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HUNTINGTOWER
JOHN BUCHAN
_By_ JOHN BUCHAN
HUNTINGTOWER
THE PATH OF THE KING
MR. STANDFAST
GREENMANTLE
THE WATCHERS BY THE THRESHOLD
SALUTE TO ADVENTURES
PRESTER JOHN
THE POWER HOUSE
THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME
NEW YORK: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
HUNTINGTOWER
BY
JOHN BUCHAN
NEW [Illustration] YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
[Illustration]
HUNTINGTOWER. II
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
W. P. KER
_If the Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford has not
forgotten the rock whence he was hewn, this simple story may give him an
hour of entertainment. I offer it to you because I think you have met my
friend Dickson McCunn, and I dare to hope that you may even in your many
sojournings in the Westlands have encountered one or other of the
Gorbals Die-Hards. If you share my kindly feeling for Dickson, you will
be interested in some facts which I have lately ascertained about his
ancestry. In his veins there flows a portion of the redoubtable blood of
the Nicol Jarvies. When the Bailie, you remember, returned from his
journey to Rob Roy beyond the Highland Line, he espoused his housekeeper
Mattie, "an honest man's daughter and a near cousin o' the Laird o'
Limmerfield." The union was blessed with a son, who succeeded to the
Bailie's business and in due course begat daughters, one of whom married
a certain Ebenezer McCunn, of whom there is record in the archives of
the Hammermen of Glasgow. Ebenezer's grandson, Peter by name, was
Provost of Kirkintilloch, and his second son was the father of my hero
by his marriage with Robina Dickson, eldest daughter of one Robert
Dickson, a tenant-farmer in the Lennox. So there are coloured threads in
Mr. McCunn's pedigree, and, like the Bailie, he can count kin, should he
wish, with Rob Roy himself through "the auld wife ayont the fire at
Stuckavrallachan."_
_Such as it is, I dedicate to you the story, and ask for no better
verdict on it than that of that profound critic of life and literature,
Mr. Huckleberry Finn, who observed of the_ Pilgrim's Progress, _that he
"considered the statements interesting, but steep."_
J. B.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PROLOGUE 11
CHAPTER
I HOW A RETIRED PROVISION MERCHANT FELT
THE IMPULSE OF SPRING 17
II OF MR. JOHN HERITAGE AND THE DIFFERENCE
IN POINTS OF VIEW 28
III HOW CHILDE ROLAND AND ANOTHER CAME TO
THE DARK TOWER 46
IV DOUGAL 70
V OF THE PRINCESS IN THE TOWER 85
VI HOW MR. McCUNN DEPARTED WITH RELIEF AND
RETURNED WITH RESOLUTION 114
VII SUNDRY DOINGS IN THE MIRK 135
VIII HOW A MIDDLE-AGED CRUSADER ACCEPTED A
CHALLENGE 154
IX THE FIRST BATTLE OF THE CRUIVES 171
X DEALS WITH AN ESCAPE AND A JOURNEY 189
XI GRAVITY OUT OF BED 209
XII HOW MR. McCUNN COMMITTED AN ASSAULT
UPON AN ALLY 225
XIII THE COMING OF THE DANISH BRIG 244
XIV THE SECOND BATTLE OF THE CRUIVES 257
XV THE GORBALS DIE-HARDS GO INTO ACTION 286
XVI IN WHICH A PRINCESS LEAVES A DARK TOWER
AND A PROVISION MERCHANT RETURNS TO
HIS FAMILY 306
HUNTINGTOWER
PROLOGUE
The girl came into the room with a darting movement like a swallow,
looked round her with the same birdlike quickness, and then ran across
the polished floor to where a young man sat on a sofa with one leg laid
along it.
"I have saved you this dance, Quentin," she said, pronouncing the name
with a pretty staccato. "You must be so lonely not dancing, so I will
sit with you. What shall we talk about?"
The young man did not answer at once, for his gaze was held by her face.
He had never dreamed that the gawky and rather plain little girl whom he
had romped with long ago in Paris would grow into such a being. The
clean delicate lines of her figure, the exquisite pure colouring of hair
and skin, the charming young arrogance of the eyes--this was beauty, he
reflected, a miracle, a revelation. Her virginal fineness and her dress,
which was the tint of pale fire, gave her the air of a creature of ice
and flame.
"About yourself, please, Saskia," he said. "Are you happy now that you
are a grown-up lady?"
"Happy!" Her voice had a thrill in it like music, frosty music. "The
days are far too short. I grudge the hours when I must sleep. They say
it is sad for me to make my début in a time of war. But the world is
very kind to me, and after all it is a victorious war for our Russia.
And listen to this, Quentin. To-morrow I am to be allowed to begin
nursing at the Alexander Hospital. What do you think of that?"
The time was January, 1916, and the place a room in the great Nirski
Palace. No hint of war, no breath from the snowy streets, entered that
curious chamber where Prince Peter Nirski kept some of the chief of his
famous treasures. It was notable for its lack of drapery and
upholstering--only a sofa or two and a few fine rugs on the cedar floor.
The walls were of a green marble veined like malachite, the ceiling was
of darker marble inlaid with white intaglios. Scattered everywhere were
tables and cabinets laden with celadon china, and carved jade, and
ivories, and shimmering Persian and Rhodian vessels. In all the room
there was scarcely anything of metal and no touch of gilding or bright
colour. The light came from green alabaster censers, and the place swam
in a cold green radiance like some cavern below the sea. The air was
warm and scented, and though it was very quiet there, a hum of voices
and the strains of dance music drifted to it from the pillared corridor
in which could be seen the glare of lights from the great ballroom
beyond.
The young man had a thin face with lines of suffering round the mouth
and eyes. The warm room had given him a high colour, which increased
his air of fragility. He felt a little choked by the place, which seemed
to him for both body and mind a hot-house, though he knew very well that
the Nirski Palace on this gala evening was in no way typical of the land
or its masters. Only a week ago he had been eating black bread with its
owner in a hut on the Volhynian front.
"You have become amazing, Saskia," he said. "I won't pay my old
playfellow compliments; besides, you must be tired of them. I wish you
happiness all the day long like a fairy-tale Princess. But a crock like
me can't do much to help you to it. The service seems to be the wrong
way round, for here you are wasting your time talking to me."
She put her hand on his. "Poor Quentin! Is the leg very bad?"
He laughed. "Oh, no. It's mending famously. I'll be able to get about
without a stick in another month, and then you've got to teach me all
the new dances."
The jigging music of a two-step floated down the corridor. It made the
young man's brow contract, for it brought to him a vision of dead faces
in the gloom of a November dusk. He had once had a friend who used to
whistle that air, and he had seen him die in the Hollebeke mud. There
was something _macabre_ in the tune.... He was surely morbid this
evening, for there seemed something _macabre_ about the house, the room,
the dancing, all Russia.... These last days he had suffered from a sense
of calamity impending, of a dark curtain drawing down upon a splendid
world. They didn't agree with him at the Embassy, but he could not get
rid of the notion.
The girl saw his sudden abstraction.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked. It had been her favourite
question as a child.
"I was thinking that I rather wished you were still in Paris."
"But why?"
"Because I think you would be safer."
"Oh, what nonsense, Quentin dear! Where should I be safe if not in my
own Russia, where I have friends--oh, so many, and tribes and tribes of
relations? It is France and England that are unsafe with the German guns
grumbling at their doors.... My complaint is that my life is too
cosseted and padded. I am too secure, and I do not want to be secure."
The young man lifted a heavy casket from a table at his elbow. It was of
dark green imperial jade, with a wonderfully carved lid. He took off the
lid and picked up three small oddments of ivory--a priest with a beard,
a tiny soldier and a draught-ox. Putting the three in a triangle, he
balanced the jade box on them.
"Look, Saskia! If you were living inside that box you would think it
very secure. You would note the thickness of the walls and the hardness
of the stone, and you would dream away in a peaceful green dusk. But all
the time it would be held up by trifles--brittle trifles."
She shook her head. "You do not understand. You cannot understand. We
are a very old and strong people with roots deep, deep in the earth."
"Please God you are right," he said. "But, Saskia, you know that if I
can ever serve you, you have only to command me. Now I can do no more
for you than the mouse for the lion--at the beginning of the story. But
the story had an end, you remember, and some day it may be in my power
to help you. Promise to send for me."
The girl laughed merrily. "The King of Spain's daughter," she quoted,
"Came to visit me,
And all for the love
Of my little nut-tree."
The other laughed also, as a young man in the uniform of the
Preobrajenski Guard approached to claim the girl. "Even a nut-tree may
be a shelter in a storm," he said.
"Of course I promise, Quentin," she said. "_Au revoir._ Soon I will come
and take you to supper, and we will talk of nothing but nut-trees."
He watched the two leave the room, her gown glowing like a tongue of
fire in the shadowy archway. Then he slowly rose to his feet, for he
thought that for a little he would watch the dancing. Something moved
beside him, and he turned in time to prevent the jade casket from
crashing to the floor. Two of the supports had slipped.
He replaced the thing on its proper table and stood silent for a
moment.
"The priest and the soldier gone, and only the beast of burden left....
If I were inclined to be superstitious, I should call that a dashed bad
omen."
CHAPTER I
HOW A RETIRED PROVISION MERCHANT FELT THE IMPULSE OF SPRING
Mr. Dickson McCunn completed the polishing of his smooth cheeks with the
towel, glanced appreciatively at their reflection in the looking-glass,
and then permitted his eyes to stray out of the window. In the little
garden lilacs were budding, and there was a gold line of daffodils
beside the tiny greenhouse. Beyond the sooty wall a birch flaunted its
new tassels, and the jackdaws were circling about the steeple of the
Guthrie Memorial Kirk. A blackbird whistled from a thorn-bush, and Mr.
McCunn was inspired to follow its example. He began a tolerable version
of "Roy's Wife of Aldivalloch."
He felt singularly light-hearted, and the immediate cause was his safety
razor. A week ago he had bought the thing in a sudden fit of enterprise,
and now he shaved in five minutes, where before he had taken twenty, and
no longer confronted his fellows, at least one day in three, with a
countenance ludicrously mottled by sticking-plaster. Calculation
revealed to him the fact that in his fifty-five years, having begun to
shave at eighteen, he had wasted three thousand three hundred and
seventy hours--or one hundred and forty days--or between four and five
months--by his neglect of this admirable invention. Now he felt that he
had stolen a march on Time. He had fallen heir, thus late, to a fortune
in unpurchasable leisure.
He began to dress himself in the sombre clothes in which he had been
accustomed for thirty-five years and more to go down to the shop in
Mearns Street. And then a thought came to him which made him discard the
grey-striped trousers, sit down on the edge of his bed, and muse.
Since Saturday the shop was a thing of the past. On Saturday at
half-past eleven, to the accompaniment of a glass of dubious sherry, he
had completed the arrangements by which the provision shop in Mearns
Street, which had borne so long the legend of D. McCunn, together with
the branches in Crossmyloof and the Shaws, became the property of a
company, yclept the United Supply Stores, Limited. He had received in
payment cash, debentures and preference shares, and his lawyers and his
own acumen had acclaimed the bargain. But all the week-end he had been a
little sad. It was the end of so old a song, and he knew no other tune
to sing. He was comfortably off, healthy, free from any particular cares
in life, but free too from any particular duties. "Will I be going to
turn into a useless old man?" he asked himself.
But he had woke up this Monday to the sound of the blackbird, and the
world, which had seemed rather empty twelve hours before, was now brisk
and alluring. His prowess in quick shaving assured him of his youth.
"I'm no' that dead old," he observed, as he sat on the edge of the bed,
to his reflection in the big looking-glass.
It was not an old face. The sandy hair was a little thin on the top and
a little grey at the temples, the figure was perhaps a little too full
for youthful elegance, and an athlete would have censured the neck as
too fleshy for perfect health. But the cheeks were rosy, the skin clear,
and the pale eyes singularly childlike. They were a little weak, those
eyes, and had some difficulty in looking for long at the same object, so
that Mr. McCunn did not stare people in the face, and had, in
consequence, at one time in his career acquired a perfectly undeserved
reputation for cunning. He shaved clean, and looked uncommonly like a
wise, plump schoolboy. As he gazed at his simulacrum he stopped
whistling "Roy's Wife" and let his countenance harden into a noble
sternness. Then he laughed, and observed in the language of his youth
that "There was life in the auld dowg yet." In that moment the soul of
Mr. McCunn conceived the Great Plan.
The first sign of it was that he swept all his business garments
unceremoniously on to the floor. The next that he rootled at the bottom
of a deep drawer and extracted a most disreputable tweed suit. It had
once been what I believe is called a Lovat mixture, but was now a
nondescript sub-fusc, with bright patches of colour like moss on
whinstone. He regarded it lovingly, for it had been for twenty years his
holiday wear, emerging annually for a hallowed month to be stained with
salt and bleached with sun. He put it on, and stood shrouded in an
odour of camphor. A pair of thick nailed boots and a flannel shirt and
collar completed the equipment of the sportsman. He had another long
look at himself in the glass, and then descended whistling to breakfast.
This time the tune was "Macgregor's Gathering," and the sound of it
stirred the grimy lips of a man outside who was delivering
coals--himself a Macgregor--to follow suit. Mr. McCunn was a very
fountain of music that morning.
Tibby, the aged maid, had his newspaper and letters waiting by his
plate, and a dish of ham and eggs frizzling near the fire. He fell to
ravenously but still musingly, and he had reached the stage of scones
and jam before he glanced at his correspondence. There was a letter from
his wife now holidaying at the Neuk Hydropathic. She reported that her
health was improving, and that she had met various people who had known
somebody who had known somebody else whom she had once known herself.
Mr. McCunn read the dutiful pages and smiled. "Mamma's enjoying herself
fine," he observed to the teapot. He knew that for his wife the earthly
paradise was a hydropathic, where she put on her afternoon dress and
every jewel she possessed when she rose in the morning, ate large meals
of which the novelty atoned for the nastiness, and collected an immense
casual acquaintance with whom she discussed ailments, ministers, sudden
deaths, and the intricate genealogies of her class. For his part he
rancorously hated hydropathics, having once spent a black week under the
roof of one in his wife's company. He detested the food, the Turkish
baths (he had a passionate aversion to baring his body before
strangers), the inability to find anything to do and the compulsion to
endless small talk. A thought flitted over his mind which he was too
loyal to formulate. Once he and his wife had had similar likings, but
they had taken different roads since their child died. Janet! He saw
again--he was never quite free from the sight--the solemn little
white-frocked girl who had died long ago in the spring.
It may have been the thought of the Neuk Hydropathic, or more likely the
thin clean scent of the daffodils with which Tibby had decked the table,
but long ere breakfast was finished the Great Plan had ceased to be an
airy vision and become a sober well-masoned structure. Mr. McCunn--I may
confess it at the start--was an incurable romantic.
He had had a humdrum life since the day when he had first entered his
uncle's shop with the hope of some day succeeding that honest grocer;
and his feet had never strayed a yard from his sober rut. But his mind,
like the Dying Gladiator's, had been far away. As a boy he had voyaged
among books, and they had given him a world where he could shape his
career according to his whimsical fancy. Not that Mr. McCunn was what is
known as a great reader. He read slowly and fastidiously, and sought in
literature for one thing alone. Sir Walter Scott had been his first
guide, but he read the novels not for their insight into human character
or for their historical pageantry, but because they gave him material
wherewith to construct fantastic journeys. It was the same with
Dickens. A lit tavern, a stage-coach, post-horses, the clack of hoofs on
a frosty road, went to his head like wine. He was a Jacobite not because
he had any views on Divine Right, but because he had always before his
eyes a picture of a knot of adventurers in cloaks, new landed from
France, among the western heather.
On this select basis he had built up his small library--Defoe, Hakluyt,
Hazlitt and the essayists, Boswell, some indifferent romances and a
shelf of spirited poetry. His tastes became known, and he acquired a
reputation for a scholarly habit. He was president of the Literary
Society of the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, and read to its members a variety
of papers full of a gusto which rarely became critical. He had been
three times chairman at Burns Anniversary dinners, and had delivered
orations in eulogy of the national Bard; not because he greatly admired
him--he thought him rather vulgar--but because he took Burns as an
emblem of the un-Burns-like literature which he loved. Mr. McCunn was no
scholar and was sublimely unconscious of background. He grew his flowers
in his small garden-plot oblivious of their origin so long as they gave
him the colour and scent he sought. Scent, I say, for he appreciated
more than the mere picturesque. He had a passion for words and cadences,
and would be haunted for weeks by a cunning phrase, savouring it as a
connoisseur savours a vintage. Wherefore long ago, when he could ill
afford it, he had purchased the Edinburgh _Stevenson_. They were the
only large books on his shelves, for he had a liking for small
volumes--things he could stuff into his pocket in that sudden journey
which he loved to contemplate.
Only he had never taken it. The shop had tied him up for eleven months
in the year, and the twelfth had always found him settled decorously
with his wife in some seaside villa. He had not fretted, for he was
content with dreams. He was always a little tired, too, when the
holidays came, and his wife told him he was growing old. He consoled
himself with tags from the more philosophic of his authors, but he
scarcely needed consolation. For he had large stores of modest
contentment.
But now something had happened. A spring morning and a safety razor had
convinced him that he was still young. Since yesterday he was a man of a
large leisure. Providence had done for him what he would never have done
for himself. The rut in which he had travelled so long had given place
to open country. He repeated to himself one of the quotations with which
he had been wont to stir the literary young men at the Guthrie Memorial
Kirk:
"What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold:
When we mind labour, then only, we're too old--
What age had Methusalem when he begat Saul?"
He would go journeying--who but he?--pleasantly.
It sounds a trivial resolve, but it quickened Mr. McCunn to the depths
of his being. A holiday, and alone! On foot, of course, for he must
travel light. He would buckle on a pack after the approved fashion. He
had the very thing in a drawer upstairs, which he had bought some years
ago at a sale. That and a waterproof and a stick, and his outfit was
complete. A book, too, and, as he lit his first pipe, he considered what
it should be. Poetry, clearly, for it was the Spring, and besides poetry
could be got in pleasantly small bulk. He stood before his bookshelves
trying to select a volume, rejecting one after another as inapposite.
Browning--Keats, Shelley--they seemed more suited for the hearth than
for the roadside. He did not want anything Scots, for he was of opinion
that Spring came more richly in England and that English people had a
better notion of it. He was tempted by the Oxford Anthology, but was
deterred by its thickness, for he did not possess the thin-paper
edition. Finally he selected Izaak Walton. He had never fished in his
life, but _The Compleat Angler_ seemed to fit his mood. It was old and
curious and learned and fragrant with the youth of things. He remembered
its falling cadences, its country songs and wise meditations. Decidedly
it was the right scrip for his pilgrimage.
Characteristically he thought last of where he was to go. Every bit of
the world beyond his front door had its charms to the seeing eye. There
seemed nothing common or unclean that fresh morning. Even a walk among
coal-pits had its attractions.... But since he had the right to choose,
he lingered over it like an epicure. Not the Highlands, for Spring came
late among their sour mosses. Some place where there were fields and
woods and inns, somewhere, too, within call of the sea. It must not be
too remote, for he had no time to waste on train journeys; nor too near,
for he wanted a countryside untainted. Presently he thought of Carrick.
A good green land, as he remembered it, with purposeful white roads and
public-houses sacred to the memory of Burns; near the hills but yet
lowland, and with a bright sea chafing on its shores. He decided on
Carrick, found a map and planned his journey.
Then he routed out his knapsack, packed it with a modest change of
raiment, and sent out Tibby to buy chocolate and tobacco and to cash a
cheque at the Strathclyde Bank. Till Tibby returned he occupied himself
with delicious dreams.... He saw himself daily growing browner and
leaner, swinging along broad highways or wandering in bypaths. He
pictured his seasons of ease, when he unslung his pack and smoked in
some clump of lilacs by a burnside--he remembered a phrase of
Stevenson's somewhat like that. He would meet and talk with all sorts of
folk; an exhilarating prospect, for Mr. McCunn loved his kind. There
would be the evening hour before he reached his inn, when, pleasantly
tired, he would top some ridge and see the welcoming lights of a little
town. There would be the lamp-lit after-supper time when he would read
and reflect, and the start in the gay morning, when tobacco tastes
sweetest and even fifty-five seems young. It would be holiday of the
purest, for no business now tugged at his coat-tails. He was beginning a
new life, he told himself, when he could cultivate the seedling
interests which had withered beneath the far-reaching shade of the shop.
Was ever a man more fortunate or more free?
Tibby was told that he was going off for a week or two. No letters need
be forwarded, for he would be constantly moving, but Mrs. McCunn at the
Neuk Hydropathic would be kept informed of his whereabouts. Presently he
stood on his doorstep, a stocky figure in ancient tweeds, with a bulging
pack slung on his arm, and a stout hazel stick in his hand. A passer-by
would have remarked an elderly shopkeeper bent apparently on a day in
the country, a common little man on a prosaic errand. But the passer-by
would have been wrong, for he could not see into the heart. The plump
citizen was the eternal pilgrim; he was Jason, Ulysses, Eric the Red,
Albuquerque, Cortez--starting out to discover new worlds.
Before he left Mr. McCunn had given Tibby a letter to post. That morning
he had received an epistle from a benevolent acquaintance, one
Mackintosh, regarding a group of urchins who called themselves the
"Gorbals Die-Hards." Behind the premises in Mearns Street lay a tract of
slums, full of mischievous boys with whom his staff waged truceless war.
But lately there had started among them a kind of unauthorised and
unofficial Boy Scouts, who, without uniform or badge or any kind of
paraphernalia, followed the banner of Sir Robert Baden-Powell and
subjected themselves to a rude discipline. They were far too poor to
join an orthodox troop, but they faithfully copied what they believed to
be the practices of more fortunate boys. Mr. McCunn had witnessed their
pathetic parades, and had even passed the time of day with their leader,
a red-haired savage called Dougal. The philanthropic Mackintosh had
taken an interest in the gang and now desired subscriptions to send them
to camp in the country.
Mr. McCunn, in his new exhilaration, felt that he could not deny to
others what he proposed for himself. His last act before leaving was to
send Mackintosh ten pounds.