Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries (25 page)

Byrd got up at that, and his clenched hand crashed on the table.

“Then, by the kingdom of Satan, I will overturn every settler's cabin when the boat goes out tomorrow.”

My uncle gave no attention to the man's violence.

“You would do wanton injury to innocent men,” he said. “The settlers did not fire your boat.”

“How can you know that, Abner?”

My uncle changed. Vigor and energy and an iron will got into his body and his face.

“Byrd,” he said, “we had an argument just now; let me recall it to your attention. You said ‘chance' happened equally to all, and I that the Providence of God directs it. If I had failed to come on tonight, the boat would have burned. The settlers would have taken blame for it. And Madison of Virginia, Simon Carroll of Maryland and my brother Rufus, whose company at Baltimore insure your boat, would have met a loss they can ill afford.”

His voice was hard and level like a sheet of light.

“Not you, Byrd, who, as you tell me, are neither good nor Christian, but these men, who are, would have settled for this loss. Is it the truth—eh, Mr. Evlyn Byrd?”

The man's big blue eyes widened in his olive skin.

“I should have claimed the insurance, of course, as I had the right to do,” he said coldly, for he was not in fear. “But, Abner—”

“Precisely!” replied my uncle. “And now, Mr. Evlyn Byrd, let us go on. We had a further argument. You thought a man in his intelligence could outwit God. And, sir, you undertook to do it! With your crew drunken here, the boat deserted, the settlers to bear suspicion and your portmanteau packed up for your journey overland to Baltimore, you watched at that window to see the flames burst out.”

The man's blue eyes—strange, incredible eyes in that olive skin—were now hard and expressionless as glass. His lips moved, and his hand crept up toward a bulging pocket of his satin waistcoat.

Grim, hard as iron, inevitable, my uncle went on:

“But you failed, Byrd! God outwitted you! When I put that fire out in the rubbish, the cabin was dark, and in the dark, Byrd, there, I saw a gleam of light shining through the keyhole of your wall desk—the desk that you alone can open, that you keep so securely locked. Three bits of candle were burning in that empty drawer.”

The man's white hand approached the bulging pocket,

And my uncle's voice rang as over a plate of steel. “Outwit God!” he cried. “Why, Byrd, you had forgotten a thing that any schoolboy could have told you. You had forgotten that a bit of candle in a drawer, for lack of air, burns more slowly than a bit outside. Your pieces set to fire the rubbish were consumed, but your pieces set in that locked drawer to make sure—to outwit God, if, by chance, the others failed—were burning when I burst the lid off.”

The man's nimble hand, lithe like a snake, whipped a derringer out of his bulging pocket.

But, quicker than that motion, quicker than light, quicker than the eye, my uncle was upon him. The derringer fell harmless to the floor. The bones of the man's slender fingers snapped in an iron palm. And my uncle's voice, big, echoing like a trumpet, rang above the storm and the drunken shouting:

“Outwit God! Why, Mr. Evlyn Byrd, you cannot outwit me, who am the feeblest of His creatures!”

It was night, and the first snow of October was in the air when my uncle got down from his horse before the door. The great stone house sat on a bench of the mountains. Behind it lay the forest, and below, the pasture land of the Hills.

After the disastrous failure of Prince Charles Edward Stuart to set up his kingdom in Scotland, more than one great Highland family had fled oversea to Virginia, and for a hundred years had maintained its customs. It was at the house of such a family that my uncle stopped.

There was the evidence of travel hard and long on my uncle and his horse. An old man bade him enter.

“Who is here?” said my uncle.

The servant replied with two foreign words, meaning “The Red Eagle” in the Gaelic tongue.

And he led my uncle through the hall into the dining-room. It was a scene laid back a hundred years in Skye that he came on. A big woman of middle age dined alone, in a long, beamed room, lighted with tallow candles. An ancient servant stood behind her chair.

Two features of the woman were conspicuous—her bowed nose and her coarse red hair.

She got up when she saw my uncle.

“Abner,” she cried, “by the Blessed God I am glad to see you! Come in! Come in!”

My uncle entered, and she put him beyond her at the table.

“You ought to eat, Abner,” she said; “for by all the tokens, you have traveled.”

“A long way,” replied my uncle.

“And did the ravens of Elijah send you to me?” said the woman. “For I need you.”

“What need?” inquired my uncle, while he attacked the rib of beef and the baked potatoes, for the dinner, although set with some formality, was plain.

“Why, this need, Abner: For a witness whose name will stand against the world.”

“A witness!” repeated my uncle.

“Aye, a witness,” continued the woman. “The country holds me hard and dour, and given to impose my will. There will be a wedding in my house tonight, and I would have you see it, free of pressure. My niece, Margaret McDonald, has got her senses finally.”

My uncle looked down at the cloth.

“Who is the man?” he said.

“Campbell,” she answered, “and good man enough for a stupid woman.”

For a moment my uncle did not move. His hands, his body, the very muscles in his eyelids, were for that moment inert as plaster. Then he went on with the potato and the rib of beef.

“Campbell is here, then?” he said.

“He came tonight,” replied the woman, “and for once the creature has some spirit. He will have the girl tonight or never. He and my husband Allen Eliott, have driven their cattle out of the glades and on the way to Baltimore. Allen is with the cattle on the Cumberland road, and Campbell rode hard in here to take the girl or to leave her. And whether she goes or stays, he will not return. When the cattle are sold in Baltimore, he will take a ship out of the Chesapeake for Glasgow.”

She paused and made a derisive gesture.

“The devil, Abner, or some witch trick, has made a man of Campbell. He used to be irresolute and sullen, but tonight he has the spirit of the men who lifted cattle in the lowlands. He is a Campbell of Glen Lion on this night. Believe me, Abner, the wavering beastie is now as hard as oak, and has the devil's courage. Wherefore is it that a man can change like that?”

“A man may hesitate between two masters,” replied my uncle, “and be only weak, but when he finally makes his choice he will get what his master has to give him—the courage of heaven, if he go that way, or of hell. Madam, if he go that way.”

“Man! Man!” she laughed. “If ‘the one who is not to be named,' as we say, put his spirit into Campbell, he did a grand work. It is the wild old cattle—lifter of Glen Lion that he is the night!”

“Do you think,” said my uncle, “that a McDonald of Glencoe ought to be mated with a Campbell of Glen Lion?”

The woman's face hardened.

“Did Lord Stair and the Campbells of Glen Lion massacre the McDonalds of Glencoe on yesterday at sunrise, or two hundred years back? Margaret—the fool!—said that before she got my final word.”

“Is it not in an adage,” said my uncle, “that the Highlander does not change?”

“But the world changes, Abner,” replied the woman. “Campbell is not ‘Bonnie Charlie'; he is at middle age, a dour man and silent, but he will have a sum of money from a half of the cattle, and he can take care of this girl.”

Then she cried out in a sharper voice:

“And what is here in this mountain for her, will you tell me? We grow poor! The old men are to feed. Alien owes money that his half of the cattle will hardly pay. Even old MacPherson”—and she indicated the ancient man behind her chair—“has tried to tell her, in
his wise-wife folderol, ‘I see you in the direst peril that overtakes a lassie, and a big shouldered man to save you.' And it was no omen, Abner, but the vision of his common sense. Here are the lean years to dry out the fool's youth, and surely Campbell is big shouldered enough for any prophecy. And now, Abner, will you stay and be a witness?”

“I will be one witness,” replied my uncle slowly, “if you will send for my brother Rufus to be another.”

The woman looked at her guest in wonder.

“That would be twenty miles through the Hills,” she said. “We could not get Rufus by the morn's morn.”

“No,” said Abner, “it would be three miles to Maxwell's Tavern. Rufus is there tonight.”

The big-nosed, red-haired woman drummed on the cloth with the tips of her fingers, and one knew what she was thinking. Her relentless will was the common talk. What she wished she forced with no concern.

But the girl was afraid of Campbell. The man seemed evil to her. It was not evidenced in any act. It was instinct in the girl. She felt the nature of the man like some venomous thing pretending to be gentle until its hour. And this fear, dominant and compelling, gave her courage to resist the woman's will.

The long suit of Campbell for the girl was known to everybody, and the woman's favor of it and the girl's resistance. The woman foresaw what folk in the Hills would say, and she wished to forestall that gossip by the presence in her house of men whose word could not be gainsaid. If Abner and his brother Rufus were here, no report of pressure on the girl could gain belief.

She knew what reports her dominating personality set current. She, and not her husband, was the head of their affairs, and with an iron determination she held to every Highland custom, every form, every feudal detail that she could, against the detritus of democratic times and ridicule, and the gain upon her house of poverty, and lean years. She was alone at that heavy labor. Allen Eliott was a person without
force. He was usually on his cattle range in the mountains, with his big partner Campbell, or in the great drive, as now, to Baltimore. And she had the world to face.

“That will be to wait,” she said, “and Campbell is in haste, and the bride is being made ready by the women, and the minister is got … to Maxwell's Tavern!”

Then she arose.

“Well, I will make a bargain with you. I will send for Rufus, but you must gain Campbell over to the waiting. And you must gain him, Abner, by your own devices, for I will not tell him that I have sent out for a witness to the freedom of my niece in this affair. If you can make him wait, the thing shall wait until Rufus is come. But I will turn no hand to help.”

“Is Campbell in the house?” said my uncle.

“Yes,” she said, “and ready when the minister is come.”

“Is he alone?” said Abner.

“Alone,” she said, with a satirical smile, “as a bridegroom ought to be for his last reflections.”

“Then,” replied my uncle, “I will strike the bargain.”

She laughed in a heavy chuckle, like a man.

“Hold him if you can. It will be a pretty undertaking, Abner, and practice for your wits. But by stealth it shall be. I will not have you bind the bridegroom like the strong man in the Scriptures.” And the chuckle deepened. “And that, too, I think, might be no easier than the finesse you set at. He is a great man in the body, like yoursel'.”

She stood up to go out, but before she went, she said another word.

“Abner,” she said, “you will not blame me,” and her voice was calm. “Somebody must think a little for these pretty fools. They are like the lilies of the field in their lack of wisdom; they will always
bloom, and there is no winter! Why, man, they have no more brain than a haggis! And what are their little loves against the realities of life? And their tears, Abner, are like the rains in summer, showering from every cloud. And their heads crammed with folderol—a prince will come, and they cannot take a good man for that dream!” She paused and added:

“I will go and send for Rufus. And when you have finished with your dinner, MacPherson will take you in to Campbell.”

The woman was hardly gone before the old man slipped over to Abner's chair.

“Mon,” he whispered, “ha'e ye a wee drop?”

“No liquor, MacPherson,” said my uncle.

The old man's bleared eyes blinked like a half-blinded owl's.

“It would be gran', a wee drop, the night,” he said.

“For joy at the wedding,” said my uncle.

“Na, mon, na, mon!” Then he looked swiftly around.

“The eagle ha beak and talons, and what ha the dove, mon?”

“What do you mean, MacPherson?” said my uncle.

The old creature peered across the table.

“Ye ha gran' shoulders, mon,” he said.

My uncle put down his fork.

“MacPherson,” he said, “what do you beat about?”

“I wa borned,” he replied, “wi a cowl, and I can see!”

“And what do you see?” inquired Abner.

“A vulture flying,” said the old man, “but it is unco dark beneath him.”

Again on this night every motion and every sign of motion disappeared from my uncle's body and his face. He remained for a moment like a figure cut in wood.

“A vulture!” he echoed.

“Aye, mon! What ha the dove to save it?”

“The vulture, it may be,” said my uncle.

“The Red Eagle, and the foul vulture!” cried the old man. “Noo, mon, it is the bird of death!”

“A bird of death, but not a bird of prey.” Then he got up.

“You may have a familiar spirit, MacPherson,” he said coldly, “for all I know. Perhaps they live on after the Witch of Endor. It is a world of mystery. But I should not come to you to get up Samuel, and I see now why the Lord stamped out your practice. It was because you misled his people. If there is a vulture in this business, MacPherson, it is no symbol of your bridegroom. And now, will take me in to Campbell?”