Part 10 (1/2)
”You shouldn't have refused to take me with you,” said Tinker, preparing to slip over the other side on to anyone's head.
”What haf you broke? What haf you broke?” cried Herr Schlugst, looking round at the instruments with a practised eye, and seeing them unharmed.
”Nothing. What should I break anything for?” said Tinker scornfully.
”No; dere is nodings broke, schoundrel. But vere--vere is mine von tousand pound? I ask you! Vare is mine von tousand pound! You haf ruined me! Ruined me!”
”Oh, that's all right!” said Tinker. ”I had a pa.s.senger who paid his fare. Here are two thousand pounds.” And he gave him two of the notes.
Herr Schlugst opened his mouth and stared at the notes, ”Doo tousand pound! Doo tousand pound!” he muttered thickly. ”You vas von vonder-child! Von vonder-child!”
Tinker bade him good-bye, and slipped out of the car, leaving him to fly to some smooth place in the environs, where he could dismantle his machine. Sir Tancred was too thankful for Tinker's safety to be very angry with him: and they descended the tower surrounded by gendarmes, who were put to it to preserve Tinker from the embraces of excited persons of either s.e.x. One fat Frenchman, indeed, kissed him on both cheeks, crying, ”Vive le rosbif! vive le rosbif!” before he could ward him off.
At the bottom of the tower Mr. Blumenruth, radiant and triumphant, burst through the throng, flung himself upon them, and dragged them to a smart victoria which awaited them. He told them joyously that he had cleared eighty-seven thousand pounds, and protested that they should be his guests at his hotel as long as they stayed in Paris. On the way to it Sir Tancred got down to buy some cigars, and he was barely in the shop when the financier said in a jerky way to Tinker, ”I saw a very neat little motor-car, which I should like to make you a present of.
But I say--I don't want you to tell anyone--how--how ill I was up there. My spirit was all right, of course; but that rarefied air--acting on business worries--produced a state of nervous prostration. I--I wasn't quite myself, in fact.”
Tinker looked at him with intelligent interest, and, closing one of his sunny blue eyes, said thoughtfully, ”Nervous prostration? Is the motor a Panhard?”
”Yes,” said Mr. Blumenruth.
”If you hadn't been so--so--upset, I've no doubt you'd have sailed the machine yourself,” said Tinker warmly.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE BARON AND THE MONEY-LENDER
Sir Tancred would only stay four days in Paris with the grateful Blumenruth, because he wished Hildebrand Anne to have the sea air, for it seemed to him that he had not yet got back his full strength after the scarlet fever. They returned, therefore, to Brighton, and when the weather grew hotter, removed to the more bracing East Coast. Tinker was for sharing the three thousand pounds he had made out of his trip in the flying-machine equally with his father; but Sir Tancred would not hear of it. Chiefly to please him, however, he borrowed a thousand of it at five per cent., and invested the rest in Tinker's name. With this thousand-pound note and three notes of fifty pounds, he paid off the loan of a thousand pounds which he had borrowed from Mr. Robert Lambert, a money-lender, five years before, with the balance of the interest up to date, and found himself once more unenc.u.mbered save for a few small debts, and with plenty of money for his immediate needs.
During August and September they stayed at different country houses; and Fortune being in a kindly mood, the money remained untouched. In the middle of October they came to London to their usual rooms in the Hotel Cecil; and Sir Tancred was one morning at breakfast disagreeably surprised to receive from Mr. Robert Lambert a demand for the immediate payment of 1450 pounds. At first he thought it was a mistake, then he remembered that he had paid Mr. Lambert in notes; and that Mr. Lambert had promised to get at once from his bank the promissory note on which the money had been borrowed, and send it to him. The promissory note had not come, and the matter had pa.s.sed from Sir Tancred's mind. Now, he perceived that, if Mr. Lambert chose to deny that payment, he was in no little of a plight.
After breakfast, therefore, he took a hansom, and drove to Mr.
Lambert's office. The worthy money-lender received him at once, and with no less delay began to deny with every appearance of honest indignation that he had been paid the debt. Sir Tancred grew exceedingly disagreeable; he set forth with perfect frankness his opinion of Mr. Lambert's character, declared that he would rather go to that uncomfortable abode of contemptuous debtors, Holloway, than be swindled in so barefaced a fas.h.i.+on; and exclaiming, ”You may go to your native Jericho, before I pay you a farthing, you thieving rascal!” went out of the office, and banged the door behind him.
The worthy money-lender smiled an uncomfortable and malignant smile at the banged door, and at once gave instructions to his manager to take proceedings. Sir Tancred explained the transaction to Tinker; warned him against laxness in matters of business; prepared for immediate flight; and they caught the midnight mail from Euston. By the time an indefatigable bailiff had ascertained next day that they had left London, they were eating their dinner, in a secure peace, at Ardrochan Lodge in Ardrochan forest, which Sir Tancred had borrowed for the while from his friend Lord Crosland.
Hildebrand Anne was used to long periods unenlivened by companions of his own age; and he began forthwith to make the best of the forest.
Some days he stalked the red deer with his father; some days were devoted to his education, fencing, boxing, and gymnastics; and on the others he explored the forest on a s.h.a.ggy pony. It was of a comfortable size, forty square miles or thereabouts, stretches of wild heath, broken by strips of wood, craggy hills, and swamps, full of streams, and abounding in many kinds of animals. It was an admirable place for Indians, outlaws, brigands, and robber barons, and Tinker practised all these professions in turn, with the liveliest satisfaction.
At first it was something of a tax on his imagination to be a whole band of these engaging persons himself; with one companion it would have been easy enough, but his imagination presently compa.s.sed the task. And when he found his way to the Deil's Den, a low stone tower on a hill some six miles from Ardrochan, his favourite occupation was that of robber baron. It would have been more proper to put the tower to its old use of a lair of a Highland cateran; but, to his shame, Tinker funked the dialect with which such a person must necessarily be cursed.
The Deil's Den had earned its name in earlier centuries from the b.l.o.o.d.y deeds of its first owners. No gillie would go within a mile of it, even in bright suns.h.i.+ne. Tinker's carelessness of its ghosts, a headless woman and a redheaded man with his throat cut, had won him the deepest respect of the village, or rather hamlet, of Ardrochan. Twice he had constrained himself to wait in the tower till dusk, in the hope that his fearful, but inquiring, spirit would be gratified by the sight of one or other of these psychic curiosities.
It was a two-storied building, and its stone seemed likely to last as long as the hills from which it had been quarried. In some thought that it might be used as a watch-tower by his keepers, Lord Crosland had repaired its inside, and fitted it with a stout door and two ladders, one running to the second story and another to the roof. From here the keen eyes of Hildebrand Anne, Baron of Ardrochan, scanned often the countryside, looking for travelling merchants or wandering knights; while his gallant steed Black Rudolph, whose coat was drab and dingy, waited saddled and bridled below, and Blazer the bloodhound sniffed about the burn hard by. Blazer had a weakness for rats quite uncommon in bloodhounds.
Tinker cherished but a faint hope that Fortune would ever send him a prisoner, even a braw, shock-headed lad, or sonsie, savage la.s.sie of the country. But he did not do justice to that G.o.ddess's love of mischief. It was she who inspired into Mr. Robert Lambert the desire to s.h.i.+ne in the Great World; and it was she who gave him the idea of taking for the season Lord Hardacre's house and forest of Tullispaith, in lieu of the cash which he would never get. Thither he invited certain spirited young clients, who had practically only the choice of being Mr. Lambert's guests at Tullispaith or King Edward's at Holloway.
Thither he came, a week beforehand, to make ready for them.
At once he set about becoming an accomplished deer-stalker. For three days he rode, or tramped, about the forest of Tullispaith, in search of red deer which, in quite foolish estimate of their peril, insisted always on putting a hill between themselves and his rifle. On the fourth day he rested, for though his spirit was willing, his legs were weak. This inactivity irked him, for he knew the tireless energy of the English sportsman; and at noon Fortune inspired him with the most disastrous idea of all, the idea of taking a stroll by himself. He took his rifle and a packet of sandwiches, and set out. Now to the unpractised eye any one brae, or glen, or burn of bonnie Scotland is exactly like any other brae, or glen, or burn of that picturesque land.