Dickson McCunn - Complete 'Gorbals Die-hards' Series. Buchan John
“Half an hour ago,” said Heritage, consulting a wrist watch.
“It was him that keepit me waitin’ so long. But he’s safe enough now, for five minutes syne he was splittin’ firewood at the back door o’ his hoose. I’ve found a ladder, an auld yin in yon lot o’ bushes. It’ll help wi’ the wall. There! I’ve gotten my breath again and we can start.”
The ladder was fetched by Heritage and proved to be ancient and wanting many rungs, but sufficient in length. The three stood silent for a moment, listening like stags, and then ran across the intervening lawn to the foot of the verandah wall. Dougal went up first, then Heritage, and lastly Dickson, stiff and giddy from his long lie under the bushes. Below the parapet the verandah floor was heaped with old garden litter, rotten matting, dead or derelict bulbs, fibre, withies, and strawberry nets. It was Dougal’s intention to pull up the ladder and hide it among the rubbish against the hour of departure. But Dickson had barely put his foot on the parapet when there was a sound of steps within the House approaching the verandah door.
The ladder was left alone. Dougal’s hand brought Dickson summarily to the floor, where he was fairly well concealed by a mess of matting. Unfortunately his head was in the vicinity of some upturned pot-plants, so that a cactus ticked his brow and a spike of aloe supported painfully the back of his neck. Heritage was prone behind two old water-butts, and Dougal was in a hamper which had once contained seed potatoes. The house door had panels of opaque glass, so the new-comer could not see the doings of the three till it was opened, and by that time all were in cover.
The man—it was Spittal—walked rapidly along the verandah and out of the garden door. He was talking to himself again, and Dickson, who had a glimpse of his face, thought he looked both evil and furious. Then came some anxious moments, for had the man glanced back when he was once outside, he must have seen the tell-tale ladder. But he seemed immersed in his own reflections, for he hobbled steadily along the house front till he was lost to sight.
“That’ll be the end o’ them the day,” said Dougal, as he helped Heritage to pull up the ladder and stow it away. “We’ve got the place to oursels, now. Forward, men, forward.” He tried the handle of the House door and led the way in.
A narrow paved passage took them into what had once been the garden room, where the lady of the house had arranged her flowers, and the tennis racquets and croquet mallets had been kept. It was very dusty, and on the cobwebbed walls still hung a few soiled garden overalls. A door beyond opened into a huge murky hall, murky, for the windows were shuttered, and the only light came through things like port-holes far up in the wall. Dougal, who seemed to know his way about, halted them. “Stop here till I scout a bit. The women bide in a wee room through that muckle door.” Bare feet stole across the oak flooring, there was the sound of a door swinging on its hinges, and then silence and darkness. Dickson put out a hand for companionship and clutched Heritage’s; to his surprise it was cold and all a-tremble. They listened for voices, and thought they could detect a far-away sob.
It was some minutes before Dougal returned. “A bonny kettle o’ fish,” he whispered. “They’re both greetin’. We’re just in time. Come on, the pair o’ ye.”
Through a green baize door they entered a passage which led to the kitchen regions, and turned in at the first door on their right. From its situation Dickson calculated that the room lay on the seaward side of the House next to the verandah. The light was bad, for the two windows were partially shuttered, but it had plainly been a smoking-room, for there were pipe-racks by the hearth, and on the walls a number of old school and college photographs, a couple of oars with emblazoned names, and a variety of stags’ and roebucks’ heads. There was no fire in the grate, but a small oil-stove burned inside the fender. In a stiff-backed chair sat an elderly woman, who seemed to feel the cold, for she was muffled to the neck in a fur coat. Beside her, so that the late afternoon light caught her face and head, stood a girl.
Dickson’s first impression was of a tall child. The pose, startled and wild and yet curiously stiff and self-conscious, was that of a child striving to remember a forgotten lesson. One hand clutched a handkerchief, the other was closing and unclosing on a knob of the chair back. She was staring at Dougal, who stood like a gnome in the centre of the floor. “Here’s the gentlemen I was tellin’ ye about,” was his introduction, but her eyes did not move.
Then Heritage stepped forward. “We have met before, Mademoiselle,” he said. “Do you remember Easter in 1918—in the house in the Trinita dei Monte?”
The girl looked at him.
“I do not remember,” she said slowly.
“But I was the English officer who had the apartments on the floor below you. I saw you every morning. You spoke to me sometimes.”
“You are a soldier?” she asked, with a new note in her voice.
“I was then—till the war finished.”
“And now? Why have you come here?”
“To offer you help if you need it. If not, to ask your pardon and go away.”
The shrouded figure in the chair burst suddenly into rapid hysterical talk in some foreign tongue which Dickson suspected of being French. Heritage replied in the same language, and the girl joined in with sharp questions. Then the Poet turned to Dickson.
“This is my friend. If you will trust us we will do our best to help you.”
The eyes rested on Dickson’s face, and he realized that he was in the presence of something the like of which he had never met in his life before. It was a loveliness greater than he had imagined was permitted by the Almighty to His creatures. The little face was more square than oval, with a low broad brow and proud exquisite eyebrows. The eyes were of a colour which he could never decide on; afterwards he used to allege obscurely that they were the colour of everything in Spring. There was a delicate pallor in the cheeks, and the face bore signs of suffering and care, possibly even of hunger; but for all that there was youth there, eternal and triumphant! Not youth such as he had known it, but youth with all history behind it, youth with centuries of command in its blood and the world’s treasures of beauty and pride in its ancestry. Strange, he thought, that a thing so fine should be so masterful. He felt abashed in every inch of him.
As the eyes rested on him their sorrowfulness seemed to be shot with humour. A ghost of a smile lurked there, to which Dickson promptly responded. He grinned and bowed.
“Very pleased to meet you, Mem. I’m Mr. McCunn from Glasgow.”
“You don’t even know my name,” she said.
“We don’t,” said Heritage.
“They call me Saskia. This,” nodding to the chair, “is my cousin Eugenie … We are in very great trouble. But why should I tell you? I do not know you. You cannot help me.”
“We can try,” said Heritage. “Part of your trouble we know already through that boy. You are imprisoned in this place by scoundrels. We are here to help you to get out. We want to ask no questions—only to do what you bid us.”
“You are not strong enough,” she said sadly. “A young man—an old man—and a little boy. There are many against us, and any moment there may be more.”
It was Dougal’s turn to break in, “There’s Lean and Spittal and Dobson and four tinklers in the Dean—that’s seven; but there’s us three and five more Gorbals Die-hards—that’s eight.”
There was something in the boy’s truculent courage that cheered her.
“I wonder,” she said, and her eyes fell on each in turn.
Dickson felt impelled to intervene.
“I think this is a perfectly simple business. Here’s a lady shut up in this house against her will by a wheen blagyirds. This is a free country and the law doesn’t permit that. My advice is for one of us to inform the police at Auchenlochan and get Dobson and his friends took up and the lady set free to do what she likes. That is, if these