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Page 128
"Do you think, my lad, that your uncle could be setting out for
heathen parts to learn the witch words for his hell business in
the boathouse?"
The suggestion startled me. The thing was not beyond all
possibility.
But I felt that I had come to the end of this examination. I was
not going to be questioned further like a small boy overtaken on
the road I had answered a good many questions and I determined to
ask one.
"Who are you?" I said. "And what have you got to do with my
uncle's affairs?"
He cocked his eye at me, looking down as one looks down at a
child.
"The first of your questions," he said, "you will find out if you
can, and the second you cannot find out if you will." And he was
gone, striding past me in the deep heather.
"I have some business with your uncle, of a pressing nature," he
called back. "I will just take a look through Oban, the night
and the morn's morn."
I was utterly at sea about the big Highlander. He might be a
friend or an enemy of my uncle. But clearly he knew all about
the man and the mysterious experiment in which he was engaged.
He was keeping the place well within his eye; that was also
evident. From his seat in the heather the whole place was spread
out below him.
And his queer speech fitted with old Andrew's fear. Surely the
Buddha was a heathen image and my uncle had set it up. The stern
Scotch conscience would be outraged and see the Decalogue
violated in its injunctions. This would explain the dread with
which my uncle's house was regarded and the reason I could find
no man to help me on the way to it. But it would not explain my
uncle's apprehension.
But my adventure on this afternoon did not end with the big
Highlander. I found out something more.
I returned along the edge of the loch and approached the
boathouse from the waterside.
Here the path passed directly along the whole wall of the
building. The path was padded with damp sod, and as it happened
I made no sound on it. It was late afternoon, the shadows were
beginning to extend, there was no wind and the whole world was
intensely quiet. Midway of the wall I stopped to listen.
The house was not empty. There was some one in it. I could hear
him moving about.
It was of no use to try to look in through the wall; every joint
and crack of the stones was plastered. I went on.
Old Andrew was about setting me some supper. He came over and
stood a moment by the window looking at the shadows on the loch.
And I tried to take him unaware with a sudden question:
"Has my uncle returned from Oban?"
But I had no profit of the venture.
"The master," he said, "is where he went this morning."
The strange elements in this affair seemed on the point of
converging upon some common center. The thing was in the air.
Old Andrew voiced it when he went out with his candle.
"Ah, sir," he said, "it was the fool work of an old man to bring
you into this affair. The master will have his way and he must
meet what waits for him at the end of it."
I saw how he hoped that my visit might interrupt some plan that
my uncle was about to put into effect, but realized that it was
useless.
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