Sick Heart River (Mountain Meadow) E-Book

John Buchan

• Herausgeber: John Buchan
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Sick Heart River (1941) is a novel by Scottish author John Buchan set in Canada. It was published posthumously. The book was published in the United States under the title Mountain Meadow. Sir Edward Leithen is diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis and given a year to live. While deciding how to spend his remaining days, an American associate, John S. Blenkiron, requests help to find his niece's husband, Francis Galliard, who has disappeared from his very successful financial career in New York and fled to Canada. Leithen follows Galliard to the Quebec. During this he finds a mountain meadow he had seen on a trip thirty years earlier and which has stayed in his memory since.

Leseprobe

Sick Heart River

by

John Buchan

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PART I

“Thus said Alfred:

If thou hast a woe, tell it not to the weakling,

Tell it to thy saddle-bow, and ride singing forth.”

Proverbs of Alfred.

1

Leithen had been too busy all day to concern himself with the thoughts which hung heavily at the back of his mind. In the morning he had visited his bankers to look into his money affairs. These were satisfactory enough: for years he had been earning a large income and spending little of it; his investments were mostly in trustee stocks; he found that he possessed, at a safe computation, a considerable fortune, while his Cotswold estate would find a ready sale. Next came his solicitors, for he was too wise a man to make the mistake of many barristers and tinker with his own will. He gave instructions for bringing the old one up to date. There were a few legacies by way of mementoes to old friends, a considerable gift to his college, donations to certain charities, and the residue to his nephew Charles, his only near relation.

He forced himself to lunch at one of his clubs, in a corner where no one came near him, though Archie Roylance waved a greeting across the dining-room. Then he spent a couple of hours with his clerk in his Temple chambers, looking through the last of his briefs. There were not a great many, since, for some months, he had been steadily refusing work. The batch of cases for opinion he could soon clear off, and one big case in the Lords he must argue next week, for it involved a point of law in which he had always taken a special interest. The briefs for the following term would be returned. The clerk, who had been with him for thirty years, was getting on in life and would be glad to retire on an ample pension. Still, it was a painful parting.

“It’s a big loss to the Bar, Sir Edward, sir,” old Mellon said, “and it’s pretty well the end of things for me. You have been a kind master to me, sir, and I’m proud to have served you. I hope you are going to have many happy years yet.”

But there had been a look of pain in the old man’s eyes which told Leithen that he had guessed what he dared not hint at.

He had tea at the House of Commons with the Chief Whip, a youngish man named Ritson, who in the War had been a subaltern in his own battalion. Ritson listened to him with a wrinkled brow and troubled eyes.

“Have you told your local people?” he asked.

“I’ll write to them tomorrow. I thought I ought to tell you first. There’s no fear of losing the seat. My majority has never been less than six thousand, and there’s an excellent candidate ready in young Walmer.”

“We shall miss you terribly, you know. There’s no one to take your place.”

Leithen smiled. “I haven’t been pulling my weight lately.”

“Perhaps not. But I’m thinking of what’s coming. If there’s an election, we’re going to win all right, and we’ll want you badly in the new Government. It needn’t be a law office. You can have your pick of half a dozen jobs. Only yesterday the Chief was speaking to me about you.” And he repeated a conversation he had had with the man who would be the next Prime Minister.