There was no path through the gorse, but when I reached the heather
where the foot of the mountain peak descended into the loch there was
a sort of newly broken trail. The heather was high and dense and I
followed the trail onto the high ground overlooking the sweep of the
coast.
The loch was dappled with sun. The air was like wine. The mountains
above the moor and the heather were colored like an Oriental carpet.
I was full of the joy of life and swung into an immense stride, when
suddenly a voice stopped me.
“My lad,” it said, “which one of the Ten Commandments is it the most
dangerous to break?”
Before me, at the end of the trail, seated on the ground, was a big
Highlander. He was knitting a woolen stocking and his needles were
clicking like an instrument. I was taken off my feet, but I tried to
meet him on his ground.
“Well,” I answered, “I suppose it would be the one against murder, the
sixth.”
“You suppose wrong,” he replied. “It will be the first. You will read
in the Book how Jehovah set aside the sixth. Aye, my lad, He ordered it
broken when it pleased Him. But did you ever read that He set aside the
first or that any man escaped who broke it?”
He spoke with the deep rich burr of his race and with a structure of
speech that I cannot reproduce here.
“Did you observe,” he added, “the graven images that your uncle has set
up?... Where is the man the noo?”
“He is gone to Oban,” I said.
He sprang up and thrust the stocking and needles into his sporran.
“To Oban!” He stood a moment in some deep reflection. “There will be
ships out of Oban.” Then he put another question to me:
“What did auld Andrew say about it?”
“That my uncle was gone to Oban,” I answered, “and had set no time for
his return.”
He looked at me queerly for a moment, towering above me in the deep
heather.
“Do you think, my lad, that your uncle could be setting out for heathen
parts to learn the witch words for his hell business in the boathouse?”
The suggestion startled me. The thing was not beyond all possibility.
But I felt that I had come to the end of this examination. I was not
going to be questioned further like a small boy overtaken on the road I
had answered a good many questions and I determined to ask one.
“Who are you?” I said. “And what have you got to do with my uncle's
affairs?”
He cocked his eye at me, looking down as one looks down at a child.
“The first of your questions,” he said, “you will find out if you
can, and the second you cannot find out if you will.” And he was gone,
striding past me in the deep heather.
“I have some business with your uncle, of a pressing nature,” he called
back. “I will just take a look through Oban, the night and the morn's
morn.”
I was utterly at sea about the big Highlander. He might be a friend
or an enemy of my uncle. But clearly he knew all about the man and the
mysterious experiment in which he was engaged. He was keeping the place
well within his eye; that was also evident. From his seat in the heather
the whole place was spread out below him.
And his queer speech fitted with old Andrew's fear. Surely the Buddha
was a heathen image and my uncle had set it up. The stern Scotch
conscience would be outraged and see the Decalogue violated in its
injunctions. This would explain the dread with which my uncle's house
was regarded and the reason I could find no man to help me on the way to
it. But it would not explain my uncle's apprehension.
But my adventure on this afternoon did not end with the big Highlander.
I found out something more.
I returned along the edge of the loch and approached the boathouse from
the waterside.
Here the path passed directly along the whole wall of the building. The
path was padded with damp sod, and as it happened I made no sound on it.
It was late afternoon, the shadows were beginning to extend, there was
no wind and the whole world was intensely quiet. Midway of the wall I
stopped to listen.
The house was not empty. There was some one in it. I could hear him
moving about.
It was of no use to try to look in through the wall; every joint and
crack of the stones was plastered. I went on.
Old Andrew was about setting me some supper. He came over and stood a
moment by the window looking at the shadows on the loch. And I tried to
take him unaware with a sudden question:
“Has my uncle returned from Oban?”
But I had no profit of the venture.
“The master,” he said, “is where he went this morning.”
The strange elements in this affair seemed on the point of converging
upon some common center. The thing was in the air. Old Andrew voiced it
when he went out with his candle.
“Ah, sir,” he said, “it was the fool work of an old man to bring you
into this affair. The master will have his way and he must meet what
waits for him at the end of it.”
I saw how he hoped that my visit might interrupt some plan that my uncle
was about to put into effect, but realized that it was useless.
Clearly my uncle had not left the place; he had been at work all day in
the boathouse. The journey was to account to me for his disappearance. I
had passed the lie along to the queer sentinel that sat watching in the
heather and I wondered whether I had sent a friend or an enemy into Oban
on an empty mission, and whether I had fouled or forwarded my uncle's
enterprise.
I put out the candle and sat down by the window to keep watch, for the
boathouse, the loch and the open sea were under the sweep of it. But,
alas, Nature overreaches our resolves when we are young. It was far into
the night when I awoke.
A wind was coming up and I think it was the rattle of the window that
aroused me. There was no moon, but under the open stars the world was
filled with a thin, ghostly light, and the scene below the window was
blurred a little like an impalpable picture.
A low-masted sailing ship lay in the open sea; there was a boat at the
edge of the loch, and human figures were coming out of the boathouse
with burdens which they were loading into the boat. Almost immediately
the boat, manned with rowers, turned about and silently traversed the
crook of the loch on its way to the ship. But certain of the human
figures remained. They continued between the boathouse and the beach.
And I realized that I had opened my eyes on the loading of a ship. The
boat was taking off a cargo.
Something stored in the boathouse was being transferred to the hold of
the sailing ship. The scene was inconceivably unreal. There was no
sound but the intermittent puffs of the wind, and the figures were like
phantoms in a sort of lighted mist. Directly as I looked two figures
came out of the boathouse and along the path to the drawing-room door
under my window. I took off my shoes and crept carefully out of the room
and down the stairway. The door from the hall into the long, low room
was ajar. I stood behind it, and looked in through the crack.
My uncle was burning letters and papers in the fireplace with a candle,
and in the chair beyond him sat the strangest human creature that I had
ever seen in the world.
He was a big Oriental with a sodden, brutal face fixed as by some
sorcery into an expression of eternal calm. He wore the uniform of an
English skipper. It was dirty and sea-stained as though picked up at
some sailor's auction. He was speaking to my uncle and his careful
precise sentences in the English tongue, coming from the creature,
seemed thereby to take on added menace.
“Is it wise, Sahib,” he said, “to leave any man behind us in this
house?”
“We can do nothing else,” replied my uncle.
The Oriental continued with the same carefully selected words:
“Easily we can do something else, Sahib,” he said, “with a bar of pig
securely lashed to the ankles, the sea would receive them.”
“No, no,” replied my uncle, busy with his letters and the candle. The
big Oriental did not move.
“Reflect, Sahib,” he went on. “We are entering an immense peril. The
thing that will be hunting us has innumerable agencies everywhere in
its service. If it shall discover that we have falsified its symbols,
it will search the earth for us. And what are we, Sahib, against this
thing? It does not die, nor wax old, nor grow weary.”
“The lad knows nothing,” replied my uncle, “and old Andrew will keep
silent.”
“Without trouble, Sahib,” the creature continued, “I can put the young
one beyond all knowledge and the old one beyond all speech. Is it
permitted?”
My uncle got up from the fireplace, for he had finished with his work.
“No,” he said, “let there be an end of it.”
He turned about, and under the glimmer of the candle I could see that
the man had changed; his big pale face was grim with some determined
purpose, and there was about him the courage and the authority of one
who, after long wavering, at last hazards a desperate venture. He broke
the glass box and put the Buddha into his pocket.
“It is good silver,” he said, “and it has served its purpose.”
The Oriental got softly onto his feet like a great toy of cotton wood.
His face remained in its expression of equanimity, and he added no
further word of gesture to his argument.
My uncle held the door open for him to pass out, and after that he
extinguished the candle and followed, closing the door noiselessly
behind him.
The thing was like a scene acted in a playhouse. But it accomplished
what the playhouse fails in. It put the fear of death into one who
watched it. To me in the dark hall, looking through the crack of the
door, the placid Oriental in his English uniform, and with his precise
words like an Oxford don, was surely the most devilish agency that ever
urged the murder of innocent men on an accomplice.
The wind was continuing to rise and the mist now covered the loch and
the open sea. It was of no use to stand before the window, for the world
was blotted out. I was cold and I lay down on the bed and wrapped the
covers around me. It seemed only a moment later when old Andrew's hand
was on me, and his thin voice crying in the room.
“Will you sleep, sir, and God's creatures going to their death!”
He ran, whimpering in his thin old voice, down the stair, and I followed
him out of the house into the garden.
It was midmorning. A man was standing before the door, his hands behind
him, looking out at the sea. In his long trousers and bowler hat I
did not at once recognize him for the Highlander of my yesterday's
adventure.
The coast was in the tail of a storm. The wind boomed, as though puffed
by a bellows, driving in gusts of mist.
The ship I had seen in the night was hanging in the sea just beyond the
crook of the loch. It fluttered like a snared bird. One could see
the crew trying every device of sail and tacking, but with all their
desperate ingenuities the ship merely hung there shivering like a
stricken creature.
It was a fearful thing to look at. Now the mist covered everything and
then for a moment the wind swept it out, and all the time, the silent,
deadly struggle went on between the trapped ship and the sea running in
among the needles of the loch. I don't think any of us spoke except the
Highlander once in comment to himself.
“It's Ram Chad's tramp.... So that's the craft the man was depending
on!”
Then the mist shut down. When it lifted, the doom of the ship was
written. It was moving slowly into the deadly maw of the loch.
Again the mist shut down and, when again the wind swept it out, the ship
had vanished.
There was the open sea and the long swells and the murderous current
boiling around the sharp points of the needles; but there was no ship
nor any human soul of the crew. Old Andrew screamed like a woman at the
sight.
“The ship!” he cried. “Where is the ship and the master?”
The thing was so swift and awful that I spoke myself.
“My God!” I said. “How quickly the thing they feared destroyed them!”
The big Highlander came over where I stood. The burr of his speech and
its sacred imagery were gone with his change of dress.
“No,” he said, “they escaped the thing they feared.... What do you think
it was?”
“I don't know,” I answered. “The creature in the English uniform said
that it did not die, nor wax old, nor grow weary.”
“Ram Chad was right,” replied the Highlander. “The British government
neither dies, ages, nor tires out. Do you realize what your uncle was
doing here?”
“Molding images of Buddha,” I said.
“Molding Indian rupees,” he retorted.
“The Buddha business was a blind.... I'm Sir Henry Marquis, Chief of the
Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. ... We got track of
him in India.”
Then he added:
“There's a hundred thousand sterling in false coin at the bottom of the
loch yonder!”