John Buchan - The Collected Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

OF THE PRINCESS IN THE TOWER

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Very early the next morning, while Mrs. Morran was still cooking breakfast, Dickson and Heritage might have been observed taking the air in the village street. It was the Poet who had insisted upon this walk, and he had his own purpose. They looked at the spires of smoke piercing the windless air, and studied the daffodils in the cottage gardens. Dickson was glum, but Heritage seemed in high spirits. He varied his garrulity with spells of cheerful whistling.

They strode along the road by the park wall till they reached the inn. There Heritage’s music waxed peculiarly loud. Presently from the yard, unshaven and looking as if he had slept in this clothes, came Dobson the innkeeper.

“Good morning,” said the poet. “I hope the sickness in your house is on the mend?”

“Thank ye, it’s no worse,” was the reply, but in the man’s heavy face there was little civility. His small grey eyes searched their faces.

“We’re just waiting for breakfast to get on the road again. I’m jolly glad we spent the night here. We found quarters after all, you know.”

“So I see. Whereabouts, may I ask?”

“Mrs. Morran’s. We could always have got in there, but we didn’t want to fuss an old lady, so we thought we’d try the inn first. She’s my friend’s aunt.”

At this amazing falsehood Dickson started, and the man observed his surprise. The eyes were turned on him like a searchlight. They roused antagonism in his peaceful soul, and with that antagonism came an impulse to back up the Poet. “Ay,” he said, “she’s my auntie Phemie, my mother’s half-sister.”

The man turned on Heritage.

“Where are ye for the day?”

“Auchenlochan,” said Dickson hastily. He was still determined to shake the dust of Dalquharter from his feet.

The innkeeper sensibly brightened. “Well, ye’ll have a fine walk. I must go in and see about my own breakfast. Good day to ye, gentlemen.”

“That,” said Heritage as they entered the village street again, “is the first step in camouflage, to put the enemy off his guard.”

“It was an abominable lie,” said Dickson crossly.

“Not at all. It was a necessary and proper ruse de guerre . It explained why we spent the right here, and now Dobson and his friends can get about their day’s work with an easy mind. Their suspicions are temporarily allayed, and that will make our job easier.”

“I’m not coming with you.”

“I never said you were. By ‘we’ I refer to myself and the red-headed boy.”

“Mistress, you’re my auntie,” Dickson informed Mrs. Morran as she set the porridge on the table. “This gentleman has just been telling the man at the inn that you’re my Auntie Phemie.”

For a second their hostess looked bewildered. Then the corners of her prim mouth moved upwards in a slow smile.

“I see,” she said. “Weel, maybe it was weel done. But if ye’re my nevoy ye’ll hae to keep up my credit, for we’re a bauld and siccar lot.”

Half an hour later there was a furious dissension when Dickson attempted to pay for the night’s entertainment. Mrs. Morran would have none of it. “Ye’re no’ awa’ yet,” she said tartly, and the matter was complicated by Heritage’s refusal to take part in the debate. He stood aside and grinned, till Dickson in despair returned his notecase to his pocket, murmuring darkly the “he would send it from Glasgow.”

The road to Auchenlochan left the main village street at right angles by the side of Mrs. Morran’s cottage. It was a better road than that by which they had come yesterday, for by it twice daily the postcart travelled to the post-town. It ran on the edge of the moor and on the lip of the Garple glen, till it crossed that stream and, keeping near the coast, emerged after five miles into the cultivated flats of the Lochan valley. The morning was fine, the keen air invited to high spirits, plovers piped entrancingly over the bent and linnets sang in the whins, there was a solid breakfast behind him, and the promise of a cheerful road till luncheon. The stage was set for good humour, but Dickson’s heart, which should have been ascending with the larks, stuck leadenly in his boots. He was not even relieved at putting Dalquharter behind him. The atmosphere of that unhallowed place lay still on his soul. He hated it, but he hated himself more. Here was one, who had hugged himself all his days as an adventurer waiting his chance, running away at the first challenge of adventure; a lover of Romance who fled from the earliest overture of his goddess. He was ashamed and angry, but what else was there to do? Burglary in the company of a queer poet and a queerer urchin? It was unthinkable.

Presently, as they tramped silently on, they came to the bridge beneath which the peaty waters of the Garple ran in porter-coloured pools and tawny cascades. From a clump of elders on the other side Dougal emerged. A barefoot boy, dressed in much the same parody of a Boy Scout’s uniform, but with corduroy shorts instead of a kilt, stood before him at rigid attention. Some command was issued, the child saluted, and trotted back past the travellers with never a look at them. Discipline was strong among the Gorbals Die-Hards; no Chief of Staff ever conversed with his General under a stricter etiquette.

Dougal received the travellers with the condescension of a regular towards civilians.

“They’re off their gawrd,” he announced. Thomas Yownie has been shadowin’ them since skreigh o’ day, and he reports that Dobson and Lean followed ye till ye were out o’ sight o’ the houses, and syne Lean got a spy-glass and watched ye till the road turned in among the trees. That satisfied them, and they’re both away back to their jobs. Thomas Yownie’s the fell yin. Ye’ll no fickle Thomas Yownie.”

Dougal extricated from his pouch the fag of a cigarette, lit it, and puffed meditatively. “I did a reckonissince mysel’ this morning. I was up at the Hoose afore it was light, and tried the door o’ the coal-hole. I doot they’ve gotten on our tracks, for it was lockit—aye, and wedged from the inside.”

Dickson brightened. Was the insane venture off?

“For a wee bit I was fair beat. But I mindit that the lassie was allowed to walk in a kind o’ a glass hoose on the side farthest away from the Garple. That was where she was singin’ yest’reen. So I reckonissinced in that direction, and I fund a queer place.” Sacred Songs and Solos was requisitioned, and on a page of it Dougal proceeded to make marks with the stump of a carpenter’s pencil. “See here,” he commanded. “There’s the glass place wi’ a door into the Hoose. That door maun be open or the lassie maun hae the key, for she comes there whenever she likes. Now’ at each end o’ the place the doors are lockit, but the front that looks on the garden is open, wi’ muckle posts and flower-pots. The trouble is that that side there’ maybe twenty feet o’ a wall between the pawrapet and the ground. It’s an auld wall wi’ cracks and holes in it, and it wouldn’t be ill to sklim. That’s why they let her gang there when she wants, for a lassie couldn’t get away without breakin’ her neck.”

“Could we climb it?” Heritage asked.

The boy wrinkled his brows. “I could manage it mysel’—I think—and maybe you. I doubt if auld McCunn could get up. Ye’d have to be mighty carefu’ that nobody saw ye, for your hinder end, as ye were sklimmin’, wad be a grand mark for a gun.”

“Lead on,” said Heritage. “We’ll try the verandah.”

They both looked at Dickson, and Dickson, scarlet in the face, looked back at them. He had suddenly found the thought of a solitary march to Auchenlochan intolerable. Once again he was at the parting of the ways, and once more caprice determined his decision. That the coal-hole was out of the question had worked a change in his views, Somehow it seemed to him less burglarious to enter by a verandah. He felt very frightened but—for the moment—quite resolute.