Part 6 (1/2)
Haward shook his head, and applied himself again to the Madeira.
”Then you carry with you coin of the realm with which to settle?”
continued the other. ”The wine is two s.h.i.+llings; the book you may have for twelve-pence.”
”Here I need not pay, good fellow,” said Haward negligently, his eyes upon a row of dangling objects. ”Fetch me down yonder cane; 't is as delicately tapered and clouded as any at the Exchange.”
”Pay me first for the wine and the book,” answered the man composedly.
”It's a dirty business enough, G.o.d knows, for a gentleman to put finger to; but since needs must when the devil drives, and he has driven me here, why, I, Angus MacLean, who have no concerns of my own, must e'en be faithful to the concerns of another. Wherefore put down the silver you owe the Sa.s.senach whose wine you have drunken and whose book you have taken.”
”And if I do not choose to pay?” asked Haward, with a smile.
”Then you must e'en choose to fight,” was the cool reply. ”And as I observe that you wear neither sword nor pistols, and as jack boots and a fine tight-b.u.t.toned riding coat are not the easiest clothes to wrestle in, it appears just possible that I might win the cause.”
”And when you've thrown me, what then?”
”Oh, I would just draw a rope around you and yonder cask of Jamaica, and leave you to read your stolen book in peace until Saunderson (that's the overseer, and he's none so bad if he was born in Fife) shall come. You can have it out with him; or maybe he'll hale you before the man that owns the store. I hear they expect him home.”
Haward laughed, and abstracting another bottle from the shelf broke its neck. ”Hand me yonder cup,” he said easily, ”and we'll drink to his home-coming. Good fellow, I am Mr. Marmaduke Haward, and I am glad to find so honest a man in a place of no small trust. Long absence and somewhat too complaisant a reference of all my Virginian affairs to my agent have kept me much in ignorance of the economy of my plantation. How long have you been my storekeeper?”
Neither cup for the wine nor answer to the question being forthcoming, Haward looked up from his broken bottle. The man was standing with his body bent forward and his hand pressed against the wood of a great cask behind him until the finger-nails showed white. His head was high, his face dark red and angry, his brows drawn down until the gleaming eyes beneath were like pin points.
So sudden and so sinister was the change that Haward was startled. The hour was late, the place deserted; as the man had discovered, he had no weapons, nor, strong, active, and practiced as he was, did he flatter himself that he could withstand the length of brawn and sinew before him.
Involuntarily, he stepped backward until there was a s.p.a.ce between them, casting at the same moment a glance toward the wall where hung axe and knife and hatchet.
The man intercepted the look, and broke into a laugh. The sound was harsh and gibing, but not menacing. ”You need not be afraid,” he said. ”I do not want the feel of a rope around my neck,--though G.o.d knows why I should care! Here is no clansman of mine, and no cursed Campbell either, to see my end!”
”I am not afraid,” Haward answered calmly. Walking to the shelf that held an array of drinking vessels, he took two cups, filled them with wine, and going back to his former station, set one upon the cask beside the storekeeper. ”The wine is good,” he said. ”Will you drink?”
The other loosened the clasp of his hand upon the wood and drew himself upright. ”I eat the bread and drink the water which you give your servants,” he answered, speaking with the thickness of hardly restrained pa.s.sion. ”The wine cup goes from equal to equal.”
As he spoke he took up the peace offering, eyed it for a moment with a bitter smile, then flung it with force over his shoulder. The earthen floor drank the wine; the china s.h.i.+vered into a thousand fragments. ”I have neither silver nor tobacco with which to pay for my pleasure,”
continued the still smiling storekeeper. ”When I am come to the end of my term, then, an it please you, I will serve out the damage.”
Haward sat down upon a keg of powder, crossed his knees, and, with his chin upon his hand, looked from between the curled lengths of his periwig at the figure opposite. ”I am glad to find that in Virginia, at least, there is honesty,” he said dryly. ”I will try to remember the cost of the cup and the wine against the expiry of your indenture. In the mean time, I am curious to know why you are angry with me whom you have never seen before to-day.”
With the das.h.i.+ng of the wine to earth the other's pa.s.sion had apparently spent itself. The red slowly left his face, and he leaned at ease against the cask, drumming upon its head with his fingers. The sunlight, shrinking from floor and wall, had left but a single line of gold. In the half light strange and sombre shapes possessed the room; through the stillness, beneath the sound of the tattoo upon the cask head, the river made itself heard.
”For ten years and more you have been my--master,” said the storekeeper.
”It is a word for which I have an invincible distaste. It is not well--having neither love nor friends.h.i.+p to put in its place--to let hatred die. When I came first to this slavery, I hated all Campbells, all Whigs, Forster that betrayed us at Preston, and Ewin Mor Mackinnon. But the years have come and the years have gone, and I am older than I was at twenty-five. The Campbells I can never reach: they walk secure, overseas, through Lorn and Argyle, couching in the tall heather above Etive, tracking the red deer in the Forest of Dalness. Forster is dead. Ewin Mackinnon is dead, I know; for five years ago come Martinmas night I saw his perjured soul on its way to h.e.l.l. All the world is turning Whig. A man may hate the world, it is true, but he needs a single foe.”
”And in that capacity you have adopted me?” demanded Haward.
MacLean let his gaze travel over the man opposite him, from the looped hat and the face between the waves of hair to the gilt spurs upon the great boots; then turned his eyes upon his own hand and coa.r.s.ely clad arm stretched across the cask. ”I, too, am a gentleman, the brother of a chieftain,” he declared. ”I am not without schooling. I have seen something of life, and of countries more polite than the land where I was born, though not so dear. I have been free, and have loved my freedom. Do you find it so strange that I should hate you?”
There was a silence; then, ”Upon my soul, I do not know that I do,” said Haward slowly. ”And yet, until this day I did not know of your existence.”
”But I knew of yours,” answered the storekeeper. ”Your agent hath an annoying trick of speech, and the overseers have caught it from him. 'Your master' this, and 'your master' that; in short, for ten years it hath been, 'Work, you dog, that your master may play!' Well, I have worked; it was that, or killing myself, or going mad. I have worked for you in the fields, in the smithy, in this close room. But when you bought my body, you could not buy my soul. Day after day, and night after night, I sent it away; I would not let it bide in these dull levels, in this cursed land of heat and stagnant waters. At first it went home to its own country,--to its friends and its foes, to the torrent and the mountain and the music of the pipes; but at last the pain outweighed the pleasure, and I sent it there no more. And then it began to follow you.”
”To follow me!” involuntarily exclaimed Haward.