SIR EDWARD LEITHEN'S MYSTERIES - Complete Series. Buchan JohnЧитать онлайн книгу.
was foretold by the starlings packing at nightfall, or the crows sitting with their beaks to the wind, or a badger coming home after daylight. The boy knew how to make cunning whistles from ash and rowan with which to imitate a snipe’s bleat or the call of an otter, and he knew how at all times and in all weathers to fend for himself and find food and shelter. A tough little nomad he became under this tutelage, knowing no boys’ games, with scarcely an acquaintance of his age, but able to deal on equal terms with every fisherman, gillie, and tinker north of the Highland line.
It chanced that in the spring of this year Mrs Bogle had fallen ill for the first time in her life. It was influenza, and, being neglected, was followed by pneumonia, so that when May came she was in no condition to take the road. By ill luck her husband had been involved in a drunken row, when he had assaulted two of his companions with such violence and success that he was sent for six months to prison. In these circumstances there was nothing for it but that Benjie should set out alone with the cart, and it is a proof of the stoutheartedness of the family tradition that his mother never questioned the propriety of this arrangement. He departed with her blessing, and weekly despatched to her a much-blotted scrawl describing his doings. There was something of his father’s hard fibre in the child, for he was a keen bargainer and as wary as a fox against cajolery. He met friends of his family who let him camp beside them, and with their young he did battle, when they dared to threaten his dignity. Benjie fought in no orthodox way, but like a weasel, using every weapon of tooth and claw, but in his sobbing furies he was unconquerable, and was soon left in peace. Presently he found that he preferred to camp alone, so with his old cart and horse he made his way up and down the long glens of the West to the Larrig. There, he remembered, the fish trade had been profitable in past years, so he sat himself down by the roadside, to act a middleman between the fishing-cobles of Inverlarrig and the kitchens of the shooting lodges. It would be untrue to say that this was his only means of livelihood, and I fear that the contents of Benjie’s pot, as it bubbled of an evening in the Wood of Larrigmore, would not have borne inspection by any keeper who chanced to pass. The weekly scrawls went regularly to his now convalescent mother, and once a parcel arrived for him at the Inverlarrig post-office containing a gigantic new shirt, which he used as a blanket. For the rest, he lived as Robinson Crusoe lived, on the country-side around him, asking no news of the outer world.
On the morning of the 27th of August he might have been seen, a little after seven o’clock, driving his cart up the fine beech avenue which led to Glenraden Castle. It was part of his morning round, but hitherto he had left his cart at the lodge-gate, and carried his fish on foot to the house; wherefore he had some slight argument with the lodge-keeper before he was permitted to enter. He drove circumspectly to the back regions, left his fish at the kitchen door, and then proceeded to the cottage of the stalker, one Macpherson, which stood by itself in a clump of firs. There he waited for some time till Mrs Macpherson came to feed her hens. A string of haddocks changed hands, and Benjie was bidden indoors, where he was given a cup of tea, while old Macpherson smoked his early pipe and asked questions. Half an hour later Benjie left, with every sign of amity, and drove very slowly down the woodland road towards the haugh where the Raden, sweeping from the narrows of the glen, spreads into broad pools and shining shallows. There he left the cart and squatted inconspicuously in the heather in a place which commanded a prospect of the home woods. From his observations he was aware that one of the young ladies regularly took her morning walk in this quarter.
Meantime in the pleasant upstairs dining-room of the Castle breakfast had begun. Colonel Alastair Raden, having read prayers to a row of servants from a chair in the window—there was a family tradition that he once broke off in a petition to call excitedly his Maker’s attention to a capercailzie on the lawn—and having finished his porridge, which he ate standing, with bulletins interjected about the weather, was doing good work on bacon and eggs. Breakfast, he used to declare, should consist of no kickshaws like kidneys and omelettes; only bacon and eggs, and plenty of ‘em. The master of the house was a lean old gentleman dressed in an ancient loud-patterned tweed jacket and a very faded kilt. Still erect as a post, he had a barrack-square voice, and high-boned, aquiline face, and a kindly but irritable blue eye. His daughters were devoting what time was left to them from attending to the breakfasts of three terriers to an animated discussion of a letter which lay before them. The morning meal at Glenraden was rarely interrupted by correspondence, for the post did not arrive till the evening, but this missive had been delivered by hand.
“He can’t come,” the younger cried. “He says he’s seedy again. It may really be smallpox this time.”
“Who can’t come, and who has smallpox?” her father demanded.
“Sir Archibald Roylance. I told you I met him and asked him to lunch here to-day. We really ought to get to know our nearest neighbour, and he seems a very pleasant young man.”
“I think he is hiding a dark secret,” said the elder Miss Raden. “Nobody who calls there ever finds him in—except Lady Claybody, and then he told her he had smallpox. Old Mr Bandicott said he went up the long hill to Crask yesterday, and found nobody at home, though he was perfectly certain he saw one figure slinking into the wood and another moving away from a window. I wonder if Sir Archibald is really all right. We don’t know anything about him, do we?”
“Of course he’s all right—bound to be—dashed gallant sporting fellow. Sorry he’s not coming to luncheon—I want to meet him. He’s probably afraid of Nettie, and I don’t blame him, for she’s a brazen hussy, and he does well to be shy of old Bandicott. I’m scared to death by the old fellow myself.”
“You know you’ve promised to let him dig in the Piper’s Ring, Papa.”
“I know I have, and I would have promised to let him dig up my lawn to keep him quiet. Never met a man with such a flow of incomprehensible talk. He had the audacity to tell me that I was no more Celtic than he was, but sprung from some blackguard Norse raiders a thousand years back. Judging by the sketch he gave me of their habits, I’d sooner the Radens were descended from Polish Jews.”
“I thought him a darling,” said his elder daughter, “and with such a beautiful face.”
“He may be a darling for all I know, but his head is stuffed with maggots. If you admired him so much, why didn’t you take him off my hands? I liked the look of the young fellow and wanted to have a word with him. More by token”—the Colonel was hunting about for the marmalade—“what were you two plotting with him in the corner after dinner?”
“We were talking about John Macnab.”
The Colonel’s face became wrathful.
“Then I call it dashed unfilial conduct of you not to have brought me in. There was I, deafened with the old man’s chatter—all about a fellow called Harald Blacktooth or Bottlenose or some such name, that he swears is buried in my grounds and means to dig up—when I might have been having a really fruitful conversation. What was young Bandicott’s notion of John Macnab?”
“Mr Junius thinks he is a lunatic,” said the elder Miss Raden. She was in every way her sister’s opposite, dark of hair and eye where Janet was fair, tall where Janet was little, slow and quiet of voice where Janet was quick and gusty.
“I entirely differ from him. I think John Macnab is perfectly sane, and probably a good fellow, though a dashed insolent one. What’s Bandicott doing about his river?”
“Patrolling it day and night between the 1st and 3rd of September. He says he’s taking no chances, though he’d bet Wall Street to a nickel that the poor poop hasn’t the frozenest outside.”
“Nettie, he said nothing of the kind!” Miss Agatha was indignant. “He talks beautiful English, with no trace of an accent—all Bostonians do, he told me.”
“Anyhow, he asked what steps we were taking and advised us to get busy. We come before him, you know…Heavens, papa, it begins to-morrow night! Oh, and I did so want to consult Sir Archibald. I’m sure he could help.”
Colonel Raden, having made a satisfactory breakfast, was lighting a pipe.
“You need not worry, my dear. I’m an old campaigner