The Cone-Gatherers. Robin Jenkins

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       CHAPTER THREE

      Next morning was so splendid that as he walked through the policies towards the mansion house despair itself was lulled. The sky was vast and bright; the withered leaves underfoot were iridescent with melting frost; the very air glittered. As if in contrition for last night’s mistrust in the dim shed, his dogs showed him how to enjoy such sunshine as they ran here and there, giving holiday sniffs and yelps, and barking up at squirrels as tawny as themselves darting along red pine branches. It was a morning that seemed to beguile the mind with recollections of a time of innocence before evil and unhappiness were born.

      Peggy and her mother had been asleep, and the stars still shining, when he had slipped out. He had taken no breakfast and hadn’t shaved.

      He walked under the squirrels, gun under his arm, smiling.

      When he came near the house he heard cries and the crack of ball against bat. They must be playing cricket on the lawn. Young Roderick would have coaxed his uncle to play with him. The boy was useless at games, as far as Duror could judge; his awkwardness, physical and mental, prevented him from being proficient no matter how zealously he persevered. Duror had watched him once kicking a football for an hour; at the finish he had been clumsier and keener than at the beginning. Perhaps because he was like his father outwardly, with startled deer’s eyes and hare’s teeth, he was his mother’s favourite, although his sister Sheila, two years younger, was beautiful healthy, courageous, and as assured as any lady. Roderick from birth had been weak in body and complicated in mind. He had had to be removed from school, and now was tutored at home. He had never liked Duror, and when little had not hesitated to say so. His mother more than once had had to apologise for him.

      Duror was early. He stood behind a thick holly to watch the players on the lawn; his dogs sat at his feet. Roderick batted; his uncle bowled; and Sheila was supposed to field, assisted by her dog, a small short-legged terrier called Monty. Roderick was very earnest as he faced up to the ball, swiped out at it, missed, and shouted an explanation for his miss. He immediately ran behind the wicket to retrieve the ball and throw it back to his uncle so that the whole thing could be repeated as soon as possible. Once he struck the ball, and began to race between the wickets as if those runs would mean the winning of a Test Match. His uncle called to him laughingly that there was no need for such hurry. Roderick paused to glance towards where the ball had flown. He was obviously displeased to see that Monty had it in his mouth and was playing a game of come-and-get-it-if-you-can with Sheila. Roderick shouted to his sister that she was spoiling the game; but his uncle, still laughing, came down the pitch and put an arm round his neck. He was a tall almost bald man of about thirty-five, in peacetime a lawyer from Edinburgh, where his father, Lord Forgan, had been a judge. Duror knew him as a quiet, pleasant, considerate man, with his only vanity a moustache as black and glossy as a snail.

      Duror came out from behind the holly and walked respectfully along the path by the side of the lawn. His dogs too recognised the presence of superiors; when Monty came scampering along to sniff and yap insolently at them they endured it with glances up at their master as if to make sure he was noticing their forbearance.

      Captain Forgan waved his hand; then, as if that gesture had not been cordial enough, he came striding across the lawn.

      ‘Good morning, Duror,’ he cried.

      ‘Good morning, sir.’

      Forgan smiled up at the sky and held out his hands as if to catch some of the benison dropping from it. His face, ruddy but hardly military from open-air life in army camps, beamed with gratitude as if he thought this spell of magnificent weather was being provided in his honour.

      ‘This is a real honey of a morning, Duror,’ he said, ‘and no mistake. Air like champagne.’ He breathed it in deeply and gratefully. Although he was smiling he was serious: in two or three weeks he would be in an African desert.

      ‘Well, is there going to be a deer drive?’ he asked.

      ‘I think we’ll be able to arrange something, sir.’

      ‘Good man. I knew I could rely on you.’ He bent down to pat the dogs. ‘Handsome creatures,’ he said, with zest. ‘Why do we talk about a dog’s life, Duror? What right have we to feel superior to these chaps?’ He glanced up at their master with a smile. ‘They have no wars, Duror.’

      ‘No, sir.’

      Forgan rose up and laughed. It was a comprehensive laughter, at the fine scenery, at his sentimental envy of dogs, at the forlorn wickets on the lawn, at Roderick with bat at rest like a sentinel, and at himself in well-creased khaki trousers.

      ‘We were playing cricket,’ he said.

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      Forgan gazed all round. ‘It’s really a beautiful place,’ he murmured. ‘I’m glad I could come. СКАЧАТЬ