Dougal listens gravely and again salutes.
“I’ve brought ye a message,” he says. “We’ve just had a meetin’ and I’ve to report that ye’ve been unanimously eleckit Chief Die-Hard. We’re a’ hopin’ ye’ll accept.”
“I accept,” Dickson replies. “Proudly and gratefully I accept.”
The last scene is some days later, in a certain southern suburb of Glasgow. Ulysses has come back to Ithaca, and is sitting by his fireside, waiting for the return of Penelope from the Neuk Hydropathic. There is a chill in the air, so a fire is burning in the grate, but the laden tea-table is bright with the first blooms of lilac. Dickson, in a new suit with a flower in his buttonhole, looks none the worse for his travels, save that there is still sticking-plaster on his deeply sunburnt brow. He waits impatiently with his eye on the black marble timepiece, and he fingers something in his pocket.
Presently the sound of wheels is heard, and the pea-hen voice of Tibby announces the arrival of Penelope. Dickson rushes to the door, and at the threshold welcomes his wife with a resounding kiss. He leads her into the parlour and settles her in her own chair.
“My! but it’s nice to be home again!” she says. “And everything that comfortable. I’ve had a fine time, but there’s no place like your own fireside. You’re looking awful well, Dickson. But losh! What have you been doing to your head?”
“Just a small tumble. It’s very near mended already. Ay, I’ve had a grand walking tour, but the weather was a wee bit thrawn. It’s nice to see you back again, Mamma. Now that I’m an idle man you and me must take a lot of jaunts together.”
She beams on him as she stays herself with Tibby’s scones, and when the meal is ended, Dickson draws from his pocket a slim case. The jewels have been restored to Saskia, but this is one of her own which she has bestowed upon Dickson as a parting memento. He opens the case and reveals a necklet of emeralds, any one of which is worth half the street.
“This is a present for you,” he says bashfully.
Mrs. McCunn’s eyes open wide. “You’re far too kind,” she gasps. “It must have cost an awful lot of money.”
“It didn’t cost me that much,” is the truthful answer.
She fingers the trinket and then clasps it round her neck, where the green depths of the stones glow against the black satin of her bodice. Her eyes are moist as she looks at him. “You’ve been a kind man to me,” she says, and she kisses him as she has not done since Janet’s death.
She stands up and admires the necklet in the mirror. Romance once more, thinks Dickson. That which has graced the slim throats of princesses in far-away Courts now adorns an elderly matron in a semi-detached villa; the jewels of the wild Nausicaa have fallen to the housewife Penelope.
Mrs. McCunn preens herself before the glass. “I call it very genteel,” she says. “Real stylish. It might be worn by a queen.”
“I wouldn’t say but it has,” says Dickson.
THE END
THE POWER-HOUSE
I. BEGINNING OF THE WILD-GOOSE CHASE
II. I FIRST HEAR OF MR ANDREW LUMLEY
III. TELLS OF A MIDSUMMER NIGHT
IV. I FOLLOW THE TRAIL OF THE SUPER-BUTLER
VI. THE RESTAURANT IN ANTIOCH STREET
DEDICATION
TO MAJOR-GENERAL SIR FRANCIS LLOYD, K.C.B.
My Dear General,
A recent tale of mine has, I am told, found favour in the dug-outs and billets of the British front, as being sufficiently short and sufficiently exciting for men who have little leisure to read. My friends in that uneasy region have asked for more. So I have printed this story, written in the smooth days before the war, in the hope that it may enable an honest man here and there to forget for an hour the too urgent realities, I have put your name on it, because among the many tastes which we share one is a liking for precipitous yarns.
J.B.
PREFACE BY THE EDITOR
We were at Glenaicill—six of us—for the duck-shooting, when Leithen told us this story. Since five in the morning we had been out on the skerries, and had been blown home by a wind which threatened to root the house and its wind-blown woods from their precarious lodgment on the hill. A vast nondescript meal, luncheon and dinner in one, had occupied us till the last daylight departed, and we settled ourselves in the smoking-room for a sleepy evening of talk and tobacco.
Conversation, I remember, turned on some of Jim’s trophies which grinned at us from the firelit walls, and we began to spin hunting yarns. Then Hoppy Bynge, who was killed next year on the Bramaputra, told us some queer things about his doings in New Guinea, where he tried to climb Carstensz, and lived for six months in mud. Jim said he couldn’t abide mud— anything was better than a country where your boots rotted. (He was to get enough of it last winter in the Ypres Salient.) You know how one tale begets another, and soon the whole place hummed with odd recollections, for five of us had been a good deal about the world.
All except Leithen, the man who was afterwards Solicitor- General, and, they say, will get to the Woolsack in time. I don’t suppose he had ever been farther from home than Monte Carlo, but he liked hearing about the ends of the earth.
Jim had just finished a fairly steep yarn about his experiences on a Boundary Commission near Lake Chad, and Leithen got up to find a drink.
“Lucky