Greenmantle - John Buchan (free ebook reader for iphone .TXT) 📗

hot, and your cold brings me fever. It will pass in a day or two if you can give me a bed.”

“You are welcome,” she said; “but first I will make you coffee.”

I took off my dripping cloak, and crouched close to the hearth. She gave me coffee⁠—poor washy stuff, but blessedly hot. Poverty was spelled large in everything I saw. I felt the tides of fever beginning to overflow my brain again, and I made a great attempt to set my affairs straight before I was overtaken. With difficulty I took out Stumm’s pass from my pocketbook.

“That is my warrant,” I said. “I am a member of the Imperial Secret Service and for the sake of my work I must move in the dark. If you will permit it, mother, I will sleep till I am better, but no one must know that I am here. If anyone comes, you must deny my presence.”

She looked at the big seal as if it were a talisman.

“Yes, yes,” she said, “you will have the bed in the garret and be left in peace till you are well. We have no neighbours near, and the storm will shut the roads. I will be silent, I and the little ones.”

My head was beginning to swim, but I made one more effort.

“There is food in my rucksack⁠—biscuits and ham and chocolate. Pray take it for your use. And here is some money to buy Christmas fare for the little ones.” And I gave her some of the German notes.

After that my recollection becomes dim. She helped me up a ladder to the garret, undressed me, and gave me a thick coarse nightgown. I seem to remember that she kissed my hand, and that she was crying. “The good Lord has sent you,” she said. “Now the little ones will have their prayers answered and the Christkind will not pass by our door.”

VIII The Essen Barges

I lay for four days like a log in that garret bed. The storm died down, the thaw set in, and the snow melted. The children played about the doors and told stories at night round the fire. Stumm’s myrmidons no doubt beset every road and troubled the lives of innocent wayfarers. But no one came near the cottage, and the fever worked itself out while I lay in peace.

It was a bad bout, but on the fifth day it left me, and I lay, as weak as a kitten, staring at the rafters and the little skylight. It was a leaky, draughty old place, but the woman of the cottage had heaped deerskins and blankets on my bed and kept me warm. She came in now and then, and once she brought me a brew of some bitter herbs which greatly refreshed me. A little thin porridge was all the food I could eat, and some chocolate made from the slabs in my rucksack.

I lay and dozed through the day, hearing the faint chatter of children below, and getting stronger hourly. Malaria passes as quickly as it comes and leaves a man little the worse, though this was one of the sharpest turns I ever had. As I lay I thought, and my thoughts followed curious lines. One queer thing was that Stumm and his doings seemed to have been shot back into a lumber-room of my brain and the door locked. He didn’t seem to be a creature of the living present, but a distant memory on which I could look calmly. I thought a good deal about my battalion and the comedy of my present position. You see I was getting better, for I called it comedy now, not tragedy.

But chiefly I thought of my mission. All that wild day in the snow it had seemed the merest farce. The three words Harry Bullivant had scribbled had danced through my head in a crazy fandango. They were present to me now, but coolly and sanely in all their meagreness.

I remember that I took each one separately and chewed on it for hours. “Kasredin”⁠—there was nothing to be got out of that. “Cancer”⁠—there were too many meanings, all blind. “v. I.”⁠—that was the worst gibberish of all.

Before this I had always taken the I as the letter of the alphabet. I had thought the “v.” must stand for von, and I had considered the German names beginning with I⁠—Ingolstadt, Ingeburg, Ingenohl, and all the rest of them. I had made a list of about seventy at the British Museum before I left London.

Now I suddenly found myself taking the I as the numeral One. Idly, not thinking what I was doing, I put it into German.

Then I nearly fell out of the bed. “Von Einem”⁠—the name I had heard at Gaudian’s house, the name Stumm had spoken behind his hand, the name to which Hilda was probably the prefix. It was a tremendous discovery⁠—the first real bit of light I had found. Harry Bullivant knew that some man or woman called von Einem was at the heart of the mystery. Stumm had spoken of the same personage with respect and in connection with the work I proposed to do in raising the Muslim Africans. If I found von Einem I would be getting very warm. What was the word that Stumm had whispered to Gaudian and scared that worthy? It had sounded like “Ünmantl.” If I could only get that clear, I would solve the riddle.

I think that discovery completed my cure. At any rate on the evening of the fifth day⁠—it was Wednesday, the 29th of December⁠—I was well enough to get up. When the dark had fallen and it was too late to fear a visitor, I came downstairs and, wrapped in my green cape, took a seat by the fire.

As we sat there in the firelight, with the three white-headed children staring at me with saucer eyes, and smiling when I