“What do you think of the great Craw?” he asked Jaikie.
“He seems a pleasant fellow,” was the answer.
“Oh, he’s soft-spoken enough. He has the good manners of one accustomed to having his own way. But, man, to hear him talk was just like hearing a grandfather-clock ticking. He’s one mass of artifice.”
Dougal proceeded to a dissection of Mr Craw’s mind which caused him considerable satisfaction. He proved beyond question that the great man had no brains of his own, but was only an echo, a repository for other men’s ideas. “A cistern, not a spring,” was his conclusion. But he was a little dashed by Jaikie, who listened patiently to the analysis, and then remarked that he was talking rubbish.
“If a man does as much in the world as Craw, and makes himself as important, it’s nonsense to say he has no brains. He must have plenty, though they may not be the kind you like. You know very well, Dougal, that you’re mightily pleased to have the chance of doing the great man a favour. And maybe rather flattered.”
The other did not reply for a moment. “Perhaps I am,” he said at length. “We’re all snobs in a way—all but you. You’re the only true democrat I know. What’s the phrase—’Fellow to a beggar and brother to a king, if he be found worthy’? It’s no credit to you—it’s just the way you’re made.”
After that it was impossible to get a word out of Jaikie, and even Dougal drifted by way of monosyllables into silence, for the place and the hour had their overmastering enchantments. There was no evening mist, and in the twilight every hill stood out clean-cut in a purple monochrome. Soon the road skirted the shores of the Lower Loch Garroch, twining among small thickets of birch and hazel, with the dark water on its right lapping ghostly shingle. Presently the glen narrowed and the Garroch grumbled to itself in deep linns, appearing now and then on some rockshelf in a broad pool which caught the last amethyst light of day. There had been no lamps attached to the bicycles of John Catterick and the herd of the west hirsel, so the travellers must needs move circumspectly. And then the hills fell back, the glen became a valley, and the Garroch ran free in wild meadows of rush and bracken.
The road continued downstream to the junction with the Callowa not far from the town of Portaway. But to reach Castle Gay it was necessary to break off and take the hill-road on the left, which crossed the containing ridge and debouched in the upper part of Glen Callowa. The two riders dismounted, and walked the road which wound from one grassy howe to another till they reached the low saddle called the Pad o’ the Slack, and looked down upon a broader vale. Not that they had any prospect from it—for it was now very dark, the deep autumn darkness which precedes moonrise; but they had an instinct that there was freer space before them. They remounted their bicycles, and cautiously descended a road with many awkward angles and hairpin bends, till they found themselves among trees, and suddenly came on to a metalled highway.
“Keep to the right,” Jaikie directed. “We’re not more than two miles from the Castle gates.”
The place had the unmistakable character of a demesne. Even in the gloom it had an air of being well cared for, and the moon, which now began to send a shiver of light through the darkness, revealed a high wall on the left—no dry-stone dyke but a masoned wall with a coping. The woods, too, were not the scrub of the hills, but well-grown timber trees and plantations of fir. Then the wall fell back, there were two big patches of greensward protected by chains and white stones, and between them a sweep of gravel, a castellated lodge, and vast gates like a portcullis. The Lord Rhynns of three generations ago had been unhappily affected by the Gothic Revival.
“Here’s the place,” said Dougal. “It’s a mighty shell for such a wee body as Craw.”
The gates were locked. There was a huge bell pendant from one of the pillars and this Jaikie rang. It echoed voluminously in the stillness, but there was no sign of life in the lodge. He rang again and yet again, making the night hideous, while Dougal hammered at the massive ironwork of the gate.
“They’re all dead or drunk,” the latter said. “I’m positive there’s folk in the lodge. I saw a bit of a light in the upper window. What for will they not open?”
Jaikie had abandoned the bell and was peering through the ironwork.
“Dougal,” he whispered excitedly, “look here. This gate is not meant to open. Look what’s behind it. It’s a barricade. There’s two big logs jammed between the posts. The thing would keep a Tank out. Whoever is in there is terrified of something.”
“There’s somebody in the lodge watching us. I’m certain of that. What do they mean by behaving as if they were besieged? I don’t like it, Jaikie. There’s something here we don’t understand—and Craw doesn’t understand. How can they expect to defend as big a space as a park? Any active man could get over the wall.”
“Maybe they want to keep out motors… Well, we needn’t waste time here. That letter has got to be delivered, and there’s more roads than the main road.”
“Is there another entrance?”
“Yes. This is the main one, but there’s a second lodge a mile beyond Starr—that’s the village—on the Knockraw road. But we needn’t worry about that. We can leave our bicycles, and get into the park at the Callowa bridge.”
They remounted and resumed their course along the highway. One or two cottages were passed, which showed no sign of life, since the folk of these parts rise early and go early to bed. But in an open space a light was visible from a larger house on the slope to the right. Then came a descent and the noise of a rapid stream.
The bicycles were shoved under a hawthorn bush, and Jaikie clambered on to the extreme edge of the bridge parapet.
“We can do it,” he reported. “A hand traverse for a yard or two and then a ten-foot drop. There’s bracken below, so it will be soft falling.”
Five minutes later the two were emerging from a bracken covert on to the lawn-like turf which fringed the Callowa. The moon was now well up in the sky, and they could see before them the famous wild park of Castle Gay. The guide-books relate that in it are both red deer and fallow-deer, and in one part a few of the ancient Caledonian wild cattle. But these denizens must have been asleep, for as Jaikie and Dougal followed the river they saw nothing but an occasional rabbit and a belated heron. They kept to the stream side, for Jaikie had once studied the ordnance map and remembered that the Castle was close to the water.
The place was so magical that one of the two forgot his errand. It was a cup among high hills, but, seen in that light, the hills were dwarfed, and Jaikie with a start realised that the comb of mountain, which seemed little more than an adjacent hillock, must be a ridge of the great Muneraw, twenty miles distant. The patches of wood were black as ink against the pale mystery of the moonlit sward. The river was dark too, except where a shallow reflected the moon. The silence was broken only by the small noises of wild animals, the ripple of the stream, and an occasional splash of a running salmon.
Then, as they topped a slope, the house lay before them. It stood on its own little plateau, with the ground falling from it towards the park and the stream, and behind it the fir-clad Castle Hill. The moon turned it into ivory, so that it had the air of some precious Chinese carving on a jade stand. In such a setting it looked tiny, and one had to measure it with the neighbouring landscape to realise that it was a considerable pile. But if it did not awe by its size, it ravished the eyes with its perfection. Whatever may have been crude and ugly in it, the jerry-building of our ancestors, the demented reconstruction of our fathers, was mellowed by night into a classic grace. Jaikie began to whistle softly with pure delight, for he had seen a vision.
The practical Dougal had his mind on business. “It’s past eleven o’clock, and it looks as if they were all in their beds. I don’t see a light. There’ll be gardens to get through before we reach the door. We’d better look