The Courtship of Morrice Buckler: A Romance

by A. E. W. Mason

If you stood with your back to the door of the hut, the noise came from directly behind you. On your right rose the pine-forest wherein we laboured, very steep and dense, to the crest of a hill; on your left a barren wilderness, encumbered by stones, sloped up to the foot of a great field of snow, which grew steeper and steeper towards its summit. Here and there great masses of ice bulged out from the incline, like nothing so much as the bosses of shields. I was rather apt to underrate the size and danger of these, until one day a fragment, which seemed in comparison no greater than a pea, broke away from one of these bosses and dropped on to the slope beneath, starting, as it were, a little rillet of snow down the hillside. On the instant the hollow was filled with a great thunder, as though a battery of cannon had been discharged; and I should hardly have believed this fragment could have produced so great a disturbance, had not the Tyrolese looked across the valley, and by their words to one another assured me it was so.

In front of you, the head of this hollow was blocked up by a tongue of ice, which wound downwards like some huge dragon, and the stream of which I have spoken flowed from the tip of it, as though the dragon spewed the water from its mouth. It was then apparent to me from these observations that I had been carried into this prison by some track through the pine-forest, and I set myself to the discovery of it. But whether the wood-cutters kept aloof from it, or whether it was in reality indistinguishable, I could perceive no trace of it. At one point on the crest of the hill there was a marked depression, and I judged that there lay the true entrance; but through the gap I could see nothing but a sea of white, with dark peaks of rock tossed this way and that, and dreaded much adventuring myself that way.

It soon came upon me, however, that in whichever way I determined to make my attempt, I must needs delay the actual enterprise until the spring; for we were now in the month of November, and the snow falling very thickly, so that for some while we worked knee-deep in snow. Then one morning Groder and his comrades once more bound my hands and bandaged my eyes, and we set off to pass the winter in one of the lower valleys. On this occasion I took such notice as I could of our direction, and from the diminishing sound of the waterfall, I understood that we marched for some distance towards the head of the valley, and then turned to the right through the pine-forest. Evidently we were making for the gap in the ridge of the hill, and I determined to pay particular heed to the course which we followed down the other side. Again, however, I was led in a continual zigzag, first to the right, then to the left, and with such irregular distances between each turn that it became impossible to keep a clear notion of our direction. At times, too, we would retrace our steps, at others we seemed to be describing the greater part of a circle; so that in the end, when we finally reached our quarters, I was little wiser than at the moment of setting out.

There were some five or six cottages in the ravine whither we were come, and one of them most undeniably an inn; for though I was not suffered to go there myself--nor, indeed, had I any inclination that way--my guardians frequently brought back upon their tongues and in their faces evidence as convincing as a sign swinging above the door. In truth if the house was not an inn, it possessed the most hospitable master in the world.

None the less strictly, however, on this account was the watch maintained upon me; for if Groder and his fellows chanced to be incapacitated for the time, there were ever some peasants from the neighbouring cottages ready to fill their place; though, indeed, there was but little necessity for their zeal, for the snow lay many feet deep upon the ground, and the only path along which one could travel at all led down to the more populous parts of the valley, through which, at this time of the year, it would be impossible to escape. One could journey no faster than at a snail's pace, and would leave, besides, an unmistakable trail for the pursuers.

These winter months proved the most irksome of my captivity, my sole occupation being the plaiting of ropes from the flax which was grown about these parts. At this tedious and mechanic labour I toiled for many hours a day, in an exceeding great vacancy of spirit, until I hit upon a plan by which I might exercise my mind without hindering the work of my fingers. 'Twas my terror lest my wits should wither for lack of use that first set me on the device; since, indeed, it mattered little how or when Countess Ilga discovered that I had slain her husband. She had discovered it; that was the kernel of the matter, and the searching out of the means whereby she gained the knowledge no more than an idle cracking of the shell into little fragments after the kernel has been removed.

Many incidents, of course, became intelligible to me now that I knew whose portrait the miniature box contained. The sudden swoon of Lady Tracy in the hall at Pall Mall was now easily accounted for. The moment before I had been speaking of the miniature, and Lady Tracy knew--what I could not know--that Ilga held a proof of her acquaintanceship with the Count, and would be certain to attribute it as the cause of his death. It was doubtless, also, that piece of knowledge which drove her to such a pitch of fear that on seeing the Countess at Bristol she disclosed the story to her brother and besought his protection. I understood, moreover, the drift of the words which Marston was uttering when death took him. He meant to ask a question, not to make an explanation.

Concerning those events, however, which more nearly concerned myself I was not so clear. I had no clue whereby I could ascertain how the Countess first came to fix her suspicions upon me, and in the absence of that, my speculations were the merest conjectures. Much of course was significant to me which I had disregarded, as, for instance, the journey of Countess Lukstein to Bristol, the diagram which she had drawn on the gravel under the piazza of Covent Garden, the perplexity with which she had regarded the diagram, and the sudden start she had given when I mentioned the date of my departure from Leyden. For I remembered that she had previously remarked the Horace when she came to visit me; and in that volume the date "September 14, 1685," was inscribed on the page opposite to Julian's outline of Lukstein.

These details, now that I was aware she suspected me at that time, were full of significance, but they gave me no help towards the solving of that first question as to what directed her thoughts my way. It seemed to me, indeed, as I looked back upon the incidents of our acquaintance, that the Countess, almost from our first meeting, had begun to set her husband's death to my account.

One thing, however, I did clearly recognise, and for that recognition I shall ever be most gratefully thankful. 'Twas of far more importance to me than any academic speculations, and I do but cite them here that I may show how I came by it. I perceived that 'twas not so much any investigation on the part of the Countess which had betrayed me to her, as my own wilful and independent actions. Of my own free choice I came from Cumberland to seek her; of my own free choice I brought her to my rooms, where she saw the Horace; of my own free choice I joined her in the box at the Duke's Theatre, and so led Marston to speak of my ride to Bristol; and again of my own free choice I had persuaded Lady Tracy to enter the house in Pall Mall and confront my mistress. Even in the matter of the diagram, 'twas my anxiety and insistence to prove that Lady Tracy and I were strangers which induced me to dwell upon the date of my leaving Holland, and so gave to the Countess the clue to resolve her perplexity. In short, my very efforts at concealment were the means by which suspicion was ratified and assured, and I could not but believe that Providence in its great wisdom had so willed it. 'Tis that belief and conviction for which I have ever been most grateful; for it enheartened me with patience to endure my present sufferings, and saved me, in particular, from cherishing a petty rancour and resentment against the lady who inflicted them.