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

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СКАЧАТЬ found that I was cleverer than other people, and that my brains enabled me to use those others. How could I ever be afraid of what I could use? For twenty years I have watched a world which I despised as futile, and pulled the strings of its folly. Some of those years were occupied by war. I took no apparent part in the war, for I had no fatherland, but I caught fish in its troubled waters. I evolved a philosophy, but I have never lied to myself, and I knew that I cared for that creed only because it flattered my egotism. I understood humanity well enough to play on its foibles. I thought that it was all foibles, save for one or two people like myself in each generation. I wanted to adjust the world so that it would be in the hands of this select few. Oh, I was supremely confident. I believed in the intellect, and mine told me that I was right. I even cultivated a dislike of the things and the people that were opposed to my creed. But there was no passion in my dislike—there is no passion in contempt, just as there is no fear. I have never been afraid—how could I, when I saw mankind like little ants running about on my errands? Therefore my courage has never been tried. But there is this difference between us—I know that you are brave, and I do not think that I am.”

      “What nonsense!” Barbara exclaimed. “You have amazing fortitude. Look how you have behaved since we carried you off.”

      “That was not fortitude, it was bewilderment. I have been beginning to wonder, to puzzle. I have never before been puzzled in my life. I have lost my contempt.”

      “That is a good thing,” and she smiled. “My father had me taught Latin and I remember what an old bishop of the Middle Ages said. He said that the advancing stages in human wisdom were ‘spernere mundum, spernere sese, spernere nullum.’”

      He lifted his head sharply.

      “I have gone through the first stage,” he said. “I have despised the world. I think I have reached the second—I am coming to despise myself… and I am afraid.”

      The ride next day was in a difficult country, for it became necessary, in order to avoid the deep-cut ravines of torrents, to climb high up on the mountainside. The path was good, for it had been used incessantly for transport during the last months, but the weather was vile, for the south-west wind brought a storm of rain, and the party rode all day in an icy bath. The track ran with water like a millstream, he trees were too scattered to give protection against the slanting spears of rain, and in the thicker coverts a steady shower-bath descended from the canopy.

      Till the late afternoon the downpour continued, and what with slipping and plunging horses, water at every ford whirling to the riders’ boots, and the relentless soaking cataracts of rain, there was no bodily comfort that day.

      Barbara, herself lithe and active as a boy, saw that the Gobernador bore the labour ill, and was very near the edge of his strength. He managed his horse clumsily, and often in the steeper places she took his bridle. At one of the fords it was only by a vigorous haul that she saved him from a ducking.

      Before evening the rain ceased, the sun came out, and that high cold place there was no steamy mist, only a tonic smell of wet mountain soil and a jewelling of every and herb. The encampment at dusk was in a stony trough, where a shelf of rock made a deep overhang, and tents could be set up under it as under a roof. Barbara assisted the Gobernador to dismount, and so weary was he that he almost fell into her arms. She attended herself to his comfort, stripped off his soaking boots and blanket-coat, ransacked his valise for dry clothes, compounded with the assistance of Roger Grayne a merciless cocktail, and made his bed in a dry nook of rock not too far from the warmth of the fire. She found him curiously helpless, He was too weary to protest, and had as little knowledge of how to look after himself as a recruit on his first day’s service.

      After supper he seemed to recover. A woman who has nursed a man feels a protective interest in him, and Barbara found a new ease in talking to him. How had she ever looked on one so helpless as a great criminal! She dropped the formal “Excellency” with which she had been in the habit of addressing him. She had made him get into his sleeping-bag at once, and eat his supper among a pile of coverings. Now he reclined like an ancient Roman at table, the great fire lighting up the rocky antrum and silhouetting against the darkness his noble head and brows and the nose like a ship’s prow.

      “Do you know,” he said, “I have hardly ever in my life endured bodily discomfort or pain? I have never been ill. I know so little of what is in the world.”

      He seemed to have divined the girl’s thoughts. He had used human beings as pawns, careless of their sufferings. She thought that Janet was right—that he had a short-range imagination. That was his defence. His cruelties had been blindness, rather than purposeful crime. She looked on him with a kindlier eye.

      Then they spoke—a sure proof of intimacy—of their friends. Grayne sat with them for a little, and then went off on a tour of inspection. As he went, Castor’s eyes followed him. “That’s a good boy! You have many like him?”

      “Plenty. America produces them in bulk.”

      “And Britain. A different type, but the same in essentials. But they are only company officers—at the best, perhaps, brigadiers. It is commanders-in-chief that we need.”

      “There is Lord Clanroyden,” said the girl.

      “Perhaps. I am not sure. He has most of the gifts, but has he ever faced fear—faced it, and gone through to the other side? His eye is that of a leader, but I do not see in it the depths of the man who has passed the ultimate test.”

      “You are an acute observer,” she said.

      “I am becoming one,” and he smiled. “I have observed something else… If it is a liberty, I ask forgiveness… I have noted that when he was near you you moved away, as if you shrank from too near a contact. A little nervous shiver ran over you. That does not mean dislike. I think it means that you are in love with him, for even when you moved away your eyes were happy.”

      “I think you are very wise,” she said quietly. “But Lord Clanroyden will never have a thought for any woman… I am going to give you a hot drink, and then you must sleep. To-morrow will be a long day.”

      Next day they came out of the foothills on to a high shelf of ground, under the peaks called the Spanish Ladies. By midday they reached Magdalena, which, since Fort Castor and Loa had gone, was now Escrick’s only base. They were here at a lower elevation, and in ordinary savannah, greening already and scented with the curious nut-like odour of a mountain spring. The cantonments, hidden in a fold of ground, could be recognised from afar by the wireless poles. Magdalena was still secure, and apparently unknown to the enemy, whose nearest post was a hundred miles distant. But the place was under strict discipline, and it was through two lines of sentries that they made their way into the dusty circle of huts and horse-lines.

      Escrick himself was there, and he and Grayne had much to discuss, so Barbara and the Gobernador lunched alone in the General’s hut. The latter had lost his air of fatigue and bewilderment. His eyes scanned sharply every detail of the place, as though it was an environment, still unfamiliar, with which it was his business to become acquainted.

      “These people are losing,” he told Barbara. “I feel it in the air. I felt it a week ago in the Courts of the Morning Just at present things are going badly for us.”

      But there was neither disappointment nor elation in his tone. He spoke briskly, as if he had come to some decision. Later, when Escrick and Grayne joined them, it was he who directed the conversation.

      “Speak to me frankly, General,” he said. “I am your commander-in-chief in name. I want an exact statement of the situation as you see it.”

      Escrick СКАЧАТЬ