Part 83

“The country thinks I'm mad, working with such outlandish deviltry. But, curse the thing, I have set out to do it and I am not going to throw it up.”

And suddenly with an unexpected heat he damned the Buddha, shaking his clenched hand before the box.

“Your pardon, Robin,” he cried, the moment after. “But the thing's ridiculous, you know. The ritual story would be sheer rubbish. The beggars could not affect a metal casting with a form of words.”

I have tried to set down here precisely what my uncle said. It was the last talk I ever had with the man in this world, and it profoundly impressed me. He was in fear, and his jovial manner was a ghastly pretence. I left him sitting by the fire drinking neat whisky from a tumbler.

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.

This was Saint Conan's Landing, and it occurred to me that if the holy man came in rough weather from the Irish coast he required, in truth, all the perspicacity of a saint to get his boat in without having it impaled on these devil's needles.

There was no garden to speak of about the house. It was grown up like the moor. Two or three images of Buddhas stood about in it; one of them was quite large--three feet in height I should say at a guess. They were on rough stone pedestals. I examined them carefully. They were all defective; the large one had an immense flaw in the shoulder. The gorse nearly covered them; the unkept hedge let the moor in and there were no longer any paths, except one running to the boathouse.

I did not follow the path. But I looked down at the boathouse with some interest. This was the building that my uncle had turned into a sort of foundry for his weird experiments. There was a big lock on the door and a coal-blacked chimney standing above the roof.

It was afternoon. The whole coast about me was like an undiscovered country. I hardly knew in what direction to set out on my exploration. I stood in the path digging my stick into the gravel and undecided. Finally I determined to cross the bit of moor to the high ground overlooking the loch. It was the sloping base of one of the great peaks and purple with heather. It looked the best point for a full sweep of the sea and the coast.