Tales of Mysteries & Espionage - John Buchan Edition. Buchan John

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СКАЧАТЬ it’s not going to be anything more. We’ll retire shelf by shelf and watch the fireworks.”

      Two nights later it was reported by wireless that destroyers had left Olifa for the north, and the following morning they were sighted by Grayne’s air scouts about twenty miles south of the Courts of the Morning. This news enabled Grayne to adjust his time-table. The destroyers entered the gulf at 11.30 a.m., but they seemed to find difficulty with that uncharted coast, and it was well into the afternoon before they attempted to their men. Corbett and his garrison had been withdrawn from the shore, and the hut left apparently intact. But the first mariners who entered it had various unpleasing surprises, with the result that the occupation of the beach became a matter of careful reconnaissance, and darkness had fallen before the last of the landing-parties was on shore. Corbett, now at Post No. I, waited grimly for the morning advance.

      The last day in the sanctuary was for Barbara like some strange motion-picture seen from uneasy stalls. She had nothing to do except to wait and watch. The Courts been dismantled till they looked like a disused builder’s yard. The tall poles of the wireless installation had gone, the huts were empty, the great storehouse was bare except for the inflammable material which could be fired by a single fuse. One solitary aeroplane patrolled the sky. White mechanics, troopers, mestizos, Indians, all had gone except the guard which was to accompany herself and the Gobernador. It was a clear brightly-lit day and rather cold. From the sea-ravine could be heard an occasional rumble and sputter of fire, but the only garrison left there now was Corbett and two of his lieutenants. The Olifa advance was three-quarters of the way up the ravine, and Corbett had been ordered, after seeing to the last great explosion, to make his best speed to the huts. As Barbara looked round the deserted camp which for weeks had been her home, she wanted to cry.

      Departure seemed a farewell both to her hopes and her friends.

      The Gobernador, muffled in a great blanket-coat, joined her. He too looked at the bare walls and the desolate compounds.

      “That is the curse of war,” he said. “It makes one destroy what one loves.”

      “I feel as if I were leaving home,” said Barbara.

      “I did not mean this place,” was the answer. “I was linking of Lady Roylance.”

      Presently there fell on their ears a dull roar from the direction of the sea-ravine. Grayne appeared with his watch his hand.

      “Time to start now, Miss Babs. Corbett will be here in five minutes. Lossberg is a mile short of Three Fountains.”

      They mounted their wiry little horses, while the guardian aeroplane flew very slowly to the south. It was almost dusk, and as they turned into the forest trail they stopped instinctively for one look backward. Suddenly the Courts were bright with tongues of fire, and Corbett and his assistants joined them. It was to the accompaniment of roaring fires behind, which made a rival glow to the sunset, that party disappeared into the gloom of the trees. As they bent eastward under the skirts of the mountain the crackling and the glow died away, and presently, at a headland above a deep glen, Grayne halted. From far away in the muffled foothills to the south came the chatter of machine guns.

      “That is the last word,” he said. “Lossberg is at Three Fountains and our defence is falling back to join us. I’m sorry. I’d got to like the old place.”

      For hours they rode through the dark forest. There was no moon, and the speed was poor, for they guided themselves only by contact. The Indians who led the way had to move slowly to keep pace with the groping, jostling cavalcade behind. Barbara and Castor rode in the centre of the group and, full of their own thoughts, spoke scarcely a word to each other, except of apology for a sudden jolt. The Gobernador had accompanied them without protest. He seemed to have no ear for the distant rat-tat of the machine guns of his friends.

      About ten o’clock they halted to bivouac for the night.

      It was a hollow tucked between the knees of the mountain spurs. Some summer thunderstorm had once set the forest alight, and for acres beside the stream there was bare ground carpeted with moss and studded with the scarred stumps of trees. Half a dozen fires were soon burning, and supper was eaten from the saddle-bags. Barbara had her sleeping-tent, but she ate with Castor beside one of the bivouacs. She noticed how clumsily he dismounted from his horse, and how stiffly he moved. This was not the life he knew, and he was no longer young.

      It was a quiet night without a breath of wind, but chilling towards frost. The sky was ablaze with stars, which there in the open gave light enough to show the dim silhouettes of the overhanging hills. As the two sat side by side in the firelight, Castor smoking his pipe, his figure hunched in that position peculiar to townsmen who try to reproduce in the wilds the comfort of a chair, the girl realised that something had happened. Hitherto she had felt it a duty to entertain the Gobernador, making conversation as one does with a stranger. Now she found that there was no such need. She could be silent without impoliteness. He had become her friend, as he had been Janet’s, a member of her world, whose thoughts she could instinctively discern, and who could anticipate her own.

      For the last days she had been slipping dangerously near the edge of her self-control. Janet’s danger seemed only a part of the general crumbling of life. She had the sensation of walking on quicksands, with a thin crust between her and unspeakable things. But the ride in the forest—movement, even if it were towards the unknown and the darkness—had put vigour again into her blood, and now in this great hollow hand of the mountains, under a blazing canopy of stars, she felt an irrational hope. She turned to her companion, who had let his head sink back against the flaps of his saddle and was staring upwards.

      “I thought the Courts of the Morning was a refuge,” she said, “but I think it must have been also a prison. I feel freer now… I feel nearer Janet.”

      He did not answer. Then he asked: “Where were you brought up, Miss Dasent? What kind of life have you had? You can’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two.”

      “I am twenty-four,” she said. She began to tell him of her childhood, for it comforted her to talk. She spoke of a rambling country-house high up in the South Carolina piedmont, with the blue, forested hills behind; of a childhood among old coloured servants; of winter visits to the Florida shores; of barbecues each autumn for the mountain folk; of spring gallops among upland meadows or on the carpeted trails in the pinewoods; of days with a bobbery pack of hounds in difficult pockety country. She found herself speaking easily and naturally as if to an old friend. Her school days in Charleston, her first visits to Washington and New York, her first crossing of the Atlantic—she made a pleasant picture of it all as stages in a progressive happiness.

      “Why do you want to hear this?” she asked at length. “It is so different a world from yours—so very humble.”

      “It is a different world—yes. I can judge one thing about you. You have never known fear. No man or woman or animal has ever made you afraid.”

      She laughed. “How preposterous! I have been often terribly afraid.”

      “No. You have never met a fear which you were not ready to face. You are brave by instinct, but perhaps you have not been tested. When you meet a fear which draws the blood from your heart and brain and the vigour from your nerves and still keep your face to it—that is the test.”

      “Have you known such a fear?” she asked.

      “I? How could I? You cannot fear what you despise! I have been too unhappily fortunate in life. I began with advantages. I was educated by my father, who was an embittered genius. I inherited very young a great fortune!… I was born in Austria, and therefore had no real country. Even before the war СКАЧАТЬ