The castle, when they passed, was mournful dark, with no light in it – at least that could be seen. Its evening rooms looked to the courtyard; outwardly its walls rose blank expressionless, below the star-bright curve of night. A breeze fanned through the ivy, stirred the laurels. The low town, crouched beyond it, lent it height: the tower would seem to lift gigantically. Bats were abroad; at times they gave a cheep. To the east, on the Cowal hills, was a fleece of cloud that hid the risen moon.
The two men and the horse were on a private way that took them through the policy; between them and the walls was but a garden border, and they spoke in whispers. It was as if they feared to spoil MacCailein’s sleep.
‘Rats at nibbling, MacCailein! Rats at nibbling!’ said Ninian. ‘The wonder is to me Himself can sleep, even in a turret, with so many crannies for the rat in Scotland.’
Alan-Iain-Alain Og put in his horse at the back of the land where he had a stable; left a man to groom it, and took Ninian up the stair with him to find a supper ready. All Annabel said to her man was, ‘There you are!’ and pinched his elbow. She took from him the wallets.
He pulled her ear. ‘Ah!’ said he with a smile, ‘what a fine enduring woman! Many a wife left to herself would take the chance to run. Were ye no’ feared I was lost among the mounts?’
‘I feared for nothing,’ she answered, happy. ‘What always happens is the thing one never thought of, and I took time and thought of everything that could befall.’
Æneas and Janet were already at the table; the girl had not gone home.
At another hour the spirit of a company thus gladly brought together would be different, but over them tonight there was solemnity. The mystery of Paul Macmaster clamoured for solution. They scarce were seated when Ninian brought it up.
‘I ask you to excuse me,’ Æneas interrupted. ‘Was I a good soldier this month back in your command?’
Ninian beamed. ‘Ye couldna have been better! Ye did what ye were told, the sodger’s first concern, and held your tongue. If I was ever in a corner I would cry for Æneas-of-the-Pistol.’
Æneas flushed. ‘That bit of it,’ said he, ‘is neither here nor there. I only ask assurance that I played my part as a soldier should, nor questioned anything you did, nor pushed decisions of my own. I went with you on sufferance; led you into trouble, and I felt the least that I could do was to be the humble private. Now that the campaign’s over, and a new one’s started closely concerning myself, I must take another rank.’
He spoke with great decision, yet without offence, and Ninian clapped him on the shoulder.
‘Well done!’ he said, with heartiness. ‘You’re a man for the brindled hill, where each man does his own bit stalking.’
‘With me it stands like this,’ said Æneas. ‘I am greatly in the dark about affairs at the period when my father disappeared. Particularly I know little about Duncanson, and instead of working back from that amazing story we got from Lovat, I think it better to begin at the other end. How came my father to have anything to do with Duncanson?’
It was a somewhat lengthy history he got from Alan-Iain-Alain Og in response to this inquiry. The Bailie went into the most minute details. He began with a wet spring day when Æneas was unborn, when a shabby-clad man with a canvas bag and a bundle in a napkin stepped from a fishing-smack on Inveraray quay and asked the first one whom he met where he might find a lodging. The man was Duncanson. He had come from the Lowlands, where, for some years, he had followed the law in an obscure capacity. There were Duncansons in Inveraray; they were a Campbell sept, but long established in their own cognomen. It was thought at first that he was a relation. But there was no connection. In less than a week it was known in the town that his real name was Maclean. He belonged to the Isle of Coll – or rather to an islet ’twixt Tyree and Coll, by name of Gunna. His father had had a croft in Grishipol in Coll, and dealt in swine. He was a man of race by all accounts, declined in fortune – a kinsman of Lochbuie. Coll, at the century’s start, was a rebel and unruly island, though within a strong man’s hail of the Hebridean garden called Tyree, the holding of Argyll; there was always trouble with it, and the elder Maclean, to escape a prosecution, went over the narrow strait to Gunna and settled there, befriended by the Duke.
If he could not change his blood, at least he could change his name, and he aimed at a continuance of the ducal favour by taking the name of Duncanson, his father being Duncan dubh a’ Chaolais. When he died he left a son grown up – this Alexander, who had for some years made a living of sorts, in Tyree or Coll, indifferently, as the season suited. He had the name of a clever lad; the family of Argyll were interested; he was sent to a writer’s place in Edinburgh, and there he had been till he came to Inveraray.
His coming to Inveraray was a shift of ambitious policy. In Edinburgh he was lost; there seemed no rung he could reach to in the ladder of success, so he came to the very seat of patronage. In a day, with MacCailein’s influence, he was perched at a desk in a lawyer’s office; in a year he was indispensable to his master; in three he had bought him out of the business. The money which bought MacGibbon out was a scanty part of a fortune Duncanson fell heir to from a distant cousin; he was now a man of substance, so sure of his own importance that he paid attentions to the lady who was later to be Æneas’ mother.
From his first appearance Duncanson had courted Paul Macmaster’s favour, even though Macmaster was at times suspect of politics repugnant to that quarter of the shire. Himself, he had no politics that could not be trimmed and twisted to pass with either side, but mostly he avoided disputation in these matters, and with Paul the bond was one of sport. They fished and shot together, and had a taste for fighting cocks which came to an end when Paul took up with pigeons, to whose fancy he was led by the other man. They spent long nights by the dovecote fire, one winter, playing dambrod.
‘Stop, stop! … By your leave, Sir Æneas! … Are ye sure it was in the winter, Bailie?’
Ninian broke in upon a narrative whose interest sadly marred the supper.
‘There’s no mistake in’t,’ said Alan-Iain-Alain Og; ‘I’ve seen the doocot lighted up when I was coming back from curling.’
‘What light, now, would they have?’ said Ninian, but not with a show of much concern. ‘Besides the fire,’ he added.
‘Oh, candles, of course! Or a lantern,’ said the Bailie. ‘That’s not of great importance, is it?’
‘Go on!’ said Ninian, buttering bread. ‘I only wondered. My mind will run on candles,’ and history was resumed.
Paul’s interest in pigeons slackened when he married, and ceased entirely when, a twelvemonth later, his young wife died. He was, thereafter, a homeless man, who could not bear the house of his inheritance. His wife for a year had been its warmth; its stairs (the doctors said) had killed her; he never set foot in it again. The infant Æneas was sent to the care and nurture of his aunt, and his father made the world his pillow. It was a time of great conspiracy with Jacobites; for the first time seriously Paul became involved, and spent both time and money on a cause too easily made attractive to his restless spirit by the guiling tongue of an old friend, Campbell of Glendaruel, a laird impoverished and proscript. ’Twas rarely he came home, and then but for a flash, to see his child, and stay a night with his brother, and meet with Duncanson to audit his accounts.
For Duncanson was now his doer – factor of his land, and always ready to accommodate with money. Moreover, he was tenant of Drimdorran House, with a five years’ tack from Paul: he had got married. As well as Paul’s affairs he managed Islay’s, and in time was Baron Bailie to the duke as well as secretary. The son of Para-na-muic was thriving! Aware of Paul’s political engagements, he kept them secret, but in the year ’Fifteen, when Paul was drumming up in France, the knowledge of his doings leaked at home, and but for Islay’s pity for the child, Drimdorran would have been escheat, its owner outlawed. It was only a fate postponed. Four years later he engaged with Glendaruel in the rash adventure checked abruptly at Glenshiel. Drimdorran had not been forfeit to the Crown – MacCailein had seen to that – but Duncanson, who had for years made overtures to buy it, stepped into possession.
‘I would have fought him! I would have fought him!’ cried Ninian, pushing back his chair: their meal was finished.
‘That’s what I aye said!’ said Annabel.
Her husband shook his head. ‘And what were the good of that?’ he asked. ‘I had no standing. Neither had the boy. Sandy had his ledger and my brother’s pledge. I wasna goin’ to fight a law plea for the Crown. … That’s the story, Æneas. Now, what do ye make of it?’
‘Nothing,’ said Æneas. ‘It leaves me where I was. I thought to get some clew that I might follow through my father’s later days and—’
He stopped with a glance at Janet; her eyes were fixed on something in her father’s hands. It was the tangled hank, with the free part coiled on stick; the beachdair wrought with it as though beside a burn.
‘Good lad!’ he said to Æneas. ‘Aye get at the start of things! And what more clew do ye want just now than that Sandy came from Gunna, and a Maclean at that? I never knew’t before. Theid dùthchas an aghaidh nan creag – the family blood of a man goes down to the very rock! I ken Gunna; I was one time yonder, there! The solan builds in Gunna, and the solan is a bird that gets his fish just where he can; it makes no difference to him, the herring or the saithe.’
He rose and walked the floor with short steps, eager.
‘Stop you, Æneas! Although ye’re in command, I’m no’ so good a sodger as yoursel’, and must get talking. A man brought up in Gunna between a loyal isle and Coll is like the gannet, – he will take his toll of fish from both. I know the springs of Sandy now – they’re envy and ambeetion. Since ever he stood in your father’s house a tenant, and looked out upon the fields, he meant to be their laird. He got his wish. What way? By God’s goodwill, or accident? Na, na! God has no particular fancy for the clan Maclean no more nor me, and it wasna accident. He got it, first and last, wi’ his own endeavour! Your father – God be wi’ him! – was the brawest pigeon Sandy ever flew, and then he plucked him. The thing’s as clear as day! ’Twas he that blabbed in the year ’Fifteen; the man was in a hurry to sit down, and seeing your father wouldna sell, he must himself be sold. Sandy is like the ptarmigan or weasel, beasts that take the colour of the season; ye may be sure he wasna Whig in private wi’ your father, whatever he might be before the duke, and he would egg your father on. He would lend him all the money that he wanted, and never give a cheep till your father was so deep in treason there was no escape. His chance came in the silly splutter of the clans that ended at Glenshiel. Sandy, as MacCailein’s man, was bound to know the Government was going to crush that rising like an egg, but he wouldna warn your father. Na, na! Drimdorran he would have! And Glenshiel served his turn, though your father didna perish there; he was good as dead, and could never show his face again in Scotland.’
Æneas was aflame. ‘I think you’re right,’ said he. ‘It seems a very reasonable assumption of how things were standing. Duncanson was the only man in all Argyll who knew my father was yet alive, and he smuggled him off to France. Then he proclaimed and proved himself the owner of Drimdorran before the estate could be forfeit to the Crown, and he kept him there.’
‘Just what I was thinking to myself.’
‘It defies the face of clay to think how any man could be so wicked!’ Annabel cried out.
Throughout was Janet silent, listening. In her mien was some dissent or hesitation.
‘What troubles me is this,’ said the Bailie; ‘Paul was my brother-germain. We were the best of friends, although I quarrelled with him on the head of Glendaruel, and all that rebel carry-on. His son was in our dwelling. I can not think that Paul, if he was for a whole year hid in France, would not have sent some word to me.’
‘I’ll warrant ye he sent ye word!’ said Ninian.
‘I never got it, – not a scrape!’
‘Of course ye didna! Sandy would see to that. It was through him he would send you letters; and Sandy, when it comes to letters, has a tarry hand, as Jennet there kens to her cost.’
‘That, too,’ said Æneas, ‘is a very likely thing. He was done with us, and had his own skin to consider. It would never do to have it come out he was in league to hide the man whom himself, as Baron Bailie, had proclaimed.’
They stood on the floor, the men, and reasoned hotly.
‘Mercy me!’ cried Annabel, ‘can you men no’ sit down and come to the bit that pierces me – what happened to poor Paul?’
Her husband clapped her shoulder. ‘Patience, a ghalaid, patience!’
‘Is he dead at all? We have no proofs of it.’
‘But think of it, Annabel! … fourteen years … and a son of his loins with us. And he was Paul. He couldna keep the silence of the tomb for fourteen years!’
‘But he might have been imprisoned. He might, like Æneas, have been trepanned on board a ship. Do ye no’ think that is likely, Ninian?’
‘Anything on earth is likely, mem, when a bad man mounts the saddle. Your brother may be slaving in the cane.’
Janet touched his arm. She had sat with a pale face, looking at him. ‘No,’ she said in a curious low voice to him. ‘He is not there. … He is dead. … He was killed … Duncanson.’
They stared at her.
‘How ken ye that?’ her father asked, astonished.
‘You think so! I know you do! And it would be cruel wrong to build false hopes.’
‘I’ve never said a word to make you think so—’
‘No. It is in your air.’
He made a grimace. ‘The young bird kens the father’s chirp! It’s quite true, Alan; your brother’s dead, and Duncanson destroyed him. I don’t know when. I don’t know where. I don’t know how. But he brought about his end! I wasna goin’ to say that till I saw his grave. My hank is still much fankled. He had him killed. There’s not a doubt. I’ve kent it for the last two hours.’
‘How?’ said Æneas.
The beachdair gave a flicker with his hands and pouted. ‘I’ve smelled it! I’m like the fisher who can smell the herring shoal at sea. A hundred things cry out that Sandy’s guilty. They have been pouring on me since we left the North, but tonight the most of all. Æneas, lad, I’ve seen your foe! Yonder he was in a lowe of candles, and I made him squeal. He thought he had you settled like your father, and I kept him in that notion till I saw my chance. When I told him at the last that ye were here and that ye knew the story of the drowning was a lie, I pricked his liver. I got no more from him, but—’
On the porch of the house was a tirling-pin, which Annabel preferred to knockers. Ninian’s speech was stopped when it gave a harshly grating rasp.
‘The lassie’s out,’ said Annabel, starting up.
‘I’ll answer the door,’ said Æneas, and left the room.
He came back at once with an air of agitation. ‘Duncanson,’ he said, ‘has sent for me. I’ll go.’