Brothers & Sisters - John & Anna Buchan Edition (Collection of Their Greatest Works). Buchan John

walk to some place where I can hire a conveyance.”

      “Where did you think of going?” Jaikie asked.

      “London,” was the reply. “I can find privacy in the suite in my office.”

      “Have you considered that that will be watched? These Evallonians, as we know, are careful people who mean business, and they seem to have a pretty useful intelligence system. You will be besieged in your office just as badly as if you were at Castle Gay. And with far more publicity.”

      Mr Craw pondered ruefully. “You think so? Perhaps you are right. What about a quiet hotel?”

      Jaikie shook his head. “No good. They will find you out. And if you go to Glasgow or Edinburgh or Manchester or Bournemouth it will be the same. It doesn’t do to underrate the cleverness of the enemy. If Mr Craw goes anywhere in these islands as Mr Craw some hint of it will get out, and they’ll be on to it like a knife.”

      Despair was creeping back into the other’s face. “Have you any other course to suggest?” he faltered.

      “I propose that you and I go where you’re not expected, and that’s just in the Canonry. The Evallonians will look for you in Castle Gay and everywhere else except in its immediate neighbourhood. It’s darkest under the light, you see. Nobody knows you by sight, and you and I can take a quiet saunter through the Canonry without anybody being the wiser, while Dougal finishes the job at the Castle.”

      Mr Craw’s face was a blank, and Jaikie hastened to complete his sketch.

      “We’ll be on a walking tour, the same as Dougal and I proposed, but we’ll get out of the hills. An empty countryside like this is too conspicuous… I know the place, and I’ll guarantee to keep you well hidden. I’ve brought Dougal’s pack for you. In it there’s a suit of pyjamas and a razor and some shirts and things which I got from Mr Barbon… “

      Mr Craw cried out like one in pain.

      “… And a pair of strong boots,” Jaikie concluded soothingly. “I’m glad I remembered that. The boots you have on would be in ribbons the first day on these stony roads.”

      It was Jaikie’s third error in tactics. Mr Craw had experienced various emotions, including terror, that evening, and now he was filled with a horrified disgust. He had created for himself a padded and cosseted life; he had scaled an eminence of high importance; he had made his daily existence a ritual every item of which satisfied his self-esteem. And now this outrageous young man proposed that he should scrap it all and descend to the pit out of which thirty years ago he had climbed. Even for safety the price was far too high. Better the perils of high politics, where at least he would remain a figure of consequence. He actually shivered with repulsion, and his anger gave him a momentary air of dignity and power.

      “I never,” he said slowly, “never in my life listened to anything so preposterous. You suggest that I—_I_—should join you in wandering like a tramp through muddy Scottish parishes and sleeping in mean inns!… To-morrow I shall go to London. And meantime I am going to bed.”

      CHAPTER 8

       CASIMIR

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      Miss Alison Westwater rose early on the following morning, and made her way on foot through the now unbarricaded lodge-gates to the Castle. The fateful meeting with the Evallonians, to which she had not been bidden, was at eleven, and before that hour she had much to do.

      She was admitted by Bannister. “I don’t want to see Mr Barbon,” she said. “I want to talk to you.” Bannister, in his morning undress, bowed gravely, and led her into the little room on the left side of the hall where her father used to keep his boots and fishing-rods.

      Bannister was not the conventional butler. He was not portly, or sleek, or pompous, or soft-voiced, though he was certainly soft-footed. He was tall and lean, with a stoop which, so far from being servile, was almost condescending. He spoke the most correct English, and was wont to spend his holidays at a good hotel in this or that watering place, where his well-cut clothes, his quiet air, his wide knowledge of the world, and his somewhat elaborate manners caused him to be taken in the smoking-room for a member of the Diplomatic Service. He had begun life in a famous training-stable at Newmarket, but had been compelled to relinquish the career of a jockey at the age of eighteen owing to the rate at which he grew. Thereafter he had passed through various domestic posts, always in the best houses, till the age of forty-seven found him butler to that respected but ineffective statesman, the Marquis of Oronsay. At the lamented death of his patron he had passed to Mr Craw, who believed that a man who had managed four different houses for an irascible master with signal success would suit his own more modest requirements. He was right in his judgment. Bannister was a born organiser, and would have made an excellent Quartermaster-General. The household at Castle Gay moved on oiled castors, and Mr Craw’s comfort and dignity and his jealous retirement suffered no jar in Bannister’s hands. Mr Barbon might direct the strategy, but it was the butler who saw to the tactics.

      The part suited him exactly, for Bannister was accustomed to generous establishments—ubi multa supersunt—and he loved mystery. It was meat and drink to him to be the guardian of a secret, and a master who had to be zealously shielded from the public eye was the master he loved to serve. He had acquired the taste originally from much reading of sensational fiction, and it had been fostered by the circumstances of his life. He had been an entranced repository of many secrets. He knew why the Duke of Mull had not received the Garter; why the engagement between Sir John Rampole and the Chicago heiress was broken off—a tale for which many an American paper would have gladly paid ten thousand dollars; almost alone he could have given a full account of the scandals of the Braddisdale marriage; he could have explained the true reason for the retirement from the service of the State of one distinguished Ambassador, and the inexplicable breakdown in Parliament of a rising Under-Secretary. His recollections, if divulged, might have made him the humble Greville of his age. But they were never divulged—and never would be. Bannister was confidential, because he enjoyed keeping a secret more than other men enjoy telling one. It gave him a sense of mystery and power.

      There was only one thing wanting to his satisfaction. He had a profound—and, as he would have readily admitted, an illogical—liking for the aristocracy. He wished that his master had accepted a peerage, like other Press magnates; in his eyes a new title was better than none at all. For ancient families with chequered pasts he had a romantic reverence. He had studied in the county histories the story of the house of Rhynns, and it fulfilled his most exacting demands. It pleased him to dwell in a mansion consecrated by so many misdeeds. He wished that he could meet Lord Rhynns in the flesh. He respected the household at the Mains as the one link between himself and the older nobility. Mrs Brisbane-Brown was his notion of what a middle-aged gentlewoman should be; and he had admired from afar Alison galloping in the park. She was like the Ladies Ermyntrude and Gwendolen of whom he had read long ago, and whom he still cherished as an ideal, in spite of a lifetime of disillusionment. There was a fount of poetry welling somewhere in Bannister’s breast.

      “I’ve come to talk to you, Bannister,” the girl began, “about the mess we’re in. It concerns us all, for as long as Mr Craw lives in Castle Gay we’re bound to help him. As you are aware, he has disappeared. But, as you may have heard, we have a rough notion of where he is. Well, we’ve got to straighten out things here while he is absent. Hold the fort, you know.”

      The butler bowed gravely.

      “First, there’s the foreigners, who are coming here at eleven.”

      “If I might hazard a suggestion,” Bannister interrupted. “Are you certain, Miss, that these foreigners are what they claim to be?”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Is it not possible that they are a gang of international crooks who call themselves Evallonians, knowing Mr Craw’s interest in that country, and wish to effect an entry into the castle for sinister purposes?”