Lord of the Hollow Dark Read online

  “All that Morton could carry off from Balgrummo Lodging was it plenishings, among them the painting you saw in the gallery-his souvenir of the two he had thrust under the hill. He could not bring the fleshly Warlock Laird to the stake on the Castle Hill, nor exhibit the Bohemian succubus stripped of her finery and subjected to torment. His men had put to the sword the Balgrummo miners and fighting men who had not been able to reach the Weem, so Morton took back with him to Edinburgh no prisoners at all. Pity the Regent in his chagrin. Did the Laird laugh down below?”

  “I don’t pity the Regent in the least,” Marina began, all pale from the Archvicar’s story, and tears on her cheeks. “Talk of devils...”

  “Ah, but Morton was paid out,” the Archvicar interrupted her. “He fell from power a few days later. John Knox had preached against him, and—”

  But then the Sicilian girl thrust the baby upon Marina and cried out something, urgently, to the old man, pointing toward the place where the den wall lay nearest to them. All looked toward the cliff.

  On its face, only a few hundred yards distant, the unknown hill-walker had appeared, trying to descend without ropes. He was nearly halfway down, but seemed trapped there. His left foot sought in vain for some projection of rock a trifle lower.

  “By God, bide where you are, my man!” the Archvicar roared, once more in his chilling voice of command. Out of the corner of her eye, Marina saw the shock-headed acolyte from the stables running across the little bridge in the direction of that cliff face.

  Then occurred the most astonishing event of this crowded morning. Shooting up like a coiled spring, the Archvicar flung off his coat and went leaping and dashing, with incredible agility and speed, toward the cliff—springing over boulders, bursting through shrubbery, more like a predatory animal than an old man. The Sicilian pomegranate, feline again as she had been last night, kicked off her shoes and went flying after him. The two of them vanished within the tangle of the overgrown Den.

  And the man trapped on the den wall, losing his grip, fell straight to the foot of the cliff, far below.

  6

  Broken Coriolan

  Sweeney trotted over the bridge across the Fettinch Water, panting as he ascended the Den toward its northern wall. One of the acolyte-girls, Doris, had heard a commotion in the policies at the back of the Lodging, and had run to tell Grishkin; treating him like an errand boy, Grishkin had interrupted his lunch and sent him scurrying to settle the matter. He’d make that well-endowed Grishkin dance if ever he got the chance.

  From the kitchen, Doris had pointed out the direction of the disturbance. Sweeney could hear voices. Right at the foot of a cliff, he came upon a curious tableau.

  A big man, blood-streaked, lay on the ground, his eyes closed, his ripped rucksack a few feet distant from him. This man wore a threadbare kilt and a shabby tweed jacket. He seemed to have fallen straight from the sky.

  Bending over him, as if to try to force him to sit up, was Pereira, one of the acolyte-boys. The Archvicar, stick in hand, was shouting at Pereira, and that Sicilian maid stood flushed, panting, and barefoot beside her master. Madame Sesostris and Marina, with her baby, were a little beyond the fallen man.

  “What in hell...” Sweeney gasped. At that moment the fallen man opened his eyes.

  “Get up! Come on, damn you, get up!” Pereira was saying to the stranger. The fallen man tried to speak. Pereira pulled a pistol from his jacket and prodded the stranger in the ribs, and at that Marina screamed.

  He prodded the stranger only once. With astonishing deftness, the Archvicar swung his heavy stick and brought it down with a crack upon Pereira’s wrist. Crying out, the boy dropped the revolver, and tried to rise from his stooping position. The Archvicar struck again, forcefully, upon Pereira’s head, and the acolyte tumbled in a heap and lay still.

  Sweeney reached hesitantly for the revolver in the heather, but the Sicilian girl, darting as a cat, was before him. Snatching up the gun, she handed it to the Archvicar.

  “Thank you,” a faint voice said. The stranger had contrived to sit up, and was feeling his bare legs below his kilt as if to learn whether they were broken. He wore heavy battered brogues on his feet, and a sgean-dhu’s hilt protruded from one of his stockings. A sporran hung about his waist. He was tanned and muscular.

  What Sweeney wanted was the weapon. “Let me have that,” he told the Archvicar, hoping that he sounded firm. “Somebody took my own gun.” He meant to make his way out of this bedlam today, if he possibly could, and he might need the gun at the pend. He stretched out his hand to receive the pistol.

  Unperturbed, the Archvicar extracted the cartridges from the magazine, dropped them into one of his pockets, and put the gun upon Sweeney’s palm. “There you are. It will be of no use to you now, my lad. You’d be a menace if you were armed; nervous people always are. You’re to carry this pistol straight to Mr. Apollinax, with my compliments, and tell him that I say he must teach his little idiot devils better manners, or I’ll break the crowns of more of them.” Sweeney gazed at the old man in disbelief. What a change from Gerontion’s tone at Haggat or here at the Lodging, until now! He spoke crisply, as one having authority. “Put away that toy, Apeneck, and help me to have a look at this man. Not that devil-boy, you ass: I mean this newcomer.”

  The hill-walker was feeling his rib cage now. “That takes the wind out of a man,” he murmured. “Sorry to trouble you.”

  He must have fallen from the cliff face into a tall spreading rhododendron, smashing most of it, Sweeney could see; the man was bleeding from scratches all over, and blood covered his face from a nasty cut on his forehead, but he actually was trying to get on his feet. Sweeney and the Sicilian girl helped him to rise, and the Archvicar clapped a handkerchief upon that forehead cut. The disheveled Sicilian would be a first-rate catch, Sweeney thought, on getting this close view of her: a strong girl, who would fight hard before being subdued. She sustained the stranger’s weight as well as Sweeney himself did.

  “No bones smashed, my friend?” Archvicar Gerontion was inquiring. “Not even a tibia? How are your ribs? You astound me. If you had fallen at almost any other spot...”

  Sweeney put one of the stranger’s arms round his shoulder. He muttered to the Archvicar, “What do we do with this fellow? Apollinax won’t care for this.”

  “Then he must lump it.” The Archvicar had produced a second handkerchief and contrived a rough bandage for the stranger’s hand. “If Apollinax’s devil-boy hadn’t snatched out that gun, we might simply have sent our adventurer on his way through the pend, after some refreshment. But now-why, after being prodded in the ribs with a deadly weapon, he might give awkward testimony about the new keepers at Balgrummo Lodging.”

  Sweeney nodded. “And Apollinax won’t like the way you thumped Pereira here, either.”

  “Won’t he? I should have cudgeled Pereira days ago, and the other young devils besides. Ah, Marina, don’t look so terrified: I don’t mean to thump you, too, my dear. Do give her a whiff of your smelling salts, Grizel. Do you think I’m an ogre?”

  A cut on the stranger’s right calf was nearly as bad as the one on his forehead. “We must have him into the Lodging and put sticking plaster on him,” the Archvicar declared. “I’d never have thought that a man might come down that way and live.” He studied the stranger’s face as he spoke.

  The hill-walker extended his arms slowly, took three deep breaths, and looked back into the Archvicar’s face, now that the blood no longer was trickling into his eyes. He was a deep-chested man, muscular, with no superfluous flesh about him, well tanned, healthy-seeming. “Did I hear you say”—the words required some effort—“did I hear you say that this place is Balgrummo Lodging?” he asked.

  “Good, your brain functions also!” Having borrowed a third handkerchief from Madame, the Archvicar was fastening it over the cut on the stranger’s calf. “Yes, my dear sir, you’ve fallen into Balgrummo Den. Have you heard of the property?”

  “I knew it
well once, my lord.” The hill-walker now stood unsupported.

  The Archvicar paused in his bandaging, then resumed to tie a knot, and said to Madame and the Sicilian girl, “Help me.” They assisted Gerontion to his feet; his debility seemed to have fallen upon him again. Looking the stranger cannily in the face, the old man told him, “I’m not a peer. As you can see, I’m a clergyman, Archvicar Gerontion.”

  The stranger blinked. “I beg your pardon, padre: that bashing I took must have put a silly notion into my head. Somehow I thought old Alec Balgrummo...”

  “He died three years ago.” The Archvicar was soft-voiced, almost unctuous, again. “Perhaps you were acquainted with the last Lord Balgrummo? The title is extinct now.”

  “My father knew him well, poor chap, and I was in the Lodging once or twice. I’m Bain, Ralph Bain.”

  The Archvicar continued to watch this man’s face. “An officer, possibly?”

  “Yes, I think so.” Bain pressed his hands to either side of his head. “What was my regiment? I took a bad head wound, in Libya. Yes, I was a captain. Some things are clear in my memory, and some foggy. I tramp about much of the time. This morning I came over the hills in this direction, for no especial reason, with no map in my sporran. I’d no notion that I had come close to Balgrummo Lodging. Then I found myself at the head of this den, and it looked vaguely familiar, so I thought I’d come down; and I did, don’t you see, with a thump.” The lean man was smiling. “Who’s at the Lodging now, with Balgrummo gone?”

  “Come along to the house,” the Archvicar answered. “You actually can walk, after that tumble? Incredible: you’re all bruises, and soon you’ll ache like fury. I hope that cut on your forehead hasn’t stirred up that old head wound of yours; that happens sometimes.

  “The Lodging belongs to the Balgrummo Trust now. A Mr. Apollinax is holding a conference there; he’s taken the Lodging on six months’ let. Are you stopping anywhere in particular?” The Arch vicar was leaning heavily upon his stick again, seemingly having relapsed into feebleness.

  “I simply tramp about,” said Bain, apparently unembarrassed, “and whatever I need is in this rucksack.” He had hung it over one shoulder by a strap.

  “Then why not spend the week with us?” the Archvicar suggested. “Having known Lord Balgrummo once, you’ve as much a claim to be at the Lodging as has anyone, I suppose.”

  Sweeney doubted very much whether Apollinax would be delighted to welcome this shabby-genteel tramp into his hocus-pocus “gathering.” Had Gerontion been shaken in his wits by his long ordeal in that Haggat prison? The Archvicar’s rambling conversation and mysterious hints; the remarkable oddity of that memorandum he had submitted to Apollinax; the sudden burst of violence against Pereira; now this positively senile invitation to the kilted tramp-was the Archvicar turning out to be crazier than Apollinax’s disciples? And would Apollinax think that he, Sweeney, had a hand in this invitation? He meant to get out of this loony bin as soon as he could, but meanwhile he wanted no more trouble with Apollinax.

  “Hold on a minute,” Sweeney said to the Archvicar. “You’d better ask Apollinax...”

  The Archvicar beamed upon him, but the old man’s voice had that hard ring of command in it. “Sweeney, trot ahead of us, like a good chap, and tell Grishkin to have a room aired for Captain Bain. Let Mr. Apollinax know that we have a guest; I’ll talk with him presently. And send a brace of the young men to collect that fellow Pereira, or whatever his name may be, and put him to bed. The pistol is to be delivered into Apollinax’s hands, remember. Smart, now, if you please.”

  Sweeney hesitated. The Archvicar stared him down. For a moment, Sweeney felt giddy. Knock, knock, knock. “You’ve had a cream of a nightmare dream...” Why hang about arguing with lunatics? “Oh, hell,” Sweeney sighed. He strode back across the bridge toward the Lodging.

  Marina, with Madame and the Sicilian maid beside her, slowly followed the Archvicar and the lean newcomer back toward the house. The Archvicar bewildered her now: he seemed more peremptory and passionate, when the mood was upon him, than ever her father the General had been. Musing on the terrible story of the Third Laird, she caught snatches at the same time of the conversation between the Archvicar and this Captain Bain.

  “Odd chaps you have for keepers,” Bain was saying.

  “But weren’t they always, during the last Lord’s time?”

  “Aye, but those men were hired as much to keep Balgrummo in as to keep others out-not that Alec Balgrummo would have broken his word.” Captain Bain, though grimacing with pain now and again as he walked, already seemed half recovered from his fall.

  “It’s much the same here still, Bain.”

  “Really? You mean that I’ve fallen into a private madhouse?”

  “You can judge for yourself of that, Bain. In theory, at least, this is a conference concerned with the life of the spirit. But no one is to leave the policies all this week. Will you conform? There’s not much to be said for the food here, but you ought to have a good rest after that tumble of yours.” Marina noticed that the chi-chi quality had vanished altogether from the Archvicar’s speech, as he talked with Bain. What a protean old man he was! Or was he so old? And did he really need those goggles of his?

  “That’s very good of you, my-very good of you, Archvicar. Frankly, I haven’t a shilling in my sporran at the moment, so your hospitality is doubly welcome. Never could keep money. I was cowman on a farm near Londonderry, and got into a scrape with some gunmen, and left in rather a hurry. Almost thought I was back there again when that keeper chap of yours prodded me with that pistol.”

  “There’s another eccentricity about this gathering,” the Archvicar added. “Everyone here assumes a name from T.S. Eliot’s poems, and takes a role, too. It’s something of a game, though I’m not well informed about the rules, and have no notion of how the game is supposed to end, or who the winners are supposed to be. Mr. Apollinax tells us that it’s all a form of spiritual therapy.”

  “A chap may as well have the game as the name.” Bain readjusted the bandage on his forehead. “Who is this Apollinax?”

  “That’s a mere Eliot name of his, recently chosen; he’s had many names, I believe. He’s the principal in all this, and my employer. The old people here, and the young ones too, expect him to work a cure of souls-that’s a way of putting it. The newest name suits him; one can fancy him ‘where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence.’ And ‘Gerontion’ fits me like a glove. Yet for the others, why the names from Eliot...”

  “Eliot? Edited some London paper, didn’t he? Wrote a poem about somebody who didn’t dare to eat a peach, I recall, and another about an old man-I say, that’s your name, isn’t it, Gerontion? Better not to ask your real name at the moment, I take it. Quite. Will Eliot be here at the Lodging?” The Archvicar gave him a long look. “Eliot died some years ago.”

  “I didn’t know; but then, I’m afraid I’m vague much of the time, what with the old head wound. What name will you give me?”

  “It will have to be approved by Mr. Apollinax: this is his show, not mine, you understand; I might be called a consultant. But I think that ‘Coriolan’ will do very well.”

  “Don’t know him. Did Coriolan eat peaches?”

  “It’s from “Coriolanus’-Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and Plutarch’s, you know: the Roman soldier. Eliot wrote a poem about a modern Coriolan, and there’s a line in The Waste Land about a broken Coriolan revived at nightfall.”

  Bain laughed. “Then the name suits well enough, in more ways than one. Must read Shakespeare’s play again. Those Volscians ran Coriolanus through at the end, didn’t they? Read the play at Harrow, I believe. Not with a whimper but a bang, eh? Eliot-yes, I saw him once at a club, perhaps-somebody pointed him out: about my height, kindly-looking chap. What’s that ‘whimper’ poem—‘The Empty Men’? Oh, ‘The Hollow Men,’ right. Quite good, really; understand it now better than when it came out. Pity Eliot can’t come here himself.”
>
  They were entering a doorway at the back of the Lodging. “We’ve missed lunch, Marina,” the Archvicar told her, “but Grizel will have something or other brought for you. By the way, these dreams of ours considered, don’t eat more than you must in this house, or drink anything but water. Phlebas promises us not merely fresh eggs, cooked by his own savage hand, but occasionally also a roast pigeon. One’s head should be clear, eh?”

  The Archvicar preceded Bain down a corridor, leaving Marina with Madame. “How did he do it?” Marina demanded.

  Madame Sesostris’ tired old eyes looked at her guardedly.

  “You mean that gentleman’s fall from the cliff, and his surviving, my dear?”

  No, that’s wonderful enough, but the Archvicar—how could he find the strength to go dashing off the way he did, and to thrash that young man? He took my breath away.”

  “Yes, wasn’t he grand? When one simply has to do a thing, there are reserves, aren’t there? I suppose that no one noticed how energetic he was except for our little partv. Marina. I shouldn’t mention it to anyone else. Do cherish the Archvicar: you see how very helpful he can be—good at need.’ He seems to have taken a fancy to you; I’d hoped he would: he always has liked pretty girls.”

  The baby now demanding attention. Marina found her way back to her room. The Archvicar seemed to entertain doubts about Mr. Apollinax, but for her part she entertained doubts about the Archvicar. There was a vein of savagery in him, she could tell. And what was she to make of his stories?