The Spanish Lady E-Book

Maurice Walsh

• Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The setting is a village in the Highlands as a murder occurs. The general's nephew falls in love with his lovely Spanish wife. The general is killed; the lovers suspect each other; the whole village is implicated. Who can unravel this mystery? 

Leseprobe

The Spanish Lady

 by Maurice Walsh

First published in 1943

This edition published by Reading Essentials

Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The Spanish Lady 

by 

Maurice Walsh

PART ONE: THE SOWING

CHAPTER IHOLE-AND-CORNER

1

Diego Usted was the only passenger that got off the train at Craik Station, but, then, as far as he could see, there was no reason in the world why anyone—even himself—should get off at that station in the portals of an empty mountain wilderness.

He had left six people behind him in the compartment, but who they were and where they were going he did not know and did not care. He did not care at all. In fact he had not a care in the world. All the way from London he hadn’t had a care, not even when half-a-score of passengers crowded into the compartment at York, and a stout person, probably female, edged him into the corridor. For hours he had stood there, his hands on the rail across the window, looking out at the fattish, flattish, tamish, leisurely English landscape sliding by and showing little or no sign of the blitz that might go on forever and ever and ever. He could be leisurely, too, in the same stolid, toneless way, a way that was beyond hopelessness and underneath despair.

He did not remember much about that long train ride. At the beginning of it he had set his mind in what he called stoicism without knowing much of the real doctrine of stoicism. But all the time he had been conscious of an emptiness somewhere about the pit of the stomach, not hunger, but a vacuum in which there was no pain. He was pleased about that, that is he was pleased there was no pain, that the vacuum did not break down into that persistent, weary, mind-destroying, just-bearable gnaw that he had known for so many months. He had used his ration book hardly at all. Probably, in spite of his spurious stoicism, he was afraid, though he would not admit fear; but somewhere, deep down, he was afraid to stir again into life that patient, ravening gnaw. At York he had had some weak tea, and at Edinburgh, where he stayed the night, some soup and milk pudding off the scanty menu; and all next day, through a country that was often desolate and sometimes ugly and always strong, he had not eaten at all until reaching Inverness, full of soldiery, where he had stayed another night.

Here now, in the April afternoon, he was at his destination, his very final destination on top of earth, the spot from which he hoped to step off into another dimension—if any. For he told himself, he had often told himself, that another three months—or six—would see the end of the entity that was Diego Usted. He would go out with the fall of the year. After five years of very savage warfare he wanted to die in a hole-and-corner. That was the Latin blood in him, or the Gaelic.

He took the awkward step down to the platform, pulled his old leather bag after him, and looked round. Yes, he was the sole passenger getting off at Craik, and there was no one here to meet him, though he had written three days previously. He felt a small touch of disappointment, for he was not yet the lone wolf he thought he was.

There were only three persons on the platform: the guard, the station porter, and a postman, all oldish men manhandling a few parcels from the van at the other end of the train.

Diego felt stiff after the long constraint, and stamped up the length of a carriage and back again. He was not cold. The air here had not the dank harshness of the London atmosphere that had done its worst on him during four wintry months. The air was brisk and had a feeling of youth in it, and the April sun was shining as if it had never known treachery. He did not stamp about for long, for his legs had lost much of their pith, and too much activity might start that old gnaw nibbling, and he felt as empty as a drum. He went across and sat on the iron seat between the windows of the solid, stone-built, one-storeyed house that was ticket-office, waiting-room, goods-store and station agent’s quarters. In due time the porter would come along, take up his ticket, and give him a few route directions. He found the ticket and slipped it into his cuff in readiness. It was a single ticket.

He sat there quietly, stolidly, legs out, hands deep in pocket, his eyes on the battered bag lying forlornly on the wide spread of packed gravel. All sounds were muffled in the bright but fragile sunshine. The engine, conserving its steam, was softly hissing to itself. The driver leant out of his cab looking down the platform to where the guard, the porter and the postman, having finished with the van, stood gossiping amiably. The murmuring soft drawl of their Highland voices just reached Diego. And then one of them laughed. They were in no hurry. This train was at least three hours late, so why trouble about another five minutes. And, then, a wisp of green waved, a door banged harshly, the engine gave a husky snort of whistle, puffed heavily, thuttered rapidly like a machine gun, and went back to slow, laborious, steam-jetting effort; and the train snailed out of the station, the curling puffs of steam fading quickly into the thin, blue, spring sky.

It was then that Diego Usted felt marooned in his hole-and-corner. Any place he went from here he would go on his two feet—or with his two feet first. He did not mind which.

Now that the train was gone he could view the prospect across the double line of rails. There was no platform on the other side, only a bank wisped with bleached grass, a white paling, and beyond that country, country, country. There was not a house anywhere, not a friendly tuft of smoke anywhere, just empty upheaved country. Diego knew something about desolate landscapes, but this one was new to him. Beyond the paling was a sea of red-brown grass humped with grey-green islands out of which grey stone ribbed. From beyond came the cold sound of water strong-running, but he could not see where it ran; and beyond that hidden water the land lifted slowly and was clothed in wood. He could see the brown trunks of the first ranks of trees and then nothing but a sombre, dark-green mantle lifting upwards, flowing over, and again lifting upwards. He tried to remember the names his Highland mother—she was now with God—had given to the Highland trees: birch, rowan, alder, and the conifers, spruce, larch and pine. In his own mind he always confused the spruce and the larch. One remained dark green all the year round, the other put forth a tender green in spring and cast its needles in the fall. This was spring, but there was no shade of spring green relieving that sombre mantle. He did not know that May was the burgeoning time in the Highlands.

He lifted his eyes above the trees and looked upon the Highland hills really for the first time. Yesterday, coming up through Perth and Inverness, he had seen the Grampian Mountains, but mountains seen from a train are like mountains seen in a moving picture; they do not touch one intimately. In the country where he had been reared and grown to manhood the nearest mountain was five hundred miles away. He had, of course, seen rugged and serrated mountains in Spain, but had been too busy fighting and hiding to notice anything but their forbidding harshness and brittleness. Now the mountains were awesomely all around him.

Beyond the wooded slopes facing him, the great breast of a hill heaved upwards, clad in the rusty grey that he knew must be heather. High up it was buttressed with bare rock, and between the buttresses and hooding the long ridge of the summit was the appalling white of snow in shadow, for this face of the hill was turned away from the sun. But that was only one hill and not the biggest. Beyond its shoulders was the gloom of distance out of which rose massive peaks; slopes glistened in silver; blue chasms cut sheerly into the white ridges; and far away over a snowy pass lifted one conical peak tinged with gold and faintly washed with rose. And the sun bright and brittle marched along the summits.

Like any man who looks, for the first time, at the big hills so close at hand he felt a touch of awe. He felt minute and unimportant in the hollow of those huge, dreaming, aloof masses. They were not dead masses. They had a life and awareness of their own different from his life and awareness, not evil, not inimical, just in a different dimension that belittled his. He wanted to grasp hold of something to hold himself in time and space, for he had that sensation that a man gets who loses his head on a cliff and has an abandoned desire to let go all holds in a reeling world. He could still feel; these mountains that his mother had known moved him.

The porter, having arranged his parcels in a neat pile, was coming up the platform, buttoning his jacket. Some distance behind, and more slowly, came the postman, a slack grey bag over one shoulder.

When the porter got nearer Diego saw by his cap that he was more than a porter. He was the station-agent also. In a universal war all the able-bodied men would be with the Forces, and wayside stations like this would be run by the old or the unfit. This man was old but hale, of good girth, smooth ruddy face, and nose suspiciously ruddier. He turned towards Diego and spoke in his easy Highland voice.

“A fine day in it, sir! A touch o’ frost come evening—too clear above the hill.” He tipped a hand, half in salute, half in request for Diego’s single ticket.

Diego had been brought up amongst a courteous people and would not stay seated while any man on his feet spoke to him. He arose and tendered the agent his much-punched ticket.

“It is a fine day, sir,” he agreed, and stopped himself inclining from the hips.

The agent examined the ticket back and front, and looked up at the tall dark stranger interrogatively.

“You’ll be for Craik, sir?”

“Am I not there?” There was no signboard or anything else to indicate the name of the station, but a ticket collector had assured him that this was Craik.

“Craik Station, sir—the township I mean.”

“There is a town, then?”

“Ach, no! A bit of a township—eight mile up the Affran Water.”

“In Glen Affran?” He knew of Glen Affran.

“The very place. The mouth of the glen this is. You’ll see the gap of it out front.” He gestured a hand over the roof of the house.

“Will you please tell me if a gentleman by the name of Hamish McLeod lives at this end?” He spoke very good English but used it formally.

“Hamish of Loch Beg Bothy?” There was now a live interest under the agent’s lifted brows.

“That is he.”

“Goad be here! You’ll no’ be his foreign nephew, James, up from London.”

“I am, sir.” In his own place he was called Diego, and that was not London.

“Gi’e us your hand, Mr.—Usted, isn’t it? I’m an old friend o’ the family. Ross—Peter Ross the name. I heard of you often from Big Ellen, and Mairi, your mother—God be good to her!—I knew her since she was that high.”

He shook Diego’s hand warmly, and the foreign man bowed over the clasped hands.

“You’re longer in the bone than the uncle,” Peter Ross said, his chin up. “You’ll be taking after the father’s side?”

“That is so, Mr. Ross.” But not quite so. His father, though of a tall race, had been short and dark and wirily lean. He himself was dark and lean, but tall—almost too tall—and once, not so long ago, he had been wiry as steel is wiry; but the steel wire in him had sagged down to that internal malaise.

Diego was not a talker, and Peter Ross was. In this empty land one would either possess oneself in silence or dam up a spate of talk ready for bursting.

“Ay man! a strange thing your Uncle Hamish is not down to meet you. But he’ll be, never you fear. The up-mail was a bit early for once—not more than three hours late anyway. He knows you’re coming?”

“I wrote my aunt a note three days ago.”

“Three days! that’s no muckle these evil times.” He shouted over his shoulder at the postman who was only three paces away. “Hey, Wally! come here! Do you know who we have? This is Wally McKenzie the Post, Mr. Usted, another old friend.”

Wally the Post was a small, hardy, weather-beaten man, but one would not know he was weather-beaten till he removed the uniform cap that came down to the tip of his nose. A walrus moustache hid his mouth and most of his chin. As he said later, he sported that moustache to stop the winds of the glen blowing his “fawsers” down his gullet.

He came forward and gave Diego a surprising handgrip, and blew through the hairs covering his mouth.

“I heard you, Peter. You’re welcome to Glen Affran, Mr. Usted. We’re a’ friends—most of us—and any friend of Hamish and Big Ellen’s is double welcome.”

There were courteous and friendly people in this stern mountain land, and Diego’s heart lifted.

“Mr. Usted wrote three days ago,” said the agent. “Did you take the letter up to Loch Beg, Wally?”

“No then, I didn’t. I took two up from Ian and young Larr.” He twirled the grey bag off his shoulder and slapped its slackness. “Three days, you’re saying! It’ll be in here among the King’s mail, and I’ll mak’ sure in a minute.”

He broke the postal seals with a jerk, thrust in a hand, and brought forth a fistful of mail, mostly in buff. He shuffled through it expertly.

“A’ for the General, Head of the Home Guard—on His Majesty’s Service. Ah! What did I tell you? Here we are!”

He held up Diego’s letter addressed to Mrs. Hamish McLeod, Loch Beg Bothy, Glen Affran, by Craik. Apparently she was known locally as Big Ellen.

“I ken your hand-of-write well’s my own,” said the postman. “You write Big Ellen once in the two months—fine newsy letters.”

Wally was being merely polite. Diego Usted did not write newsy letters. The deadly work he had been engaged on could not be given in news to a woman. The postman thrust the letter back in the bag with the others.

“I’ll deliver it myself the morn as in duty bound,” he said.

“If you gentlemen will tell me where my uncle lives—”

“Losh! ’tis a long step, sir,” said the agent. “Glen Affran is a gey long glen. Eight miles up to Craik, and six more to Affran Loch, and four beyond to Lodge Affran where the road ends.”

“And Loch Beg?”

“The name we have on the near end of Affran Loch. The head-forester’s bothy—your uncle’s place—is close on the shore of it, fourteen, maybe fifteen miles from where we stand, a good road all the way, but stiff.”

“I could hire—?”

“Not since the war. But it’ll be all right, Mr. Usted. I’ve an old boneshaker of a bike you could manage, and we can send up the bag in the lodge car tomorrow or—”

“Hist! speak o’ the devil!” interrupted the postman. “Hear ye that?”

That was the smooth powerful purr of a motor engine coming up to the station and stopping outside the far door of the waiting-hall. The postman waddled quickly into the hall, and was back almost immediately. He was frowning a little.

“Ah! the Lodge car! the General and Mistress Ann. We’ll manage you a lift all right, Mr. Usted.”

But there was no confidence in his voice, and Diego wondered at that. Surely, amongst a kindly people where cars were few, a lift would be given as a matter of course. Or did the people of Lodge Affran hold themselves aloof from the glen?

The agent, moving down the platform, gave Diego a wink over his shoulder. “The General, he’s thrawn. He’ll be wanting them parcels double quick.”

The postman moved to a red bicycle propped beyond the door, and began strapping his mail bag on the carrier. Diego sat down again and restored his hands to his pockets. He might not get a lift, he might not take one grudgingly offered, but he could if necessary cycle fourteen or fifteen miles, in spite of the vacuum at his middle. Not so many months ago he had walked and run and hid and killed for twenty miles in the dark on the rocky coast of Brittany.

2

Footsteps sounded in the hall, and two people came out on the platform. A man as tall as Diego was in the lead, and the young woman behind him was also tall. They did not see Diego, for they turned the other way at once. The man said:

“See that old dodderer has all our things, Ann.”

The young woman was already long-striding down the platform. Passing the postman she flung him a fine free gesture of a long arm. “No news for me today, Mercurio,” she said in a deep easy voice. The postman lifted his peaked cap, and his smile was warm.

The man’s back was to Diego, a long straight back with great width of shoulder under rough tweed. His legs were so slender and short for that long back and width of shoulder that he looked topheavy. Judging by his upright carriage and smooth red neck he was a man in his prime; but his hair belied that judgment. His head was bare and he had a fine bush of curled hair, but the hair was white, not white as snow, not albino white, but creamily-white all over like hair that had once been red. That curled, creamily-white bush was startling above the smooth red neck. He took a pace forward and spoke to the postman in a cultivated but light voice—too light for his big torso.

“Any letters for me, McKenzie?”

“They’ll be in the bag, General.” The postman blew through his moustache.

Diego caught the change of inflection in the postman’s voice. It was coldly respectful.

“I’ll have them please.” That was an order.

“The seals of this bag are not to be broken but in the privacy of my own Post Office,” said the postman firmly, and added, “them’s my regulations.”

“Damn your regulations!”

“Surely, General! But who’ll be the first man to report me if I break them? and I won’t either.”

“Oh very well!”

The General turned on his heel and saw Diego. The postman winked behind the turned back. The seals had been broken for Diego without a thought of regulations, and there were many buff letters for this General. Evidently Wally the Post was a man of independent mind, and owed no friendly allegiance to this tall soldier. Yet he had smiled warmly to the young woman.

The soldier looked at Diego, and kept on looking unwinkingly as he walked the four or five paces between them.

And, then, Diego saw that he was not a young man, or a man in his middle years, but a man who would soon be old—if not already old. He was sixty, he might be seventy, he might look no older at eighty. He seemed youthful, but the set of his eye sockets and the fine mesh of minute lines between his full cheeks and flat ears told the tale of many easy years. He had a short upper lip and his under-lip pouted roundly. He had no eyebrows and his light eyes had white lashes. They were ordinary, slightly protuberant blue eyes, and yet extraordinary, for they were without expression and did not once blink. Then or later Diego never saw a trace of feeling in those unwinking eyes, neither anger nor affection nor fear nor cunning, nor anything.

The lower lip pouted, and the light voice spoke.

“Who are you? Are you a soldier?”

There was something intolerant in the voice, and Diego did not like it. Though the eyes showed nothing Diego could read the thought that prompted the two quick questions. The unblinking eyes were looking down on a youngish, lean, dark, foreign-looking man in old tweeds, and such a one in wartime had to be questioned by men rightly set in authority. But this man-in-authority had no manners, so Diego did not rise to his feet. He had to lean his head back to look up soberly at his questioner.

“I am not a soldier,” he said quietly. That was true. Diego Usted was not a soldier any longer.

“Why not?”

“Because I am no damn good.”

“You mean—?”

“Just that.”

“What is your name?”

“Consider, sir, before you ask that.”

“What the devil do you mean?” His eyes did not warm, but his lip pouted some more. “I am Head of the Home Guard in Glen Affran. I ask you your name?”

“Then you will consider your manners.”

“Look here!” He brought a forefinger smartly into one palm. “I am Major General Charles Harper—”

“Enough! I am Diego y Hernandez y Mendoza de Usted.”

“Ah!” The exclamation exploded, and he turned a supple neck to look down the platform where the young woman and the old railway man were gathering and checking parcels.

“A Spaniard? A Red?”

“Paraguayan,” Diego told him.

“What are you doing in Craik?”

“Visiting my uncle.”

“Who is he?”

“Hamish McLeod of Loch Beg.”

“Why, he is my head-forester!”

“And my uncle.”

He kept on looking down at Diego. Would his eyes never blink? Evidently he lived in a world several planes above that of his head-forester, for he had never heard of Diego y Hernandez y Mendoza de Usted. Moreover, he probably did not believe this dark foreigner, and was considering some more authoritative questions. But this dark foreigner had answered all the questions that he would answer, and rose so abruptly in the other man’s face that even a general had to retire a step. Their eyes were level, the dark deep-set ones and the light expressionless ones.

“You will ask many questions, sir, and I answer thus: ‘Go thou to hell!’ ” That formal way of putting the direction made it uniquely expressive.

Indeed, coming of a courteous race, Diego should not have said that to a man so much older than himself. But, though old, the man was mighty, and could have broken Diego in two in his then physical condition. He did not try to, and Diego knew that he would not. The men of this Britain, brave enough, had got to that state where they no longer thought it worth while to react physically to an insult. That is why they had become so abusive to each other. The General stepped back another pace, and did not ask any more questions.

“You will be investigated,” he said shortly, turned on his heel, and stamped out in his top-heavy way to the motor car at the entrance.

The postman was grinning at the other side of the door. He clasped one hand with the other and shook hands with himself.

“Tell me, Mr. Usted, did you make him blink?” he whispered across.

Diego shook his head. No, he had not blinked once.

“You will some day. Dom! but you shut him up. You were welcome before, but now you’re twice welcome. Weel! I’ll be off. See you the morn. You’ll find Hamish and Big Ellen the best in the world.”

Peter Ross was coming up the platform heavily laden. Behind him strode the tall young woman, a parcel under one arm and another and a heavier bearing down a shoulder. There was a soldier out there, but he was not a soldierly man to let one of his women bear heavy parcels. Diego’s duty was plain. He met the lady half-way, his hand horizontal below his left breast.

“Señorita?”

Her black eyes crinkled at the word and she yielded up her burden. “Thank you, Señor,” she said and, surprisingly, she gave the word, señor, the proper little castanet slur.

Outside the station door on the curve of gravel was a long, blue, open car, and the General sat in the front seat next the driver’s looking straight ahead. Diego put the two parcels on the back seat, lifted his hat to no one in particular, and turned back into the station, not hesitating. He did not want to give any impression that he was hoping for a lift.

He sat down and waited for the agent and his cycle. He was finished with these people of Lodge Affran. The man was ill-bred. And the young woman? He had not come to this place to be concerned with women, but he was slightly intrigued all the same.

Voices came through to him but not the words. There was the quiet drawl of the Highland voice, and the high pitch of the soldier’s, and the woman’s voice that was deeper than the men’s. Now the Highland voice had stopped, the soldier’s voice was almost petulant, but the woman’s voice strengthened angrily and held the field. Had her lord told her that he had been consigned to hell, and was she resenting that insolence? Came silence, and quick light steps came tapping through the hall. The woman was back. She came round in front of Diego and he felt the angry aura of her. He rose to his feet to face the storm, and looked at her really for the first time.

She was young and tall and slender, but nobly breasted. Her thrown-open, tweed coat showed a tartan skirt, mostly green with small red checks, and a dark-green pull-over that outlined her firm breasts. A bright green ribbon held her hair, and her hair was the reddest and livest that he had ever seen. No hair is ever genuinely red, but that hair had more of red than yellow in it. It was the red that is sometimes seen amongst the black-haired breeds—Latin or Semite. But for the holding ribbon it would toss about her head, not in a nimbus but like the locks of that snake-woman of old. Her face was broad above and tapered rather quickly from wide-moulded cheekbones to a firm chin. Her mouth was full and shapely, and just red enough to make one wonder if she used lipstick. Her eyes, wide but deep set, were black, not shoe-button black but lustrous damson blue-black, and her lashes showed no trace of red, nor did her eyebrows that had the devil’s upcurve of thought and temper from each side of a tempered line between her brows.

Most men would call her exotic, and some men might call her beautiful, but to Diego Usted she was only dangerously bad-tempered. She was certainly in a temper now, her eyes hot and her nostrils flaring at each side of a small nose down-tilted; but though she was in a temper there was no tinge of red in the smooth matt surface of her face that had the lovely tint of old ivory.

She was now engaged in gaining control of her vocal chords before using them on Diego Usted. He got the first word in, which was unusual for him.

“But señorita, I told your father where to go only once.”

“But for the mercy of the good God that is your road and my road too, Señor,” she said deeply and surprisingly, and lifted her hands in a gesture that was all easy grace. “You are Diego—James Usted, the nephew of Hamish McLeod?”

His bow admitted it.

“It is my regret that you should be questioned with rudeness in this Glen where your people live who are my friends.”

She had a voice of low pitch indeed, but of good resonance and that small sibilance of breathing that a foreigner uses in speaking English, the beautiful English that the natives use so hellishly. And her hands were expressive.

“I ask your pardon, Señorita.” He was asking pardon for the thoughts he had had. This lady might be warm-tempered, but she was not bad-tempered, and she was not ill-bred, and she was not British. What she was he did not yet know, but he was tempted to try Spanish on her.

“And I yours, Señor,” she said. “Your people are not expecting you. Hamish was in his wife’s garden as we came down. May I give you a lift to Loch Beg?”

“But your father—?”

“General Harper is my husband, Señor.”

“Your pardon again, Señora.” He felt something that was more regret than disappointment. And then he remembered that the postman had called her Mistress Ann. Mistress Ann Harper, wife to Major General Charles Harper, the Head of the Home Guard and Lord of Glen Affran by Divine Right.

“It will please me, Señor Usted, if you accept a drive in my car. Is that your bag? Let us go then.”

She turned before he could say anything. He had nothing to say, but he would accept that invitation, divine right or no divine right. He strode across for his bag, and followed her out to the car.

The station agent was holding the door open for her. She slipped under the wheel smoothly as an eel, and he tried to close the door softly.

“Bang it, my Saint Peter!” she said, and banged it herself for him. Her husband was sitting up stiffly, and did not turn head towards Diego.

Peter Ross had stowed the parcels in a corner of the wide back seat, and there was plenty of room for Diego and his bag. Diego’s hand moved tentatively towards a hip pocket, but the old man moved a forefinger rapidly and banged the door on him.

“See you Sunday, Mr. Usted. That day I often go up to Loch Beg on the boneshaker.”

He had to lift his voice on the last words for the car was already on the move.

3

The three humans in the car spoke scarcely a word all the way up long Glen Affran. Diego mused on that with some astonishment. He was an incomer from a shattered struggling world, and these two people lived secluded amongst mountains. Surely, then, in any society worth the name, the three of them would be communicating intimately and naturally. Had the civilization of this insignificant planet developed so, into watertight compartments, that the only hope for man was such a complete shattering of organization as would compel the surviving remnant to begin over again? Possibly, a few here and there were beginning even now; and Diego wondered if he could be one of them. He knew that he could not. He had too many inhibitions of his own breed and caste, and, moreover, time would not be given him. If this empty-feeling middle of his started again to gnaw remorselessly he would have time for nothing but steeling himself to fortitude till release came.

It was evening now, and they were going westwards in long curves, so that the sun low-shining through a gap in the mountains sometimes troubled the lady at the wheel. The road had a good surface, but was barely wide enough for the big car, and it had an ugly ditch, now at one side, now at the other. At every furlong there was a small bay to enable conveyances to pass each other.

They were going deeper and deeper into broad based, snow-topped mountains, and Diego felt smaller and smaller. In places the sides of the glen narrowed in to rugged buttresses, and the road hung over a strong torrent that shouted at them over the purr of the engine. The water was not peaty but very clear, and ridged and torn by white-seamed quartz rock. Sometimes the glen opened out, the slopes were easier, and the level straths, through which the stream ran fast but smoothly, were verdant even at the end of the hardest, longest winter in living memory. On the braes were brown spreads of withered vegetation that Diego did not recognize as bracken, and scattered graceful, pale-trunked trees with a close network of slender red branches that he did not know were silver birches; and by the course of the stream were squat, leaning, leafless trees with dark trunks that he did not know were black alder. Sheep, ragged and small and with black faces, were everywhere, but there were no shepherds and no houses though there were many ruined walls. Diego’s mother had told him the tragedy of these ruined walls. A telephone wire looping on wooden posts was the only evidence of modern communication with the outside.

Eight miles up they passed through the township of Craik. Here the strath was fully a mile in length and half that in width, and the slopes rolled over in green pastures that carried many sheep. There were no cattle, for at this season cattle would be in byre. All along that mile of strath, on the stream-side of the road, was a scattering of houses, mostly one-storeyed and grey-slated, but there were some ancient squat buildings with insloping walls of unmortared stone, deep-set, foot-square windows, doorways not five feet high, and thick felts of thatch round black vents. Many of the houses were empty and falling into ruins. There were old men and women and many children about the houses and gardens, but there were no young men and girls. Adolescence everywhere was out at war for an ideal that had been falsified by the older generations.

The evening was still and clear and cloudless, and a blue film of smoke drifted from the low chimneys and vanished; and it was then Diego’s nostrils caught a strange odour that he was to live with for many a day. It was a pervading, dry, burnt-earth sort of odour, not a perfume, but not pungent, and not unpleasant. He had not experienced it before, but he knew at once what it was. The one nostalgia his mother had had in the hacienda of San José in Paraguay was for the scent of peat smoke in a Highland glen. This was the scent of peat smoke, and those dark-brown clamps at gable ends were peat stacks.

Two miles out of Craik the car slowed and stopped before a many-barred gate closing the road, and a high wire fence ran straight up the breast of the slopes on either hand. This was the boundary fence of the great deer forest of Glen Affran, but there was no forest. There were bottom lands of sound grass, and slopes of heather and grass, and above them the snow fields seamed with grey and blue rock; and there were side glens impressively lonely, with slopes and bluffs and cliffs glooming off into blue distance; but there were very few trees that Diego could see.

Diego had his hand on the door to dismount and open the high gate, but the General with youthful energy beat him to it, as much as to imply that he would not take or yield a favor to a man who had consigned him to Hades. The car slipped through, and the gate clanged smartly behind. The woman spoke in her low deep voice.

“When one is old but strong one grows petulant but secure at his own center.”

“I shall remember,” murmured Diego.

In another two miles the road took to the slope to lift above a crag that breasted into the torrent of Affran Water, and the young woman, whose live red hair was stirring under its green band, lifted a gauntleted hand off the wheel and pointed ahead. Diego looked, and in the near distance saw the evening sheen of lake water. So that was Loch Beg, which in Gaelic means small lake. It was a small lake, an oval not more than half-a-mile in length. The station agent had said that it was the lower end of Affran Loch, but Diego could not see any water spreading away beyond it, for the shore lifted suddenly into twin bluffs that curved towards each other and hid the further prospect. But beyond the bluffs he could see that there was a great hollow in the hills lipped with cliffs that swept round and made an end of Glen Affran. The loch would be down in that hollow, and at the far end of it would be Lodge Affran where General Harper and his wife lived.

And, then, as they got nearer Diego saw the house, and wondered if it was Loch Beg Bothy. It was on the near side of the slope and between the road and the water. In the distance he took it for an oblong white rock, for it was lime-washed, and the grey slates toned into the bluff behind. Nearer, he saw that it was not a bothy at all. He understood that a bothy might be anything from a hut to a one-storeyed butt-and-ben. This was a real house of two storeys, a bow window, and four good sized windows along the length of the first floor. The white of it stood out strongly against the crag behind, and against the crag itself were lean-to sheds.

But it was Loch Beg Bothy and the end of his journey. The car stopped before a high wooden gate set in a frame in a low drystone wall.

“That is your uncle in the garden,” said the lady. “You and I, we meet again soon.”

“God is good,” said Diego.

He got out and pulled his bag after him, banged the door, and lifted his hat. But no more words passed between them. The car moved on up the slope, she lifted her right hand off the wheel, and her slow gesture of fare-you-well had a unique grace and charm. Her husband did not even turn his head.

CHAPTER IITHE HAVEN

1

Diego Usted, standing there on the roadside, was sorry for himself for half a minute. The leather bag dragged at his arm, and he let it drop at his feet. He was spent and empty, his thighs trembled, and for a moment the world tilted, so that he had to brace his legs to maintain his balance. He was no good any more—never any more—but he must not fall down before his uncle’s door. He shook his head clear and looked about him, taking his bearings. That was a habit he had acquired on hard campaigning.

The white house stood end-on between road and loch. Fronting it was a good-sized kitchen garden divided into four sections by paths edged with white stones, and there were many small fruit trees and berry bushes just beginning to bud. Before the house was a patch of green grass starred with shaped flower beds, where daffodils “hung down their heads as they burned away,” and tulips stood up gracefully tall not yet flaunting their colours. The garden sloped down to the loch where a short pier jutted out of the shallows into deep water, and a small cobble was tied to a mooring post; and beyond the quarter-mile of sheening water a brown hillside lifted in slow folds to a ridge of snow. A low drystone wall enclosed the garden and house on three sides, and strung along the top of the wall was a wire netting. At the moment a black-and-white cock and his numerous harem were balanced on the coping, poking silly heads at the netting. No doubt there were worms in the dark soil that the man in the garden had been turning with a digging fork.

The man had stayed his digging as soon as the car stopped, and was now walking down the path towards the gate, his thick, bowed, short-gaitered legs moving sturdily, not slowly, not quickly, just steadily. Diego picked up his bag, clicked open the garden gate, and went to meet him, controlling his movements carefully so that his weakened legs would not stumble. Over the man’s shoulder he could see the bow window on the near side of the open door. It was lace-curtained and one of the curtains was pulled aside as if a hand held it.

The man approaching was Diego’s blood uncle on the distaff side, but in no feature was he like Diego’s mother who was dead. She had been tall and lissome and fair and lovely and joyous. This man was short and squat and dark and ugly and unsmilingly grave. He had truly remarkable breadth of shoulder and depth of chest, and big incurving hands hung to his knees at the end of bent arms. A massive neck supported a massive wide head under a brown, two-peaked cap, and his black straight hair, not a white hair in it after sixty years, showed about his close-set pointed ears. His small black eyes set deep in bony ridges were strangely hazed with blue, and his face was one smooth, sallow, bloodless thing. His colouring, the shape of his eyes, the bosses of cheekbone, the uptilted nose with open nostrils, the straight mouth, were queerly Mongolian in a Highlandman and a McLeod.

He was indeed an ugly gorilla of a man, but he was not repulsive. There was a dry clean savour about him. All the same, if he had beaten the big drum of his chest and roared, Diego would not have been surprised. He did not. Instead he spoke in the quiet, slow, husky way that a man has who is not accustomed to using his voice. He said:

“You are my sister’s son, James?”

“I am, Uncle Hamish.” He could not bow very well on these unsteady legs, with the bag dragging at his shoulder.

“I see her in you. You are welcome, boy.” His right hand, hard and dry, reached for Diego’s and pressed once. His other hand possessed itself definitely of the bag. And Diego wondered where he saw his lovely mother in his own horse-headed darkness.

“Big Ellen, the wife, is within the house,” said the uncle, as if stating the one important thing.

That was all. He made no fuss of his nephew from foreign parts, but led up the path, the heavy bag nearly touching the ground, his arm bent and his shoulder straight as if the bag had no weight. The curtain of the window had dropped back into place.

Hamish McLeod was on the step of the door when he moved aside with surprising nimbleness to give room to a tall woman who strode straight through him. She stopped short in front of Diego, and her fierce, intensely blue eyes took him apart feature by feature. He inclined head and shoulders, and wondered what she was going to strike him with, tongue or hand.

“ ’Tis himself, Big Ellen—James—our nephew—all the way from London,” introduced her husband.

“Sure I know that well, Cuchulain. Haven’t I eyes in my head for this tall and gallant man?”

That was the richest voice that Diego had ever heard, a leisurely, vibrant, effortless, deep bell of a voice, rising and falling in cadences easy as breathing. That woman was a complete surprise to him. He had often in the last year pictured the type of woman she must be, and he was good at picturing. Some time after escaping out of Spain into England he had written this uncle whom he had never seen—and who was surprising too—and the reply had come from his wife, a picturesque, impressionist letter so full of imagination as to be almost incoherent without being ungrammatical. Every month or two after that they had exchanged letters, so that he had a background for his picture. He knew that she was Irish, and he had seen her in his mind’s eye as a small, voluble, volatile, light-voiced, warm-hearted slattern, that is, exactly what many Irish women are supposed to be. He was mostly wrong. Talkative she was, but not voluble, for her talk was eloquent; and she was not small and not light-voiced, nor was she slatternly, but whether her heart was warm he did not yet know.

She was a very tall woman, and she had the erect figure and carriage of a caryatid, head, neck, shoulders, and the flowing line that a blue-and-white check apron could not hide. Her strongly-carved, cleanboned, aquiline face was strangely touching, for it would be melancholic, almost tragic, but for the fierce blue eyes that made it alive. And with the blue eyes went the black Irish hair, flowing back from her forehead, with a thick plait of it folded round her head. She was one of the ageless ones; her fifty years had left no mark on her; she might be a matron with babies about her knees. She was the first woman that Diego had met to whom the name matriarch might be applied. Not that he believed in matriarchs. There were none in Paraguay, nor even in Spain. The Spanish people, with the possible exception of the Basque, permit no woman any pedestal but one.

“I am sorry that I come like this, my aunt,” he spoke carefully. “My letter, it has not arrived.”

“What other way could you come that would be better? Give me your hand while my mind is open.”

There was something sibylline in her without the frenzy. She took his hand in both of hers, and her cool fingers smoothed the back of his brown, bony claw. He felt her vibrancy coming through, and her fierce, wide-open eyes were almost hypnotic.

“You have the big Scottish bone under your Spanish leather, and room for a little flesh between.” Her voice deepened and at the same time softened. “You come of a good stock, and there’s iron and honour in you. But your hand is hot and dry, and there’s an old fever somewhere, and your eyes are hurted. Who’s been doing things to you, my little lad?”

And like a little lad he shook his head.

“So you are one of the silent ones too. That’s right!” She nodded her head and smiled, and her eyes were no longer fiercely intent. “Not many men get room to talk and Big Ellen McCarthy with her mouth open. Listen! It was myself drew you to this Glen of Affran, and I saying to Hamish that if you had the right drop in you I would make the glen draw it.” She patted his hand and drew him forward. “I have not welcomed you at all, and you are welcome.” Her hands were on his shoulders and her lips touched the hollow of his brown cheek. He felt the clean dry odour of her, and again his heart lifted. “Come into the house now, alanna, and never mind my talking. You’ll be weary to the bone, and small wonder. The last time our Larry was up from the south he slept for three days between meals and after that went on eating.”

Diego could sleep for three days too, but he knew that he would not. He had not slept soundly for months, and he had not eaten soundly either. She drew him inside the door and towards the foot of a stairway at the back of a narrow passage. His uncle was already clumping up ahead of them.

“The west room, Cuchulain,” she called, and spoke to Diego over her shoulder, not lowering the bell of her voice. “Don’t be minding him, the poor fellow. He has only the use of a hundred words of his own, five at the one time, but anything you say to him he can repeat at the end of a year and a day. ’Tis what is called a boomerang, and you with your mind changed maybe.”

Diego went slowly up the stairs after her, his hand heavy on the bannister to help his unsteady feet. This big aunt-by-marriage was wise, and her voice was oracular. Her foremother might have talked to Aeneas at Cumae. She knew. And she would go on talking. The only thing he could do was to let her go on talking, and nurse his own silence. Perhaps that is what his uncle had been compelled to do after many defeats. She was talking now.

“You will be surprised at the fine house that’s in it. Sure the luxury of it isn’t good for man or beast. You see it was the gent’s shooting lodge till they built the big ugly place at the head of the loch. Look! There’s a bathroom in there with hot and cold water and a cake of soap with a carbolic flavour. And this is your room.”

The bedroom—the west room, the ceremonial room which is sometimes south but is always called west, and is never to the danger point of east—was conventionally furnished in dark oak, with an island of carpet round the white-counterpaned, brass bed. And there his aunt left him saying quickly:

“I will now go and wet the tea. You will come when you are ready.”

2

Diego sat on the side of the bed, and put his head in his hands. He was, indeed, weary to the bone and very empty, but he was not hungry at all. He felt that never again would he be hungry. But he had to get this evening over somehow, and lie down, and gather a little resolution about him for another day—and another day after that. All he had to do was to sit still and be silent with his silent uncle while the Irishwoman’s voice poured over them like a cello. She had some soothing power in her, and her voice helped his weariness.

He went into the tiled bathroom, and found the water in the hot tap boiling. He soaked himself in hot water for five minutes, felt too deliciously drowsy, and waked himself up with a brief cold douche and a brisk rub that made his heart thump. Then he donned a soft white shirt and his best blue suit, and looked at himself in the mirror. He was too thin, and there were hollows below his cheekbones, and his skin was surely Spanish leather, but he could see no pain in the dark of his eyes, though there was a line between his brows and a grim line to his mouth. He had to admit that there was a quality in his looks that might be called distinguished, but it was not the quality of good looks, for in his own way he was as ugly as his gorilla uncle.

He went downstairs then, treading softly, and his aunt hailed him from down the passage.

“Come you in this way. This is the place we live—Hamish’s butt-end.”

He went into the big kitchen-livingroom, an admirable cavern of a room, but before he could take it all in she directed his gaze to the window. She had pulled aside the curtains, and he could see miles down the glen to where it narrowed to a gorge. The grass plot and the garden patch were already in shadow, but an orange glow lit the valley to a lurid glory. The glow seemed to flow upwards over the brown of the heather and lighten as it lifted till it struck gold off the quartz rocks and tinted with yellow and pink fire the snowy peaks that marched down the glen.

“That’s the best you’ll see it,” his aunt said at his shoulder, “but it’ll break your heart if your heart wants breaking. I am drawing your attention to your uncle.”

He was back at his digging, turning the heavy dark soil with an easy flick of the wrists, and breaking the clods with a deft side-knock of the prongs. But he was no drudge. Every four or five forkfuls he squared up his massive head and shoulders and looked down the glen for half a minute. Smoke drifted about his ears.

“That’s his method rain or shine,” said his wife, musing sonorously, “but he covers a power o’ ground in the length of a day. Gardening he does not like, for it is not in his blood, but he has the growing hand with flowers. A shy, ugly sort of a man and deep as a well; and a comfortable sort of a man to have in the house with a woman talking. Do not you be thinking that he is giving you a cold welcome, for deep down he is as happy as the day is long that his sister’s son is in the house with us. Seeing his blood is in you, you ought to know that?”

“What I do not know my aunt will tell me,” murmured Diego.

“Ha-ha!” There was a quick happiness in her chuckle. “That is one of your uncle’s back answers. I’ll talk because I can’t help it. Come you over here to the fire, and don’t be caught by the lonely end of the day.”

He turned into the room that by contrast with the aloof grandeur of the glen was full of dusky comfort. His aunt was bent at the fire, building up the peat sods with a long tongs, and the glow from the licking flames was already stronger than the dying day.

“I see you’re sniffing,” she said. “The peats you’re smelling, but you’ll not notice it after a while. The sods we have throw out a stronger perfume than my own Irish turf. Sit you down here and let me get a word out of you. It was myself sent Hamish to the digging, for I wanted to find out the man you are, so I could compare notes with him in the heart of the night. I’m telling you that, for my heart is drawn to you already, quiet man.”

The peats were now blazing brightly on the open hearth that under a head-high mantelpiece filled two-thirds of the end wall. The walls were done in a cream wash, and the rather low ceiling was black beamed. Brown flitches of bacon, solid looking as oak, hung from the beams. There was an oval white deal table at mid-floor, and a small table with a red cover in the bow window, and on that table books were scattered. Indeed one of the first things Diego noticed in that room was the number of books and magazines. There was a glass-fronted press of them by the side of a pine dresser gleaming with blue and brown delf, and there were piles of them stacked on the mantelpiece; all sorts of books: school books, text books, second-hand library books, cheap prints and monthly journals. There was at least one reader in this house.

At one side of the doorway was another tall, glass-fronted press holding rifles, fowling pieces, cased fishing rods, and all the paraphernalia of head-forestry. There were a few coloured prints, mostly religious, on the walls, and under one of the Sacred Heart a small red lamp burned. And over all the ruddy glow of the fire washed and pulsed.

Diego went across into the pleasant diffused warmth of the peats and the tall woman had to press him down into an armed straw-bottomed chair. He did not want to sit while she stood. There was a big iron kettle hanging from a crane, and he looked into the glowing coals below it; and the patience that was in him was near content. She placed a hand on his shoulder.

“That is your chair from now on. What is weighing in your mind, son?”

“That I should not have come until I had your permission.” He was merely avoiding the answer to her question.

“You had a reason of your own for coming, so you came—and why not? Well?”

“Your letters to me were splendid. They drew me here.”

“They were meant to. I’ll try again. Are you out of the army?”

“For the time.”

“You were on Commando?”

“I could not stay the pace—a decadent son of the sun.”

“As we all are. In your last letter and the one before I saw that you were sick in mind, but it was your body?”

“Yes.”

“Your stomach?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. You see I have a son a doctor, and I used to be reading his books till I had every disease that was ever known or imagined, and I stopped for the sake of my sanity when Medical Jurisprudence began to give me nightmares. Ulceration?”

“They told me so. But there is no pain now—only emptiness.”

“Ah indeed!” Her fingers pressed his shoulder, and her voice mused. “Yes—yes! He was not sure but it might be worse—something malignant—and there we are! The young are sentimental as well as the old, and one likes to die amongst one’s own. So he came up to look around and find a corner to die in.”

And there was his secret in her hands. And he had said so little too. He was strangely troubled and afraid.

“How did you know—?”

“How couldn’t I, and the eyes you have in your head? Your uncle, for devilment, tries to keep a secret from me once in a while, but he’s no better at it than his nephew. But I will not trouble you any more now.” She bent down and looked into his eyes. “I know all I want to know, and I am happy that you are in this house. You will leave yourself in my hands, and you will forget that you have anything down below the palate that savours your food.” She straightened up and ran her hand down his short hairs, and he felt the soothing hypnotic tingle. Her voice flowed comfort into him. “Your colour is right, and I smelled sound blood under the tan, my nose against your cheek. You will go my way as long as you can stand the wagging of my tongue, and when you can’t there are the bens and the lens and the waters running. From now till October you’ll get no grander place than Glen Affran, barring one place I know. Go out into the sun, and if you have to, find your hole, find it, and die in it, and we’ll bury you decent. But don’t be sorry for yourself any more.”

“I am glad that I am here,” he whispered.

“Then we are all glad.”

The lid of the kettle thuttered, and with remarkable ease she moved the crook aside on the crane.

“What do you eat?”

“Anything—or nothing.”

“That’s right, you have your lesson. Leave it to me.”

She gave his shoulder a friendly push and went out into the passage. He heard her voice lift.

“Come you in, Cuchulain! I’m getting the tay drawn.” Why did she address him by that strange name, Cuchulain?

3

Feet sounded in the passage, and after a pause heavy boots clumped as they fell. And then slippered feet came shuffling, and Hamish entered the living room still smoking. The long northern twilight was darkening now, and the light of the fire shone stronger. The glow lit up the dusky pallor of his face, and his eyes in the bony ridges looked darker than ever.

“Take that dhudeen out o’ your gob till the viands are et,” Big Ellen ordered, “and draw the curtains. We’ll not light the brass lamp, but this being a ceremonial occasion we’ll have a light on the table.”

Diego noted that she used dialect or chosen English just as the words fitted. She lighted two candles in old brass candlesticks on the dresser, while her husband pulled heavy dark curtains across the bow of the window, for even in this remote glen, the black-out regulations must be obeyed.

“The devil sweep this war!” she grumbled feelingly. “But for it we’d have the electric down from the Lodge—and the poles up ready. The paraffin we get is only enough for the cooker, and mostly we sit in the light of a bit of bog deal.”

Hamish swung a chair lightly to the other side of the fire and sat down. He looked across at Diego, nodded his head, and put a big thumb over his shoulder.

“She talks, that woman. Thirty years and I don’t know her yet.”

“It is a high compliment that you pay, Uncle Hamish,” said Diego.

“Man, oh man!” came her rich voice, “aren’t fine manners fine in themselves, not that I have any use for them—no woman has.”

She turned to the table, and for the next ten minutes was extraordinarily busy with her hands as well as with her tongue. There was a back kitchen or cooking place and she was in and out and about almost without pause, and the flexible organ of her voice lifted and lowered so that ever the same volume of sound reached the men’s ears. She was talking to herself as much as to them.

“There’s a regular diet I know, and I’ll have to look it up so as to forget all about it. Tonight he’ll have to take a small bit of a risk. There’s no wine, and a small drop o’ the craythur—”

“There’s a bottle ben the house,” hinted her husband.

“Late you minded it. No, we’ll not touch alcohol for a month.” Her voice came from the back place. “Say, young fellow, what name were you known by where you were reared?”

Diego realised then that not once had she called him by his name, though he had signed his letters, James Usted. He smiled to himself and waited till she was in the room.

“My baptismal name is Diego y Hernandez y Mendoza de Usted.”

“The Lord protect us! A hidalgo handle like an engine shunting trucks.”

“The first and the last count. Diego is James. I am James Usted.”

“Your mother—God rest her—what did she call you?”

“Jamie when I was young. When my father—who is also with God—died she called me Diego.”

She nodded her head, and a smile lit the carved gravity of her face.

“I like Diego. It reminds me in a strange way of a lean romantic man I read about. I think that I will call you Don Diego.” She turned to her husband. “Cuchulain, I might change your name to Sancho—only you are not handsome enough.”

“Something is burning, woman.”

She fled, and the odour of frying rashers came into the room. Then Diego knew that much of his emptiness was plain hunger, and his mouth watered. If she served him that bacon he would eat it, and probably repent it to his dying day. But he would not be valetudinarian any longer, and damn the consequences!

In fifteen minutes supper was ready, and the table shining in linen and silver under the soft light of the candles. Diego did not get fried bacon. First he got a deep plate of creamy soup.