My Father Sleeps (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “It’s nothing,” she said; and laughed. “Only . . . don’t stay downstairs any longer than you can help; and . . . keep your eye on him. I still don’t like him very much.”

  “Oh, he’s all right, although I admit I’m a bit prejudiced. It’s his name, I expect. . . . Loudoun.”

  “Isn’t Loudoun a Scottish name?”

  “Good Lord, of course it is! But . . . I don’t know. . . . I expect it’s my great grandfather in me . . . I can’t explain. It’s a feeling I have in my bones. You wouldn’t know it.”

  “All right, you conceited clansman! Don’t drink too much of his whisky, anyway!”

  On this more cheerful note they parted, and Ian returned to his host.

  “I daresay,” said Loudoun, taking the pipe from his mouth and gazing at the stem of it as he spoke, “you’ll have thought me wrong in the head, the way I spoke to you this afternoon on the moor?”

  “Of course not,” said Ian, polite and wary. “Why?”

  “Man, you know why! I thought it myself last night. It’s a queer tale, and an ungodly. I wish you’d let me tell you . . .”

  Ian nodded. Of one thing he felt certain: although Catherine probably had been right when she said that Loudoun was suffering from shock, for he looked appallingly ill, he was as sane as Ian himself.

  “Go ahead,” said Ian, settling down and leaning back in his chair. “Don’t scamp the details. I like ’em. You said you were haunted. I’m willing to believe even that in the west of Scotland.”

  “You are?” Loudoun bent and poked the fire. “Well, it started, I imagine, with my accident.” He put down the poker, sat up, and tapped his leg. “I had a bad smash. A fall. At least, I’m not sure it wasn’t an attempt to put me out. You can judge when you’ve heard the story.”

  The old woman had brought in the decanter. He pushed it towards his guest.

  “Help yourself. Well, it all began very early this year, when a fellow named Ure came to see me. This was in London, by the way. I’ve a business there, and my office is just off Black-friars Bridge.

  “Well, anyway, this fellow Ure sent up his card, and when he was shown in he said he was from the Government Commission that was investigating the possibilities of developing the water-power of the Highlands for the purposes of manufacture. He said he understood I owned a glen. . . .”

  He paused for such a long time after he had made this last statement that Ian, to recall him, asked abruptly:

  “Do you?”

  “Do I . . . ? I beg your pardon? Oh, do I own a glen? Well, yes, I suppose I do. But, you see, it is such a very small glen and the only water in it, apart from cascades down the mountainside when it rains, is such a very small loch that I asked him—I wasn’t annoyed at this point, you understand; annoyance came later—how he had got hold of my name in connection with this water-power scheme. He said the commissioners had it, he supposed, and had sent him to make enquiries. So I told him (civilly, I think) that my glen would not interest the government, and that, in any case, it wasn’t for sale.

  “ ‘But you’ll have to sell,’ said he, grinning at me in an annoying way and showing a big gap in his top front teeth.”

  “ ‘The devil I shall!’ said I. And we faced one another across the writing-table in my sitting-room, and, for the first time, I really looked at the man; and what I saw I didn’t care about; so I said, a bit sharply:

  “ ‘The water in my glen is still water. It’s of no use to the government, or anybody else. And I should be glad to see your credentials, Mr. Ure.’ ”

  “He didn’t like that, and he hadn’t any credentials with him. This, as a matter of fact, impressed me fairly favourably. It seemed more reasonable, if you understand me, that he should come without proof that he was a government servant. It’s the rogue who comes furnished with every particular under the sun, including his own birth-certificate.”

  He broke off and smiled. Ian nodded.

  “What about the accident?” he said.

  “Ah, the accident; yes. I’m coming to that,” said Loudoun. “Well, I decided to take a long week-end at the beginning of February, and I thought I would come up here; not to this house, but to a kind of country club I belong to just outside St. Andrews. I had hoped for some golf, but, if you remember, we had a lot of snow about then, and play was out of the question.

  “I was in two minds about staying, as a matter of fact, and had decided to toss up for it when who should turn up but this fellow Ure, dogging me again and bleating about my glen and demanding to know my price.”

  “Well, we were in my room upstairs, and the clubhouse has an outside iron staircase. I took him out to the top of it. I wasn’t the wreck I look now. I took him by the collar and said:

  “ ‘Now, you listen to me. Either you take yourself off, here and now, and promise not to bother me again, or I pitch you headfirst down this flight of steps. Which is it to be? Take your choice, and make it quickly.’ ”

  “ ‘All right. If that’s how you feel, I’ll go,’ he said. ‘Come down and have a drink before we part.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘Good-bye.’ ”

  “I watched him go down the steps. When he got to the bottom of the flight—they are iron steps, as I said, going outside the walls of the building—he turned and looked up at me and said:

  “ ‘Oh, by the way, Mr. Loudoun . . . ’ Then he clutched the iron banisters and his voice trailed off in a kind of gurgle and he looked as though he were going to have a fit.”

  “ ‘What’s the matter?’ I called; and I went to the top step to say it. At the same moment somebody came out of one of the rooms—I thought they were all empty up there, by the way—and hooked away my feet and pushed me hard, and I took the most frightful toss down the whole flight of steps. I had very serious concussion and smashed up my leg, and when I came out of hospital I thought I’d come here to recuperate. It hasn’t been a success. This other beastly business started a week ago . . . I’ve written it out as a statement in case I go mad. . . . You read it. Here it is.”

  He unlocked a drawer in a small bureau just beside him and took out some folded papers from a blotting-pad. These papers he handed to Ian, and moved the lamp closer so that he could read more easily.

  “Mind you, I’m perfectly willing to believe I imagined the whole thing,” he said, reverting to the normal tones in which he had described the visit of Mr. Ure. “But I know I can’t stand any more. I’ve had a week of it.”

  “What happened to this fellow Ure?” demanded Ian.

  “That’s the odd part. I don’t know. He certainly didn’t stay to see how badly I was hurt. They’d even swept the snow from the path outside and I pitched on to solid concrete. I lay for nearly three hours before anyone came.”

  “Well,” said Ian, picking up the papers without enthusiasm, “I’m awfully sorry, of course, that you’ve had such a rotten time. Look here, when we leave in the morning, why don’t you come along with us? Plenty of room, I expect, where we are staying.”

  “I couldn’t do that. There’s the old woman, my housekeeper. She’d have a fit if I left her suddenly like that. Besides—oh, no, I couldn’t do that. But you read what I’ve put. It won’t take long. . . . I’d like you to know what I’ve been through . . .”

  Ian unfolded the sheets and began to read. The style was of literary flavour, and slightly pretentious at that, but the matter was clear enough. It was written in the third person. He wondered why.

  “There are haunted glens in the Western Highlands. Glencoe is only one of them. There are haunted houses, and castles grim with legend. There is a haunted mound south of Ballachulish where Seumas a Ghlinne was hanged, and his dead body hung in chains, for a murder he did not commit, and to save a secret which, so far, has never been told.”

  “Between Salachan Glen and Ballachulish stands a shooting lodge, as English people call it, where lives, in this year of grace, a haunted man. He calls himself Hector Loudoun, and he wears, at balls
and at the Highland Gatherings at Portree and at Fort William, the Campbell tartan.”

  “The first he knew of the haunting was the very odd experience he had whilst he was convalescent after an accident. He slipped on the outside staircase of the Scottish country club at which he had been staying for golf. He broke his leg just below the kneecap, and remained all night in the bitter cold of a snowy February night. He had pneumonia as a result of shock and the cold and exposure, and was a very sick man for several months.”

  “When he was able to walk a little he left Scotland and returned to London, where he had a flat, but he found the city nerve-trying. He decided to go to his place in Lochaber, to the soothing peace of his own hills and glens, to the ministrations of the old woman who had been his childhood nurse and was now his housekeeper.”

  “He had been in the house three days when the hauntings began. He had been out for his first long walk, and, although he did not go far—as a Highlander understands distance—he was extremely exhausted when at last he crawled back to the house. He was sorry for himself that he was in such poor shape, irritated that his strength had not flowed back more rapidly, and perturbed by the fear that his leg, in spite of all the care and attention that had been given, would never allow him to perform the feats of endurance which had been a commonplace of his life before the accident. There was nothing strange or unusual in these feelings. Most convalescents, especially if they have been accustomed to a strenuous, active life and are young and impatient, feel the same. But in Loudoun these emotions were aggravated by the discovery, when, sick and tired, he reached the house after his walk, that his fiancée had jilted him and had written to say that she was to be married in less than a month. His white face, haggard eyes, and air of strain and weariness alarmed old Morag, the housekeeper. He drank whisky instead of tea, and, later, refused his supper. At ten o’clock he told her to get to her bed. She obeyed him; it was her usual bedtime, and she thought that he would be better left alone. She made up the fire with good coal—for peats were used only in the kitchen and not always there—and took her candle. She paused to wish him good night and better health in the morning. She spoke in Gaelic, her native tongue, and he replied in the same language. When she was gone he rested his leg on a stool, poured out more whisky, and gave himself up to brooding.”

  “On the rug, close pressed against his foot, lay a great dog, a deerhound. Uneasy, sensing his master’s mood, he growled softly, lifted his head, whined, subsided, and never, even in sleep, allowed himself entire relaxed repose. Loudoun did not heed him. His mind went in widening but viciously concentric circles, travelling over his troubles, his griefs, his disappointments.”

  “Humiliation succeeded despair, and self-loathing followed. His Highland blood, sensitive, proud, and possessive, could not brook nor bear the crowning disaster of disillusionment. He had been in love—or thought he had—three years. He re-read the cruel letter, burnt it, and at three in the morning he stood up and limped to the old muzzle-loader hanging on the parlour wall.”

  “The dog stirred, and pricked up his ears. He growled in a questioning tone and thrust his muzzle against the calf of his master’s leg.”

  “ ‘Get out!’ said Loudoun. He fingered the stock of the gun and watched a leaping light strike on the barrel as a flame shot out from one of the red-hot coals.”

  “Above the gun was a portrait. The flame which had struck on the metal gleamed for an instant on oil-paint smooth with varnish; on a hand that was clasped on the basket hilt of a claymore; on the chequered white and red of a phillabeg and plaid. It was then that he heard the voice. He was sitting in the dark except for the glow of the fire. He had re-read the letter by firelight. It was by the less than half-light of the embers that he felt the shadow beside him in the room. The voice was sibilant. Loudoun, horribly afraid, listened, sweated, and swore. The voice went on, insistent, whispering, eerie, telling of things which Loudoun had sometimes heard in dreams.”

  “ ‘They hanged me, my son,’ said the voice.”

  “ ‘They hanged me last May.’ This was kept from you because you were young, and because it happened after your mother had married Rory Loudoun. I do not suppose you remember me. Do you remember the man with the six-ton yacht at Tobermory? I was that man.”

  “Rory gave you his name, my son, when he married Lorna. Lorna wrote to me about it. She said it would make your whole life easier. She begged me to be reasonable about it. I have always tried to be reasonable, even about my death and the manner of it, and I know it is not reasonable, my son, to haunt you like this, and at so late an hour, and in so remote a place; but I was not, in life, and am not now, in death, completely master of my morbid inclinations. Haunt you I do, and shall.”

  “It is no trick of the fire-light by which you seem to see me. I am here. And you see me all the more clearly in that you do not see me, in the earthly sense, at all. It is my voice you hear, although you would like to persuade yourself that it is the sound of shingle dragged and thrown back by the sea. This lonely glen is no longer tenanted only by you and the gulls. It was my home. It is my home again.”

  “I speak to you from the grave. I died dishonoured. I died the death of a dog; whether justly or not you shall judge, Draw nearer the fire, my son. These autumn nights are cold, and you have been grievously ill. My breath on your neck is cold, and colder than the sea-mists over Loch Linnhe is the touch of my hand on your hair.”

  “ ‘They hanged me last May.’ The snows were still on Beinn Cruachan . . .”

  “Loudoun sat down again, passed a hand over his eyes, stooped, and patted the dog. The dog whimpered once, very softly, and went to sleep.”

  “Loudoun, his hands still shaking, felt in his pockets for matches and lighted the lamp. His throat was dry with fear and his forehead was dewy with sweat. His instinct was to wake Morag. He longed for a human voice and a human presence. But he was twenty-six years old and had to deprive himself of the reassurance her presence and voice would have brought him.”

  “Leaving the lamp alight, he went to the window and looked out. The night was brilliantly clear. There had been heavy mist in the early morning. It had rolled down from Aonach and Bidean nam Bian, and over the moors from Glen Etive, and until the middle of the morning it had lain wet and thick over moor and track and road. Then the sun came through; the day had been clear and fine; it was the weather which had tempted Loudoun to take his longest tramp since his accident.”

  “He put back the window blind, took the lamp in his hand, and climbed the stair. He undressed slowly. It took him nearly an hour to get to bed. He put out the lamp at last, and then went across and looked out of the bedroom window. Outside, on the chequered landscape, there walked a man. At first sight he appeared to be part of the night, a darker shadow flung on the bushes beside the door of the house; but Loudoun, whose heart had contracted at sight of him, knew that the shadow had nothing in common with the fretwork dapplings of the moonlight, and he stood at the window, watching. The shadowy man remained still for perhaps ten minutes. Then he came out from the bushes as a man will come out from hiding, cautiously, to make sure that the coast is clear.”

  “He did not glance up at the window, and, even if he had glanced up, he would probably not have seen Loudoun. He walked away from the house and was soon out of sight among the fir trees which grew in a witch-cluster close to the shore of the little loch that lay behind the building.”

  “Loudoun found himself trembling. He waited for half an hour, but no one else came. At last he got into bed, and, huddling the bedclothes over his mouth and ears, forced his mind into channels conducive to sleep. This policy he had had to adopt since the shock of the accident. He gave himself up to a kind of soporific day-dreaming and had so far perfected himself in the technique of it that his torn nerves recognized the drug and usually reacted to it well.”

  “He woke later on in a sweat, with his heart almost bursting through the thin bony structure of his ribs. The hateful voice was
in his ears again . . . the insidious whisper seemed not to have stilled itself before he was wide awake, his eyes staring in terror about the moon-washed room, his strong fingers clutching the sheets, and his disordered hair seeming to him to stand up stiffly on his head.”

  “ ‘They hanged me last May,’ said the voice. ‘What are you going to do about that, Hector Loudoun? She said it would make life easy if you took Rory Loudoun’s name. Why should life be easy for you, my son? For you are my son. And there is Glencoe to remember.’ ”

  “Loudoun believed for some moments that he was going to die. He did not believe that anyone, under the stress of the deadly terror that he was experiencing then, could so much suffer and yet remain, not only alive, but conscious.”

  “Gradually his heart-beats steadied. He dared not try to sleep again, however. He lay awake to face the alternative horrors that either he was a haunted man or else that he was insane and subject to the delusions of madness.”

  “He rose as soon as it was light, and went out on to the moor. One thing was clear to him. He could not face a repetition of the night’s experiences. At any rate, he could not face it alone.”

  “He could not walk far that morning. His knee was very painful. Leaning upon his stick he turned off the moor, came down to the path beside the loch, and then walked seawards towards Loch Linnhe until he came to a ruined cottage standing lonely between the edge of the great sea-loch and the high moors of Appin. He limped to a broken wall, sat down and tried to think out what he should do.”

  “The beauty and the peace of his surroundings soothed and comforted him. Some impulse, of a kind which he had not associated with himself since his childhood days, rose in him without prompting. He leaned forward upon his stick and rested his chin on his fists. The sensation, long unfamiliar, of the pressure of his chin on his folded hands, then prompted him to pray. He closed his eyes and prayed for help, as drifting sailors do.”

  “I’ll just go along to Catherine to see how she is,” said Ian, without commenting on the script. Loudoun rose.