  “I humbly apologise,” said Randal, “but I had a devil of a hunt for Proser. He had gone to see a cousin about his confounded vines. He swears he never locked the door, so it must have been done from the other side. The people in the Schloss are evidently taking no chances. But I’ve got the key.”

  The thing opened readily, and the explorers repeated their recent performance, threading a maze of empty cellars till they came to a door which led to a staircase. For a long time they seemed to be climbing a spiral inside a kind of turret, and came at last to a stage where thin slits of windows let in the daylight. Archie peered out and announced that in his opinion it must be about six o’clock. At last they reached a broad landing, beyond which further steps appeared to ascend. But there was also a door, which Randal tackled confidently as if he expected it to open at once.

  It refused to budge. He examined it and announced that it was locked. “It is always kept open,” he said. “I’ve used it twenty times lately. What in thunder is the matter with it to-day?”

  It was very plain what the matter was. It had been barricaded by some heavy object on the other side. It moved slightly under his pressure, but the barricade held fast.

  “The nerves of this household have gone to blazes,” he said. “Roylance, lend a hand, and you, McCunn. We must heave our weight on it.”

  They heaved their weight, but it did not yield; indeed, they heaved till the three men had no breath left in them. There was a creaking and grinding beyond, but the heavy body, whatever it was, held its ground. They laboured for the better part of an hour, and by and by made a tiny aperture between door and doorpost. The door was too strong to splinter, but Archie got a foot in the crack and, supported by vigorous pressure from behind, slowly enlarged it. Then something seemed to topple down with a crash beyond the door, and they found that it yielded. They squeezed past a big Dutch armoire, from the top of which had fallen a marble torso of Hercules.

  Randal was now on familiar ground. The noise they had made had woken no response in the vast silent house. He led them through stone passages, and then into carpeted corridors, and through rooms hung with tapestries and pictures. There was no sign of servants or of any human life, but
Janet and Alison, feeling the approach of civilisation, tried to tidy their hair, and Mr McCunn passed a silk handkerchief over a damp forehead. At last, when it seemed that they had walked for miles, Randal knocked at a door and was bidden enter.

  It was a small room lined with books, aglow with the sunset which came through a tall window. In a chair sat an old man in a suit of white linen, and on a couch beside him a youthful and dishevelled figure which was refreshing itself with a glass of beer.

  CHAPTER VII. “SI VIEILLESSE POUVAIT”

  Mr John Galt had reason to seek refreshment, for he had had an eventful afternoon.

  He had spent two days not unpleasantly in the camp of that wing of Juventus which Ashie commanded. (“Wing” was their major unit of division: they borrowed their names from the Romans, and Ashie was “Praefectus Alae.”) He was a prisoner, but in honourable captivity — an English friend of the Commander, detained not because he was hostile, but because of the delicacy of the situation. Ashie introduced him to the subordinate officers, and he found them a remarkable collection. There were old soldiers among them who attended to the military side, but there were also a number of young engineers and business men and journalists, who all had their special duties. Juventus, it appeared, was not only a trained and disciplined force, the youth of a nation in arms for defence and, it might be, offence; it was also an organisation for national planning and economic advancement. The recruits were brigaded outside their military units in groups according to their training and professions, and in each group were regular conferences and an elaborate system of education. Jaikie attended a meeting of an oil group, oil being one of Evallonia’s major industries, and was impressed by the keenness of the members and the good sense of the discussions, so far as they were explained to him. This was no mere ebullition of militarism, but something uncommonly like a national revival. He realised that it was not one man’s making. A leader would no doubt be necessary when Juventus took a hand in politics, but the movement itself had welled up from below. It was the sum of the spontaneous efforts of a multitude of people of all types and degrees, who had decided that they were tired of toy-shops and blind alleys and must break for open country.