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Page 126
The old man-servant took me up to my room. It was a big room in
a wing of the house looking out on the garden and the sea. I saw
that it had been cleaned and made ready against my coming;
clearly the old man expected me.
He put the candle on the table and laid back the covers of the
bed. And suddenly I determined to have the matter out with him.
"Andrew," I said, "why did you add that significant word to my
uncle's letter?"
He turned sharply with a little whimpering cry.
"The master, sir!" he said, and then he stopped as though
uncertain in what manner to go on. He made a hopeless sort of
gesture with his extended hands.
"I thought your coming might interrupt the thing . . . . You are
of his family and would be silent."
"What threatens my uncle?" I cried, "What is the thing?"
He hesitated, his eyes moving about the floor.
"Oh, sir," he said, "the master is in some wicked and dangerous
business. You heard his talk, sir; that would not be the talk of
a man at peace . . . . He has strange visitors, sir, and the
place is watched. I cannot tell you any more than that, except
that something is going to happen and I am shaken with the fear
of it."
I looked out through the musty curtains before I went to bed.
But the whole world was dark, packed down in the thick mist.
Once, in the direction of the open sea, I thought I saw the
flicker of a light.
I was tired and I slept profoundly, but somewhere in the sleep I
saw my uncle and a priest of Tibet gibbering over a ladle of
molten silver.
It was nearly midday when I awoke. The whole world had changed
as under some enchantment; there was brilliant sun and afresh
stimulating air with the salt breath of the sea in it. Old
Andrew gave me some breakfast and a message.
His manner like everything else seemed to have undergone some
transformation. He was silent and, I thought, evasive. He
repeated the message without comment, as though he had committed
it to memory from an unfamiliar language:
"The master directed me to say that he must make a journey to
Oban. It is urgent business and will not be laid over."
"When does my uncle return," I said.
The old man shifted his weight from one foot to the other; he
looked out through the open window onto the strip of meadow
extending into the loch. Finally he replied:
"The master did not name the hour of his return."
I did not press the interrogation. I felt that there was
something here that the old man was keeping back; but I had an
impression of equal force that he ought to be allowed the run of
his discretion with it. Besides, the brilliant morning had swept
out my sinister impressions.
I got my cap and stick from the rack by the door and went out.
The house was within a hundred paces of the loch, in a place of
wild beauty on a bit of moor, yellow with gorse, extending from
the great barren mountains behind it right down into the water.
Immense banners of mist lay along the tops of these mountain
peaks, and streams of water like skeins of silk marked the deep
gorges in dazzling whiteness.
The loch was a crooked finger of the sea hooked into the land.
It was clear as glass in the bright morning. The open sea was
directly beyond the crook of the finger, barred out by a nest of
needlepointed rocks. On this morning, with the sea motionless,
they stood up like the teeth of a harrow, but in heavy weather I
imagined that the waves covered them. To the eye they were not
the height of a man above the level water; they glistened in the
brilliant sun like a sheaf of black pikes.
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