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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      Three days later I went to the funeral. It was a wonderful occasion. Two eminent statesmen were among the pall-bearers, Royalty was represented, and there were wreaths from learned societies and scores of notable people. It was a queer business to listen to that stately service, which was never read over stranger dust. I was thinking all the time of the vast subterranean machine which he had controlled, and which now was so much old iron. I could dimly imagine what his death meant to the hosts who had worked blindly at his discretion. He was a Napoleon who left no Marshals behind him. From the Power-House came no wreaths or newspaper tributes, but I knew that it had lost its power…

      De mortuis… , etc. My task was done, and it only remained to get Pitt-Heron home.

      Of the three people in London besides myself who knew the story— Macgillivray, Chapman, and Felix—the two last might be trusted to be silent, and Scotland Yard is not in the habit of publishing its information. Tommy, of course, must some time or other be told; it was his right; but I knew that Tommy would never breathe a word of it. I wanted Charles to believe that his secret died with Lumley, for otherwise I don’t think he would have ever come back to England.

      The thing took some arranging, for we could not tell him directly about Lumley’s death without giving away the fact that we knew of the connection between the two. We had to approach it by a roundabout road. I got Felix to arrange to have the news telegraphed to and inserted by special order in a Russian paper which Charles could not avoid seeing.

      The device was successful. Calling at Portman Square a few days later, I learned from Ethel Pitt-Heron’s glowing face that her troubles were over. That same evening a cable to me from Tommy announced the return of the wanderers.

      It was the year of the Chilian Arbitration, in which I held a junior brief for the British Government, and that and the late sitting of Parliament kept me in London after the end of the term. I had had a bad reaction from the excitements of the summer, and in these days I was feeling pretty well hipped and overdone. On a hot August afternoon I met Tommy again.

      The sun was shining through my Temple chambers, much as it had done when he started. So far as I remember, the West Ham brief which had aroused his contempt was still adorning my table. I was very hot and cross and fagged, for I had been engaged in the beastly job of comparing half a dozen maps of a despicable little bit of South American frontier.

      Suddenly the door opened, and Tommy, lean and sunburnt, stalked in.

      “Still at the old grind,” he cried, after we had shaken hands. “Fellows like you give me a notion of the meaning of Eternity.”

      “The same uneventful, sedentary life,” I replied. “Nothing happens except that my scale of fees grows. I suppose nothing will happen till the conductor comes to take the tickets. I shall soon grow fat.”

      “I notice it already, my lad. You want a bit of waking up or you’ll get a liver. A little sensation would do you a pot of good.”

      “And you?” I asked. “I congratulate you on your success. I hear you have retrieved Pitt-Heron for his mourning family.”

      Tommy’s laughing eyes grew solemn.

      “I have had the time of my life,” he said. “It was like a chapter out of the Arabian Nights with a dash of Fenimore Cooper. I feel as if I had lived years since I left England in May. While you have been sitting among your musty papers we have been riding like moss-troopers and seeing men die. Come and dine to-night and hear about our adventures. I can’t tell you the full story, for I don’t know it, but there is enough to curl your hair.”

      Then I achieved my first and last score at the expense of Tommy Deloraine.

      “No,” I said, “you will dine with me instead, and I will tell you the full story. All the papers on the subject are over there in my safe.”

       THE END

John Macnab

       Table of Contents

       I. IN WHICH THREE GENTLEMEN CONFESS THEIR ENNUI

       II. DESPERATE CHARACTERS IN COUNCIL

       III. RECONNAISSANCE

       IV. FISH BENJIE

       V. THE ASSAULT ON GLENRADEN

       VI. THE RETURN OF HARALD BLACKTOOTH

       VII. THE OLD ETONIAN TRAMP

       VIII. SIR ARCHIE IS INSTRUCTED IN THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

       IX. SIR ARCHIE INSTRUCTS HIS COUNTRYMEN

       X. IN WHICH CRIME IS ADDED TO CRIME

       XI. HARIPOL—THE MAIN ATTACK

       XII. HARIPOL—TRANSPORT

       XIII. HARIPOL—AUXILIARY TROOPS

       XIV. HARIPOL—WOUNDED AND MISSING

       XV. HARIPOL—THE ARMISTICE

       EPILOGUE

      I.

       IN WHICH THREE GENTLEMEN CONFESS THEIR ENNUI

       Table of Contents

      The great doctor stood on the hearth-rug looking down at his friend who sprawled before him in an easy-chair. It was a hot day in early July, and the windows were closed and the blinds half-down to keep out the glare and the dust. The standing figure had bent shoulders, a massive clean-shaven face, and a keen interrogatory air, and might have passed his sixtieth birthday. He looked like a distinguished lawyer, who would soon leave his practice for the Bench. But it was the man in the chair who was the lawyer, a man who had left forty behind him, but was still on the pleasant side of fifty.

      “I СКАЧАТЬ