SIR EDWARD LEITHEN'S MYSTERIES - Complete Series. Buchan John

Archie, “they’re bound to spoil sport. They may stumble on our car, or they may see more of Mr Palliser-Yeates’s doings than we want. Can nothing be done? What about Mr Crossby?”

      Crossby was called into consultation and admitted the gravity of the danger. When his help was demanded, he hesitated. “Of course I know most of them, and they know me, and they’re a very decent lot of fellows. But they’re professional men, and I don’t see myself taking on the job of gulling them. Esprit de Corps, you know…No, they don’t suspect me. They probably think I left the place after I got off the Strathlarrig fish scoop, and that I don’t know anything about the Haripol business. I daresay they’d be glad enough to see me if I turned up…I might link on to them and go with them to Haripol and keep them in a safe place.”

      “That’s the plan,” said Sir Archie. “You march them off to Haripol— say you know the ground—which you do a long sight better than they. Some of the gillies will be hunting the home woods for Lady Claybody’s pup. Get them mixed up in that show. It will all help to damage Macnicol’s temper, and he’s the chap we’re most afraid of…Besides, you might turn up handy in a crisis. Supposin’ Ned Leithen—or old John—has a hard run at the finish you might confuse the pursuit…That’s the game, Crossby my lad, and you’re the man to play it.”

      It was after eleven o’clock before the Ford car, having slipped over the pass from Crask in driving sleet, came to a stand in the screen of birches with the mist wrapping the world so close that the foaming Doran six yards away was only to be recognised by its voice. All the way there Sir Archie had been full of forebodings.

      “We’re givin’ too much weight away, Miss Janet,” he croaked. “All we’ve got on our side is this putrid weather. That’s a bit of luck, I admit. Also we’ve two of the most compromisin’ objects on earth, Fish Benjie and that little brute Roguie…Claybody has a hundred navvies, and a pack of gillies, and every beast will be in the Sanctuary, which is as good as inside a barb-wire fence…The thing’s too ridiculous. We’ve got to sit in this car and watch an eminent British statesman bein’ hoofed off the hill, while old John tries to play the decoy-duck, and Ned Leithen, miles off, is hoppin’ like a he-goat on the mountains…It’s pretty well bound to end in disaster. One of them will be nobbled—probably all three—and when young Claybody asks, ‘Wherefore this outrage?’ I don’t see what the cowerin’ culprit is goin’ to answer and say unto him.”

      But when the car stopped in the drip of the birches, and Archie had leisure to look at the girl by his side, he began to think less of impending perils. The place was loud with wind and water, and yet curiously silent. The mist had drawn so close that the two seemed to be shut into a fantastic, secret world of their own. Janet was wearing breeches and a long riding-coat covered by a grey oilskin, the buttoned collar of which framed her small face. Her bright hair, dabbled with raindrops, was battened down under an ancient felt hat. She looked, thought Sir Archie, like an adorable boy. Also for the last half-hour she had been silent.

      “You have never spoken to me about your speech,” she said at last, looking away from him.

      “Yours, you mean,” he said. “I only repeated what you said that afternoon on Carnmore. But you didn’t hear it. I looked for you everywhere in the hall, and I saw your father and your sister and Bandicott, but I couldn’t see you.”

      “I was there. Did you think I could have missed it? But I was too nervous to sit with the others, so I found a corner at the back below the gallery. I was quite near Wattie Lithgow.”

      Archie’s heart fluttered. “That was uncommon kind. I don’t see why you should have worried about that—I mean I’m jolly grateful. I was just going to play the ass of all creation when I remembered what you had said—and—well, I made a speech instead of repeating the rigmarole I had written. I owe everything to you, for, you see, you started me out—I can never feel just that kind of funk again…Charles thinks I might be some use in politics…But I can tell you when I sat down and hunted through the hall and couldn’t see you it took all the gilt off the gingerbread.”

      “I was gibbering with fright,” said the girl, “when I thought you were going to stick. If Wattie hadn’t shouted out, I think I would have done it myself.”

      After that silence fell. The rain poured from the trees on to the cover of the Ford, and from the cover sheets of water cascaded to the drenched heather. Wet blasts scourged the occupants and whipped a high colour into their faces. Janet arose and got out.

      “We may as well be properly wet,” she said. “If they get the stag as far as the Doran, they must find some way across. There’s none at present. Hadn’t we better build a bridge?”

      The stream, in ordinary weather a wide channel of stones where a slender current falls in amber pools, was now a torrent four yards wide. But it was a deceptive torrent with more noise than strength, and save in the pools was only a foot or two deep. There were many places where a stag could have been easily lugged through by an able-bodied man. But the bridge-building proposal was welcomed, since it provided relief for both from an atmosphere which had suddenly become heavily charged. At a point where the channel narrowed between two blaeberry-thatched rocks it was possible to make an inclined bridge from one bank to the other. The materials were there in the shape of sundry larch-poles brought from the lower woods for the repair of a bridge on the Crask road. Archie dragged half a dozen to the edge and pushed them across. Then Janet marched through the water, which ran close to the top of her riding-boots, and prepared the abutment on the farther shore, weighting the poles down with sods broken from an adjacent bank.

      “I’m coming over,” she cried. “If it will bear a stag, it will bear me.”

      “No, you’re not,” Archie commanded. “I’ll come to you.”

      “The last time I saw you cross a stream you fell in,” she reminded him.

      Archie tested the contrivance, but it showed an ugly inclination to behave like a see-saw, being insufficiently weighted on Janet’s side.

      “Wait a moment. We need more turf,” and she disappeared from sight beyond a knoll. When she returned she was excessively muddy as to hands and garments.

      “I slipped in that beastly peat-moss,” she explained. “I never saw such hags, and there’s no turf to be got except with a spade…No, you don’t! Keep off that bridge, please. It isn’t nearly safe yet. I’m going to roll down stones.”

      Roll down stones she did till she had erected something very much like a cairn at her end, which would have opposed a considerable barrier to the passage of any stag. Then she announced that she must get clean, and went a few yards down-stream to one of the open shallows, where she proceeded to make a toilet. She stood with the current flowing almost to her knees, suffering it to wash the peat from her boots and the skirts of her oilskin and at the same time scrubbing her grimy hands. In the process her hat became loose, dropped into the stream, and was clutched with one hand, while with the other she restrained the efforts of the wind to uncoil her shining curls.

      It was while watching the moving waters at their priest-like task that crisis came upon Sir Archie. In a blinding second he realised with the uttermost certainty that he had found his mate. He had known it before, but now came the flash of supreme conviction…For swelling bosoms and pouting lips and soft curves and languishing eyes Archie had only the most distant regard. He saluted them respectfully and passed by the other side of the road—they did not belong to his world. But that slender figure splashing in the tawny eddies made a different appeal. Most women in such a posture would have looked tousled and flimsy, creatures ill at ease, with their careful allure beaten out of them by weather. But this girl was an authentic creature of the hills and winds—her young slimness bent tensely against the current, her exquisite head and figure made more fine and delicate by the conflict. It is a sad commentary on the young man’s education, but, while his soul was bubbling with poetry, the epithet which kept recurring to his mind was “clean-run.”…More, far more. He saw in that moment of revelation a comrade who would never fail him, with whom he could keep on all the roads of life. It was that which all his days he had been confusedly seeking.”