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

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СКАЧАТЬ and a half minutes, till the invoker realised the presence of the men. She graciously shook hands with Sir Archie.

      “I drove Miss Janet over,” said the young man, explaining the obvious. “And I took the liberty of bringin’ a friend who is stayin’ with me—Mr Palliser-Yeates. I thought Lord Claybody might like to meet him, for I expect he knows all about him.”

      The lady beamed on both. “This is a very great pleasure, Mr Palliser-Yeates, and I’m sure Claybody will be delighted. He ought to be in for tea very soon.” As it chanced, Lady Claybody had an excellent memory and a receptive ear for talk, and she was aware that in her husband’s conversation the name of Palliser-Yeates occurred often, and always in dignified connections. She led the way through the hall to a vast new drawing-room which commanded a wide stretch of lawns and flower-beds as far as the woods which muffled the mouth of the Reascuill glen. When the party were seated and butler and footman had brought the materials for tea, Lady Claybody— Roguie on a cushion by her side—became confidential.

      “We’ve had such a wearing day, my dear.” She turned to Janet. “First, the ruffian who calls himself John Macnab is probably trying to poach our forest. The rain yesterday kept him off, but we have good reason to believe that he will come to-day. Poor Johnson has been on the hill since breakfast. Then, there was the anxiety about Roguie. I’ve had our people searching the woods and shrubberies, for the little darling might have been caught in a trap… Macnicol says there are no traps, but you never can tell. And then, on the top of it all, we’ve been besieged since quite early in the morning by insolent journalists. No. They hadn’t the good manners to come to the house—I should have sent them packing—but they have been over the grounds and buttonholing our servants. They want to hear about John Macnab, but we can’t tell them anything, for as yet we know nothing ourselves. I gave orders that they should be turned out of the place—no violence, of course, for it doesn’t do to offend the Press—but quite firmly, for they were trespassing. Would you believe it, my dear? they wouldn’t go. So our people had simply to drive them out, and it has taken nearly all day, and they may be coming back any moment…Something should really be done, Mr Palliser-Yeates, to restrain the license of the modern Press, with its horrid, vulgar sensationalism and its invasion of all the sanctities of private life.”

      Palliser-Yeates cordially agreed. The lady had not looked to Archie for assent, and her manner towards him was a trifle cold. Perhaps it was the memory of her visit a fortnight before when he was sickening for smallpox; perhaps it was her husband’s emphatic condemnation of his Muirtown speech.

      At this point Lord Claybody entered, magnificent in a kilt of fawn-coloured tweed and a ferocious sporran made of the mask of a dog-otter. The garments, which were aggressively new, did not become his short, square figure.

      “I don’t think you have met my husband, Miss Raden,” said his wife. Then to Lord Claybody: “You know Sir Archibald Roylance. And this is Mr Palliser-Yeates, who has been so kind as to come over to see us.”

      Palliser-Yeates was greeted with enthusiasm. “Delighted to meet you, sir. I heard you were in the North. Funny that we’ve had so much to do with each other indirectly and have never met…You’ve been having a long walk? Well, I know what you need. Cold tea for you. We’ll leave the ladies to their gossip and have a whisky-and-soda in the library. I’ve just had a letter from Dickinson on which I’d like your views. Busy folk like you and me can never make a clean cut of their holiday. There’s always something clawing us back to the mill.”

      The two men were led off to the library, and Janet was left to entertain her hostess. That lady was in an expansive mood, which may have been due to the restoration of Roguie, but also owed something to the visit of Palliser-Yeates. “My heart is buried here,” she told the girl. “Every day I love Haripol more—its beauty and poetry and its—its wonderful traditions. My dream is to make it a centre for all the nicest people to come and rest. Everybody comes to the Highlands now, and we have so much to offer them here…Claybody, I may as well admit, is apt to be restless when we are alone. He is not enough of a sportsman to be happy shooting and fishing all day and every day. He has a wonderful mind, my dear, and he wants a chance of exercising it. He needs to be stimulated. Look how his eye brightened when he saw Mr Palliser-Yeates…And then, there are the girls…I’m sure you see what I mean.”

      Janet saw, and set herself to cherish the innocent ambition of her hostess. In view of what might befall at any moment, it was most needful to have the Claybodys in a good humour. Then Lady Claybody, one of whose virtues was a love of fresh air, proposed that they should walk in the gardens. Janet would have preferred to remain in the house, had she been able to think of any kind of excuse, for the out-of-doors at the moment was filled with the most explosive material—Benjie, Mackenzie, an assortment of fugitive journalists, and Leithen and Lamancha somewhere in the hinterland. But she assented with a good grace, and, accompanied by Roguie, who after a morning of liberty had cast the part of lap-dog contemptuously behind him, they sauntered into the trim parterres.

      The head-gardener at Haripol was a man of the old school. He loved fantastically shaped beds and geometrical patterns, and geraniums and lobelias and calceolarias were still dear to his antiquated soul. On the lawns he had been given his head, but Lady Claybody, who had accepted new fashions in horticulture as in other things, had constructed a pleasaunce of her own, which with crazy-paving and sundials and broad borders was a very fair imitation of an old English garden. She had a lily-pond and a rosery and many pergolas, and what promised in twenty years to be a fine yew-walk. The primitive walled garden, planted in the Scots fashion a long way from the house, was now relegated to fruit and vegetables.

      Lady Claybody was an inaccurate enthusiast. She poured into Janet’s ear a flow of botanical information and mispronounced Latin names. Each innovation was modelled on what she had seen or heard of in some famous country house. The girl approved, for in that glen the environment of hill and wood was so masterful that the artifices of man were instantly absorbed. The gardens exhausted, they wandered through the rhododendron thickets, which in early summer were towers of flame, crossed the turbid Reascuill by a rustic bridge, and found themselves in a walk which skirted the stream through a pleasant wilderness. Here an expert from Kew had been turned loose, and had made a wonderful wild garden, in which patches of red-hot pokers and godetia and Hyacinthus candicans shone against the darker carpet of the heather. Roguie led the way, and where Roguie’s yelps beckoned his mistress followed. Soon the two were nearly a mile from the house, approaching the portals of the Reascuill glen.

      Sir Edward Leithen left Crask just as the wet dawn was breaking. He had a very long walk before him, but at that he was not dismayed; what perplexed him was how it was going to end. To the first part, a struggle with wind and rain and many moorland miles, he looked forward with enthusiasm. Long, lonely expeditions had always been his habit, for he was the kind of man who could be happy with his own thoughts. Before it became the fashion he had been a pioneer in guideless climbing in the Alps, and the red-letter days in his memory were for the most part solitary days. He was always in hard condition, and his lean figure rarely knew fatigue; weather he minded little, and he had long ago taught himself how to find his road, even in mist, with map and compass.

      So it was with sincere enjoyment that his legs covered the rough miles—along the Crask ridge till it curved round at the head of the Doran and led him to the eastern skirts of Sgurr Dearg. He knew from the map that the great eastern precipice of that mountain was towering above him, but he saw only the white wall of fog a dozen yards off. His aim was to make a circuit of the massif and bear round to the pass of the Red Burn, which made a road between Haripol and Machray. He would then be nearly north of the Sanctuary and exactly opposite where Lamancha proposed to make his entrance…A fortnight earlier, when he first came to Crask, he had gone for a walk in far pleasanter weather, and had been acutely bored. Now, with no prospect but a wet blanket of mist, and with no chance of observing bird or plant, he was enjoying every moment of it. More, his thoughts were beginning to turn pleasantly towards the other side of his life—his СКАЧАТЬ