Brothers & Sisters - John & Anna Buchan Edition (Collection of Their Greatest Works). Buchan JohnЧитать онлайн книгу.
great deal. Allins has come back mysteriously when he wasn’t expected: he has not gone near Castle Gay: he is at the Hydropathic here under an assumed name, passing as a foreigner: and he is spending his time with the very foreigners who are giving you trouble. Isn’t that enough?”
Mr Craw looked perturbed. At the moment he had a healthy dislike of Jaikie, but he believed him to be honest.
“Are you sure of that?”
“Absolutely sure. I suspect a great deal more, but what I’m giving you is rock-bottom fact… Now, it’s desperately important that Allins shouldn’t recognise you. You can see for yourself how that would put the lid on it. So I don’t want you to go much about in the daytime. You can stay here and write another of your grand articles. I hope to get money and clothes for you to-day, and then you can carry out your original plan… Would you mind if, just for extra security, I touched up your face a little? You see, in these clothes even Allins wouldn’t recognise you, especially with the fine complexion the weather has given you. But when you get your proper clothes from Castle Gay it will be different, and we can’t afford to run any risks.”
It took a good deal of coaxing for Jaikie to accomplish his purpose, but the reading of his own article, and the near prospect of getting his own garments, had mollified Mr Craw, and in the end he submitted.
Jaikie, who as a member of the Cambridge A.D.C. knew something about making up, did not overdo it. He slightly deepened Mr Craw’s complexion, turning it from a weather-beaten red to something like a gipsy brown, and he took special pains with the wrists and hands and the tracts behind the ears. He darkened his greying eyebrows and the fringe of hair which enclosed his baldness. But especially he made the lines deeper from the nose to the corner of the mouth, and at the extremity of the eyes. The result was that he did away with the air of Pickwickian benevolence. Mr Craw, when he looked at himself in the mirror, saw a man not more than forty, a hard man who might have been a horse-coper or a cattle-dealer, with a good deal of cynicism in his soul and his temper very ready to his hand—which was exactly how he felt. Short of a tropical deluge to wash off the stain, it would not be easy to recognise the bland lineaments which at that moment were confronting the world from the centre of his article in the View.
This done, Jaikie proceeded to reconnoitre. He was convinced that Alison would answer his summons and come at eleven o’clock to the Green Tree. He was equally convinced that she would not ask for him, so it was his duty to be ready for her arrival. He found that from the staircase window he had a view of the stable yard and the back door of the inn, and there he set himself to watch for her.
At two minutes before eleven a girl on a pony rode into the yard. He saw her fling her bridle to the solitary stable-boy, and be welcomed by Mrs Fairweather like a long-lost child. She talked to the hostess for a minute or two, while her eyes ran over the adjacent windows. Then she turned, and with a wave of her hand walked towards the street.
Jaikie snatched his hat and followed. He saw her moving towards the Eastgate—a trim figure, booted and spurred, wearing a loose grey coat and a grey felt hat with a kestrel’s feather. She never looked behind her, but walked with a purposeful air, crossed the Eastgate, and took a left-hand turning towards the Callowa. Then at last she turned her head, saw Jaikie, and waited for him. There was a frank welcome in her eyes. Jaikie, who for the last few days had been trying to picture them in his mind, realised that he had got them all wrong; they were not bright and stern, but of the profound blue that one finds in water which reflects a spring sky.
“I’ve brought the money,” she said. “Fifty pounds. I got it from Freddy.” And she handed over a wad of notes.
“And the clothes?”
“Mother of Moses, I forgot the clothes! They can’t really matter. What does Mr Craw want with more clothes?”
“He is wearing some pretty queer ones at present. And he wants to go to London.”
“But he mustn’t be allowed to go to London. You said yourself that he was safest under the light—here or hereabouts. London would be horribly dangerous.”
“Of course it would. I don’t want him to go to London. I’m glad you forgot the clothes.”
“Where is he?”
“Sitting in his room at the Green Tree reading an article he’s written in the View. He’s getting rather difficult to manage.”
“You must keep him there—lock him up, if necessary—for I can tell you that things at Castle Gay are in a pretty mess.”
She paused to laugh merrily.
“I don’t know where to begin. Well, first of all, Dougal—Mr Crombie—imported a friend of his on Sunday from somewhere in Carrick. His name is Dickson McCunn, and he’s the world’s darling, but what use Dougal thought he was going to be is beyond me. There was rather a mishap at Knockraw—your friend Tibbets got locked up as a poacher—and Count Casimir was in an awful stew, and sent him over to us to be pacified. Mr McCunn received him, and Tibbets took him for Mr Craw, and wrote down what he said, and published it in an interview in yesterday’s Wire. Dougal says that the things he said pretty well knock the bottom out of Mr Craw’s public form.”
“So that was it,” said Jaikie. “I very nearly guessed that it was Dickson. Mr Craw didn’t like it, but I persuaded him not to get his papers to repudiate it. You see, it rather wipes off Tibbets from our list of enemies.”
“Just what I said,” replied the girl. “Freddy wanted to wire at once about it, but I stopped him. We can disavow it later when we’re out of this mess … Now for the second snag. Count Casimir has also imported an ally, and who do you think it is? Prince John of Evallonia.”
No exclamation could have done justice to Jaikie’s emotion. In a flash he saw the explanation of what he had been fumbling after. But all he said was, “Whatever for?”
“Heaven knows! To impress Mr Craw when they find him. To impress us all. Perhaps to make me fall in love with him. They seem to think I’m rather an important person.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Yes. We all dined at Knockraw last night. The Prince is an agreeable young man, as tall as Robin Charvill, but much slimmer.”
“Handsome?” Jaikie asked with a pang at his heart.
“Extremely. Like an elegant Viking, says Freddy, who doesn’t know anything about Vikings. Like the Young Pretender, says Aunt Hatty.”
“Have you fallen in love with him?” The words had not passed his lips before Jaikie repented his audacity.
But the girl only laughed. “Not a bit of it. I’m not attracted by film stars. He’s terribly good-looking, but he’s as dull as an owl. I can see that he is going to add considerably to our troubles, for he seems quite content to settle down at Knockraw till he can bring his charms to bear on Mr Craw.”
“We must get him shifted out of that,” said Jaikie grimly. “Now you must hear my story. First of all, that man Allins is a blackguard.”
He recounted briefly the incidents of the past days, dwelling lightly on their travels in the hills, but more fully on the events since their coming to Portaway. The girl listened with widening eyes.
“You see how it is,” he concluded. “Allins has double-crossed the people at Knockraw. He arranged for their coming here to see Mr Craw, and no doubt got paid for it. That in itself was pretty fair disloyalty to his chief. But he has arranged with the Republicans to catch the Royalists at work, and with their Prince there, too. He must have suspected that they would play the Prince as their trump card. No wonder he was excited when he saw who arrived at the station last night. It’ll be jam for the Republicans to find their enemies in the act of plotting with a magnate of the British Press. The Royalists will be blown out of the water—and Mr Craw too. I can tell you the Republicans at the Hydropathic are not innocents, such as you describe the people at Knockraw. They’re real hard citizens, and they mean business. They’ve