Blue Kingdom Page 3

  “Hello!” said a voice at the window. It was a handsome woman of middle age, with a brown look of the outdoors. She was leading Excuse Me, and the window sill came so close to the ground that the mare was easily able to put her head in. She snorted in the direction of her master, and then looked half fiercely and half curiously about the room.

  “She knows you,” said the woman, “the beautiful rascal.”

  “And I know her,” said Carrick Dunmore, “but I’m afraid that I never met you, ma’am.”

  “No, you haven’t,” she said. “But I’m Elizabeth Furneaux. When you were hurt, of course, you were brought to my house.” He looked puzzled, and she went on: “Partly because I’m close, and partly, of course, because I had to do what I could for the head of my family. Well, I wanted you to see Excuse Me, and now I’ll go bring you some breakfast.”

  She disappeared, and Carrick Dunmore pondered with a startled brain a phrase she had used. He—the head of her family? However, he grew drowsy almost at once, and very nearly had to waken from deep sleep when the door opened and Miss Furneaux came in, carrying a tray of food. She put it on a bed tray that straddled him, and uncovered to him the fume of oatmeal porridge, with a yellow jug of cream beside it, two broad slabs of ham fried to a crinkle at the edges, and four eggs mounted richly on the field of that ham. Then there was another covered dish that contained wedges of hot cornbread, three inches thick, and a dish of butter. She stood without smiling at the foot of the bed and surveyed him with a mild and direct gaze such as he never had received before except from a man— and very few men, indeed, looked at Carrick Dunmore so straight.

  He, looking back at her, decided that she not only had brought in the tray, but that she had cooked the food that was on it. By her hands, somehow, he could tell it, and the flush of heat about the lower part of her face. In one stroke he wrote her down as a woman who was a lady by birth and a man by necessity. Her work ranged from the kitchen to the herd, and he was sure of it.

  “I’ll go out, if you’ll eat more comfortably when you’re not watched,” she said.

  Dunmore smiled at her. He had one of those surprisingly bright smiles that light up a face as though a veil had been brushed aside before it.

  “Crowds never bothered me, Miss Furneaux,” he replied. “I could sleep through all the noise of a boiler factory, and I could sit down and eat with a thousand ladies and gents walkin’ by and lettin’ fall their monocles at the looks of me.” With this, he poured the contents of the cream jug upon the oatmeal and heaped a white island of sugar in the center of the cream. This he then stirred vigorously with a tablespoon.

  “It makes me hungry to watch you,” said Elizabeth Furneaux, laughing a little in a very pleasant voice.

  “You,” he said, “are what I’d call a good provider. This would be somethin’ to dream about, if hotels could frame up such chuck.”

  “My dear Cousin Carrick,” she said, “of course, I’m delighted to have you . . . as long as you’ll stay.”

  He paused, halfway through the ham and eggs. “Am I your cousin?”

  “Not a shadow of a doubt of it. My mother was a Dunmore of Virginia, you know.”

  “Dunmore . . . Virginia,” he repeated. “Why, that’s a funny thing, isn’t it? And that’s what you meant by callin’ me the head of the house, I suppose?”

  “Exactly.”

  “No more men left in Virginia?”

  “No. Except Alf Dunmore’s pair of twins. Their picture came last week, and they’re cute little fellows. But only five years old.”

  “That’s old enough to make a steer mean,” said Dunmore, “but I’ve gotta say that, if the house has me for a head, it’s not goin’ to use its brain much. It’ll be more apt to crawl along on hands and feet.”

  She nodded and smiled a little. “Life hasn’t bothered you a great deal, Carrick, I suppose.”

  “Not a rip,” he said. “Never bothered me a bit. As soon as I was big enough to know the difference between sunshine and shade, I liked the sunshine and loved to be in it. The sun is never dangerous except to them that work in it, Cousin Elizabeth. You sure that I got a right to call you that?”

  “Of course, I’m sure. You have the look of the whole family, besides.”

  “Have I?”

  “Certainly you have.”

  “Look here,” he said, “suppose there might be other branches of Dunmores back there in Virginia?”

  “It’s not a common name, and the blood isn’t common, either, thank heaven,” she answered with a frank pride. “Which makes me all the happier to have the king out here. Let me bring you some hot cornbread, Cousin Carrick?”

  “No, thanks. King?” he echoed.

  She laughed. “Of course, you remember the story about the first Carrick Dunmore?” she asked.

  “Never heard of him before.”

  “Dear me! Never?”

  “Not a word before.”

  “But that doesn’t seem possible. Never heard any of the jolly old tales about Carrick Dunmore?”

  “I must’ve missed something,” he said smilingly.

  “You bet you did,” she said heartily. “That about the king, for instance. One of the Dunmores had been arrested . . . not one of the people in the castle, but some poor relation on the outskirts of the village had had too much ale and had cracked a man’s head with his staff. He was arrested. Carrick Dunmore came ramping to the jail and took the man out. He threatened to tear down the jail if such a thing happened again.

  “ ‘But the king’s law?’ they said to him.

  “ ‘Robert Bruce is King of Scotland,’ he said, ‘but I am king of the Dunmores.’ ”

  She laughed at the end, and he joined her.

  “Well, well,” he said, “a fellow like that would have had a pretty excitin’ life in the days of Robert Bruce, I suppose, what with whangin’ each other around in armor and all that sort of thing. But I reckon that it would be kind of apt to rust a gent’s constitution, wouldn’t it? I don’t suppose he lasted long?”

  “For those days, he did. He lived to be almost fifty, which was a ripe old age in the thirteenth century, you know.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Carrick, “but I would’ve guessed that they was scared of fresh air . . . and iron-clad shoes must’ve raised pretty good crops of chilblains and rheumatism. What did the King of Scotland do when he heard what Carrick Dunmore had said?”

  “That was a story, too,” she said. “The king was cross, of course, and he asked who Carrick Dunmore was, because he never had heard of him before. They told him that the Earl of Carrick lived in Carrick Castle in the town of the same name, and among his serfs were a number of people called Dunmore. One day as the earl was out riding, he found a crowd in the village street watching a ragged fellow juggling. The earl was pleased by the juggling, and, when he found out that the man was one of his own Dunmores, he ordered him to come to the castle to entertain the guests at supper.

  “This ragged man looked the earl in the face and told him that he had made a vow never to enter the castle except as its master. Naturally the earl was very angry. When he got back to his castle, he ordered one of his knights to arrest the serf. The knight tried it, but came back minus his horse and armor, and, with this as a starting point, young Dunmore gathered a gang of border riders and became a raider. A year or so later, he came back and popped into the castle of the earl one night . . . and in the morning, he was the master of the place. He gave the earl and his wife and son a horse apiece, and sent them away . . . but he took the name of Carrick to put in front of Dunmore. That’s how the name came into the family, you see.”

  “What did the king think of that story?”

  “He was amused. Then he sent word that he wanted to have Carrick Dunmore come to his court in order to be made a knight. Dunmore sent answer that no man would ever lay a sword on his shoulders without getting paid back with an axe . . . besides, he never knelt except in prayer, and that only on Whitsuntide and Christmas
morning, because it was a family habit.”

  Dunmore laughed heartily. “I would’ve liked to meet him,” he announced.

  “He would’ve liked to meet you, Cousin Carrick.”

  “And what did the king do then?”

  “It makes another story,” said Elizabeth. “And I have to make bread this morning. Is there anything you need?”

  “Not a thing. Except a new pair of legs.”

  “For those, you’ll have to wait for time and the doctor,” she said, and left the room.

  FIVE

  All the excitement that ordinarily will come to an idle and a drifting life had come to Carrick Dunmore, but he felt that this was his strangest adventure, in a way. This calm acceptance of him into a family of which he never had heard the day before seemed to Dunmore a dream-like thing. Above all, there was about Elizabeth Furneaux an air almost of reverence, of covert reverence, as she waited upon him.

  It made Carrick Dunmore smile a little, as he considered it—and then he went to sleep again, deeply to sleep, and into a profoundly vivid dream of himself, axe in hand, battering down the wall of the jail and taking from it an unlucky fellow of his own name.

  “Robert Bruce is King of Scotland, but I am the king of the Dunmores,” he was saying when he wakened, and found that it was late afternoon, the room filled with soft blue shadow, and at the foot of his bed was Elizabeth Furneaux.

  “You’re a grand sleeper,” she said. “The doctor has been here and thumbed you over like a schoolboy’s textbook, and you didn’t open an eye.”

  “What does he say?”

  “He says that you can get up in the morning.”

  “That’s a good thing,” said Dunmore. “Sit down, Cousin Elizabeth. I’m mighty glad to see you ag’in.”

  “You’re hungry,” she said. “I can see that you’re ravenous.” She smiled, as though the idea pleased her.

  He pointed toward the picture on the wall. “I’ve been walkin’ up the streets of that town,” he explained, “ever since I fell asleep. I was so far inside of that picture that it seems queer to lie here clean outside of it ag’in.”

  “Do you like it?” she asked.

  “I like it pretty fine,” said Dunmore.

  “Thank you,” she said, “because I painted it. That’s a little town between Monte Carlo and Nice. It looks as though it will slip off the shoulder of the mountain every minute. The castle is up there. A mighty good castle that a whole army could bump its head against. From the walls all these roofs go winding and tangling down beneath you. One of the old owners of that castle used to heave a rock from the battlements whenever he was angry with one of the families, and the rock would go smashing through the house from attic to basement.”

  Dunmore grinned. “Those were the good old days,” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” she replied, “the good days for people like Carrick Dunmore.” She interrupted herself with a laugh. “I mean the Carrick who was the friend of Robert Bruce.”

  “Did those two get to be friends?” asked Dunmore.

  “Yes, they did. Robert Bruce was very angry, of course, when he had such a saucy answer made to him by a man who was simply a partisan leader . . . not a noble, not even a knight. So the king summoned his army and went rushing across to pull down Carrick Castle. The Earl of Carrick went along to enjoy the fun. But when the earl’s own men tried their hands at the outworks, they got such an unlucky reception that they ran away without stopping for their dead and wounded.

  “The king considered the castle as a hungry dog considers a bone, but finally he felt that the bone was too thick and also that there were more wasps than marrow inside. So he sent for Carrick Dunmore under a flag of truce, and the Dunmore went down to see him. He sat at meat with the king, and Robert Bruce gave the great Carrick a good many compliments. Among other things, he said he was sure that such a man must have great ancestors, and Carrick said that he had.

  “ ‘This is the reason that I have attained to some honor,’ said Carrick Dunmore. ‘This is my great-greatgrandfather,’ he said, and laid hold on a heavy lance, ‘and this is my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father.’

  “As he said this, he took hold successively of his shield, his sword, and his heavy battle-axe.”

  “The king would have liked that, I guess,” suggested Carrick Dunmore.

  “Of course he did, but he said . . . ‘All these ancestors will be of no avail to you unless you also carry with you the blessing of heaven.’

  “ ‘I have that, too,’ said Carrick Dunmore, and he took out a poniard as sharp and thin as an icicle that had almost been worn away in the sun.”

  “So he and the king were friends after that?” asked the young man.

  “They were friends ever after, but Carrick Dunmore never would take a title. The king used to ask him why he would not become a noble, and Carrick would answer . . . ‘You have in your country a good handful of dukes, a bushel of earls, and more lords, baronets, barons, and knights than would make ten acres of standing wheat, if every helmet were turned into an ear of corn. But in all Scotland, there is only one Dunmore.’ That was a good answer, don’t you think?” finished Elizabeth.

  “A mighty good answer,” said her guest, and they laughed together. “I suppose he died rich and happy?”

  “He was rich enough, I suppose, though he never had broad lands, as the word went in those days. He was a lazy fellow, you see, and it took a rude earl, or a king with an army, or some such thing, to stir him up.”

  “Ah,” said Carrick Dunmore, raising himself on his elbows, “was he really lazy?”

  “They say that he would sit all day with the sun in his face and never stir a hand.”

  The youth was greatly impressed and listened with an inward look in his eye. “Well, well,” he murmured, “how did he get rich, if he didn’t work a great deal?”

  “That’s what the king asked him. He wanted to know where were the estates that enabled him to live so richly because there was hardly a patch of land beyond the castle and the village that he could call his own. Carrick took Bruce up to the top of his keep and pointed at the horizon.

  “ ‘Look all around,’ he said. ‘There to the south, my cattle are grazing.’

  “ ‘On what lands?’ asked the king.

  “ ‘On the lands of the horizon,’ said Carrick, ‘and they’re getting fat on the blue of the sky.’

  “ ‘How far south do you pasture your cattle?’ asked the king, who still did not understand. ‘As far south as Oxenford,’ said Carrick. That was as much as to say, as far south as Oxford. You see this rascal of a Carrick Dunmore actually had raided as far south as Oxford in England.

  “Then he pointed to the west. ‘There are some of my richest meadowlands and my best crops, growing,’ he said.

  “ ‘Man,’ said the king, ‘I see there nothing but the naked blue ocean.’

  “ ‘You are right,’ said Carrick Dunmore, ‘and on it graze the fattest cattle in the world. I have there round-sided galleys from Ireland, and now and again I go out there and catch a good rich bull from Spain, fat with the sweet Spanish wines . . . I find bluff-browned English bulls there, too, and the joy of my blue meadows is that my cattle are so wild that they give me beef and hunting at the same time.’

  “The king understood and laughed. ‘Your cattle,’ he said, ‘always graze on the blue?’

  “ ‘Yes,’ said Carrick. ‘Always.’

  “That was how he came to be called ‘Dunmore of the Blue’.”

  “Blue being a polite way of saying . . . ‘Dunmore of the Highway’?” asked young Carrick.

  “Well, highways run into the blue edge of the sky somewhere,” she answered. “I’ll go off and get your dinner ready.”

  So Carrick Dunmore dined mightily, and he slept again until the room was warm with the sun of the next morning. Then he rose and tried himself. He stretched each limb. He flexed and unflexed the muscles of his arms and legs, and he found that he was fit again. So he sh
aved and dressed and went out of the house. He found Elizabeth Furneaux raking up some alfalfa hay that grew among the fig trees of the front yard and was irrigated by water from the windmill.

  From the outside, the house was exactly as he had imagined it. It was a big, white, square-shouldered place, with the paint peeled off, here and there, leaving a dull bluish look to the walls. It had a baronial air as it lifted its head above the old surrounding trees, but plainly the house had come to its dotage. Everything looked pleasant, and homelike, and poverty-stricken.

  Elizabeth Furneaux seemed very surprised to see him.

  “You shouldn’t be up,” she said, “until the doctor permits you to. You’d better go back to bed.”

  “I wouldn’t have any use for doctors,” said Carrick Dunmore, “if they was gold set with diamonds and small enough to be wore on a watch chain. Gimme the rake, Elizabeth, and I’ll finish this bit of alfalfa.”

  She held him off with an air of horror. “Let an invalid come out to work in a hayfield? I should say not! You go back and rest, Carrick.”

  He went back, willingly enough, and sat in the sun under the fig trees until she had finished the raking and hurried into the house to get his breakfast ready.

  The last of the dew was evaporating, although the dust of the backyard was still darkened by it, and a sweet smell of hay floated to Carrick Dunmore. Out of the distance he heard the lowing of cattle. Somewhere, too, on the edge of the sky, a dog or a wolf was baying loudly. He smiled to himself, as if it were a voice speaking to him from the country of Dunmore of the Blue. He liked the idea of this man. It was doubly soothing to him to know of an ancestor so important, wearing his name, and also, above all, lazy like him. For he detested every physical effort except play. He reclined dreamily beneath the fig tree, until Cousin Elizabeth came out bearing to him a huge breakfast tray with twice as much on it as on the preceding morning.