Somewhere about two in the morning a squall had burst upon the castle, a
clap of screaming wind that made the towers rock, and a copious drift of
rain that streamed from the windows. The wind soon blew itself out, but
the day broke cloudy and dripping, and when the little party assembled at
breakfast their humours appeared to have changed with the change of
weather. Nance had been brooding on the scene at the river-side,
applying it in various ways to her particular aspirations, and the
result, which was hardly to her mind, had taken the colour out of her
cheeks. Mr. Archer, too, was somewhat absent, his thoughts were of a
mingled strain; and even upon his usually impassive countenance there
were betrayed successive depths of depression and starts of exultation,
which the girl translated in terms of her own hopes and fears. But
Jonathan was the most altered: he was strangely silent, hardly passing a
word, and watched Mr. Archer with an eager and furtive eye. It seemed as
if the idea that had so long hovered before him had now taken a more
solid shape, and, while it still attracted, somewhat alarmed his
imagination.
At this rate, conversation languished into a silence which was only
broken by the gentle and ghostly noises of the rain on the stone roof and
about all that field of ruins; and they were all relieved when the note
of a man whistling and the sound of approaching footsteps in the grassy
court announced a visitor. It was the ostler from the ‘Green Dragon’
bringing a letter for Mr. Archer. Nance saw her hero’s face contract and
then relax again at sight of it; and she thought that she knew why, for
the sprawling, gross black characters of the address were easily
distinguishable from the fine writing on the former letter that had so
much disturbed him. He opened it and began to read; while the ostler sat
down to table with a pot of ale, and proceeded to make himself agreeable
after his fashion.
‘Fine doings down our way, Miss Nance,’ said he. ‘I haven’t been abed
this blessed night.’
Nance expressed a polite interest, but her eye was on Mr. Archer, who was
reading his letter with a face of such extreme indifference that she was
tempted to suspect him of assumption.
‘Yes,’ continued the ostler, ‘not been the like of it this fifteen years:
the North Mail stopped at the three stones.’
Jonathan’s cup was at his lip, but at this moment he choked with a great
splutter; and Mr. Archer, as if startled by the noise, made so sudden a
movement that one corner of the sheet tore off and stayed between his
finger and thumb. It was some little time before the old man was
sufficiently recovered to beg the ostler to go on, and he still kept
coughing and crying and rubbing his eyes. Mr. Archer, on his side, laid
the letter down, and, putting his hands in his pocket, listened gravely
to the tale.
‘Yes,’ resumed Sam, ‘the North Mail was stopped by a single horseman;
dash my wig, but I admire him! There were four insides and two out, and
poor Tom Oglethorpe, the guard. Tom showed himself a man; let fly his
blunderbuss at him; had him covered, too, and could swear to that; but
the Captain never let on, up with a pistol and fetched poor Tom a bullet
through the body. Tom, he squelched upon the seat, all over blood. Up
comes the Captain to the window. “Oblige me,” says he, “with what you
have.” Would you believe it? Not a man says cheep!—not them. “Thy
hands over thy head.” Four watches, rings, snuff-boxes, seven-and-forty
pounds overhead in gold. One Dicksee, a grazier, tries it on: gives him
a guinea. “Beg your pardon,” says the Captain, “I think too highly of
you to take it at your hand. I will not take less than ten from such a
gentleman.” This Dicksee had his money in his stocking, but there was
the pistol at his eye. Down he goes, offs with his stocking, and there
was thirty golden guineas. “Now,” says the Captain, “you’ve tried it on
with me, but I scorns the advantage. Ten I said,” he says, “and ten I
take.” So, dash my buttons, I call that man a man!’ cried Sam in cordial
admiration.
‘Well, and then?’ says Mr. Archer.
‘Then,’ resumed Sam, ‘that old fat fagot Engleton, him as held the
ribbons and drew up like a lamb when he was told to, picks up his cattle,
and drives off again. Down they came to the “Dragon,” all singing like
as if they was scalded, and poor Tom saying nothing. You would ‘a’
thought they had all lost the King’s crown to hear them. Down gets this
Dicksee. “Postmaster,” he says, taking him by the arm, “this is a most
abominable thing,” he says. Down gets a Major Clayton, and gets the old
man by the other arm. “We’ve been robbed,” he cries, “robbed!” Down
gets the others, and all around the old man telling their story, and what
they had lost, and how they was all as good as ruined; till at last Old
Engleton says, says he, “How about Oglethorpe?” says he. “Ay,” says the
others, “how about the guard?” Well, with that we bousted him down, as
white as a rag and all blooded like a sop. I thought he was dead. Well,
he ain’t dead; but he’s dying, I fancy.’
‘Did you say four watches?’ said Jonathan.
‘Four, I think. I wish it had been forty,’ cried Sam. ‘Such a party of
soused herrings I never did see—not a man among them bar poor Tom. But
us that are the servants on the road have all the risk and none of the
profit.’
‘And this brave fellow,’ asked Mr. Archer, very quietly, ‘this
Oglethorpe—how is he now?’
‘Well, sir, with my respects, I take it he has a hole bang through him,’
said Sam. ‘The doctor hasn’t been yet. He’d ‘a’ been bright and early
if it had been a passenger. But, doctor or no, I’ll make a good guess
that Tom won’t see to-morrow. He’ll die on a Sunday, will poor Tom; and
they do say that’s fortunate.’
‘Did Tom see him that did it?’ asked Jonathan.
‘Well, he saw him,’ replied Sam, ‘but not to swear by. Said he was a
very tall man, and very big, and had a ’ankerchief about his face, and a
very quick shot, and sat his horse like a thorough gentleman, as he is.’
‘A gentleman!’ cried Nance. ‘The dirty knave!’
‘Well, I calls a man like that a gentleman,’ returned the ostler; ‘that’s
what I mean by a gentleman.’
‘You don’t know much of them, then,’ said Nance.
‘A gentleman would scorn to stoop to such a thing. I call my uncle a
better gentleman than any thief.’
‘And you would be right,’ said Mr. Archer.
‘How many snuff-boxes did he get?’ asked Jonathan.
‘O, dang me if I know,’ said Sam; ‘I didn’t take an inventory.’
‘I will go back with you, if you please,’ said Mr. Archer. ‘I should
like to see poor Oglethorpe. He has behaved well.’
‘At your service, sir,’ said Sam, jumping to his feet. ‘I dare to say a
gentleman like you would not forget a poor fellow like Tom—no, nor a
plain man like me, sir, that went without his sleep to nurse him. And
excuse me, sir,’ added Sam, ‘you won’t forget about the letter neither?’
‘Surely not,’ said Mr. Archer.
Oglethorpe lay in a low bed, one of several in a long garret of the inn.
The rain soaked in places through the roof and fell in minute drops;
there was but one small window; the beds were occupied by servants, the
air of the garret was both close and chilly. Mr. Archer’s heart sank at
the threshold to see a man lying perhaps mortally hurt in so poor a
sick-room, and as he drew near the low bed he took his hat off. The
guard was a big, blowsy, innocent-looking soul with a thick lip and a
broad nose, comically turned up; his cheeks were crimson, and when Mr.
Archer laid a finger on his brow he found him burning with fever.
‘I fear you suffer much,’ he said, with a catch in his voice, as he sat
down on the bedside.
‘I suppose I do, sir,’ returned Oglethorpe; ‘it is main sore.’
‘I am used to wounds and wounded men,’ returned the visitor. ‘I have
been in the wars and nursed brave fellows before now; and, if you will
suffer me, I propose to stay beside you till the doctor comes.’
‘It is very good of you, sir, I am sure,’ said Oglethorpe. ‘The trouble
is they won’t none of them let me drink.’
‘If you will not tell the doctor,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘I will give you some
water. They say it is bad for a green wound, but in the Low Countries we
all drank water when we found the chance, and I could never perceive we
were the worse for it.’
‘Been wounded yourself, sir, perhaps?’ called Oglethorpe.
‘Twice,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘and was as proud of these hurts as any lady of
her bracelets. ’Tis a fine thing to smart for one’s duty; even in the
pangs of it there is contentment.’
‘Ah, well!’ replied the guard, ‘if you’ve been shot yourself, that
explains. But as for contentment, why, sir, you see, it smarts, as you
say. And then, I have a good wife, you see, and a bit of a brat—a little
thing, so high.’
‘Don’t move,’ said Mr. Archer.
‘No, sir, I will not, and thank you kindly,’ said Oglethorpe. ‘At York
they are. A very good lass is my wife—far too good for me. And the
little rascal—well, I don’t know how to say it, but he sort of comes
round you. If I were to go, sir, it would be hard on my poor girl—main
hard on her!’
‘Ay, you must feel bitter hardly to the rogue that laid you here,’ said
Archer.
‘Why, no, sir, more against Engleton and the passengers,’ replied the
guard. ‘He played his hand, if you come to look at it; and I wish he had
shot worse, or me better. And yet I’ll go to my grave but what I covered
him,’ he cried. ‘It looks like witchcraft. I’ll go to my grave but what
he was drove full of slugs like a pepper-box.’
‘Quietly,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘you must not excite yourself. These
deceptions are very usual in war; the eye, in the moment of alert, is
hardly to be trusted, and when the smoke blows away you see the man you
fired at, taking aim, it may be, at yourself. You should observe, too,
that you were in the dark night, and somewhat dazzled by the lamps, and
that the sudden stopping of the mail had jolted you. In such
circumstances a man may miss, ay, even with a blunder-buss, and no blame
attach to his marksmanship.’ . . .
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER
PROLOGUE—THE WINE-SELLER’S WIFE
There was a wine-seller’s shop, as you went down to the river in the city
of the Anti-popes. There a man was served with good wine of the country
and plain country fare; and the place being clean and quiet, with a
prospect on the river, certain gentlemen who dwelt in that city in
attendance on a great personage made it a practice (when they had any
silver in their purses) to come and eat there and be private.
They called the wine-seller Paradou. He was built more like a bullock
than a man, huge in bone and brawn, high in colour, and with a hand like
a baby for size. Marie-Madeleine was the name of his wife; she was of
Marseilles, a city of entrancing women, nor was any fairer than herself.
She was tall, being almost of a height with Paradou; full-girdled,
point-device in every form, with an exquisite delicacy in the face; her
nose and nostrils a delight to look at from the fineness of the
sculpture, her eyes inclined a hair’s-breadth inward, her colour between
dark and fair, and laid on even like a flower’s. A faint rose dwelt in
it, as though she had been found unawares bathing, and had blushed from
head to foot. She was of a grave countenance, rarely smiling; yet it
seemed to be written upon every part of her that she rejoiced in life.
Her husband loved the heels of her feet and the knuckles of her fingers;
he loved her like a glutton and a brute; his love hung about her like an
atmosphere; one that came by chance into the wine-shop was aware of that
passion; and it might be said that by the strength of it the woman had
been drugged or spell-bound. She knew not if she loved or loathed him;
he was always in her eyes like something monstrous—monstrous in his love,
monstrous in his person, horrific but imposing in his violence; and her
sentiment swung back and forward from desire to sickness. But the mean,
where it dwelt chiefly, was an apathetic fascination, partly of horror;
as of Europa in mid ocean with her bull.
On the 10th November 1749 there sat two of the foreign gentlemen in the
wine-seller’s shop. They were both handsome men of a good presence,
richly dressed. The first was swarthy and long and lean, with an alert,
black look, and a mole upon his cheek. The other was more fair. He
seemed very easy and sedate, and a little melancholy for so young a man,
but his smile was charming. In his grey eyes there was much abstraction,
as of one recalling fondly that which was past and lost. Yet there was
strength and swiftness in his limbs; and his mouth set straight across
his face, the under lip a thought upon side, like that of a man
accustomed to resolve. These two talked together in a rude outlandish
speech that no frequenter of that wine-shop understood. The swarthy man
answered to the name of _Ballantrae_; he of the dreamy eyes was sometimes
called _Balmile_, and sometimes _my Lord_, or _my Lord Gladsmuir_; but
when the title was given him, he seemed to put it by as if in jesting,
not without bitterness.
The mistral blew in the city. The first day of that wind, they say in
the countries where its voice is heard, it blows away all the dust, the
second all the stones, and the third it blows back others from the
mountains. It was now come to the third day; outside the pebbles flew
like hail, and the face of the river was puckered, and the very
building-stones in the walls of houses seemed to be curdled with the
savage cold and fury of that continuous blast. It could be heard to hoot
in all the chimneys of the city; it swept about the wine-shop, filling
the room with eddies; the chill and gritty touch of it passed between the
nearest clothes and the bare flesh; and the two gentlemen at the far
table kept their mantles loose about their shoulders. The roughness of
these outer hulls, for they were plain travellers’ cloaks that had seen
service, set the greater mark of richness on what showed below of their
laced clothes; for the one was in scarlet and the other in violet and
white, like men come from a scene of ceremony; as indeed they were.
It chanced that these fine clothes were not without their influence on
the scene which followed, and which makes the prologue of our tale. For
a long time Balmile was in the habit to come to the wine-shop and eat a
meal or drink a measure of wine; sometimes with a comrade; more often
alone, when he would sit and dream and drum upon the table, and the
thoughts would show in the man’s face in little glooms and lightenings,
like the sun and the clouds upon a water. For a long time
Marie-Madeleine had observed him apart. His sadness, the beauty of his
smile when by any chance he remembered her existence and addressed her,
the changes of his mind signalled forth by an abstruse play of feature,
the mere fact that he was foreign and a thing detached from the local and
the accustomed, insensibly attracted and affected her. Kindness was
ready in her mind; it but lacked the touch of an occasion to effervesce
and crystallise. Now Balmile had come hitherto in a very poor plain
habit; and this day of the mistral, when his mantle was just open, and
she saw beneath it the glancing of the violet and the velvet and the
silver, and the clustering fineness of the lace, it seemed to set the man
in a new light, with which he shone resplendent to her fancy.
The high inhuman note of the wind, the violence and continuity of its
outpouring, and the fierce touch of it upon man’s whole periphery,
accelerated the functions of the mind. It set thoughts whirling, as it
whirled the trees of the forest; it stirred them up in flights, as it
stirred up the dust in chambers. As brief as sparks, the fancies
glittered and succeeded each other in the mind of Marie-Madeleine; and
the grave man with the smile, and the bright clothes under the plain
mantle, haunted her with incongruous explanations. She considered him,
the unknown, the speaker of an unknown tongue, the hero (as she placed
him) of an unknown romance, the dweller upon unknown memories. She
recalled him sitting there alone, so immersed, so stupefied; yet she was
sure he was not stupid. She recalled one day when he had remained a long
time motionless, with parted lips, like one in the act of starting up,
his eyes fixed on vacancy. Any one else must have looked foolish; but
not he. She tried to conceive what manner of memory had thus entranced
him; she forged for him a past; she showed him to herself in every light
of heroism and greatness and misfortune; she brooded with petulant
intensity on all she knew and guessed of him. Yet, though she was
already gone so deep, she was still unashamed, still unalarmed; her
thoughts were still disinterested; she had still to reach the stage at
which—beside the image of that other whom we love to contemplate and to
adorn—we place the image of ourself and behold them together with
delight.
She stood within the counter, her hands clasped behind her back, her
shoulders pressed against the wall, her feet braced out. Her face was
bright with the wind and her own thoughts; as a fire in a similar day of
tempest glows and brightens on a hearth, so she seemed to glow, standing
there, and to breathe out energy. It was the first time Ballantrae had
visited that wine-seller’s, the first time he had seen the wife; and his
eyes were true to her.
‘I perceive your reason for carrying me to this very draughty tavern,’ he
said at last.
‘I believe it is propinquity,’ returned Balmile.
‘You play dark,’ said Ballantrae, ‘but have a care! Be more frank with
me, or I will cut you out. I go through no form of qualifying my threat,
which would be commonplace and not conscientious. There is only one
point in these campaigns: that is the degree of admiration offered by the
man; and to our hostess I am in a posture to make victorious love.’
‘If you think you have the time, or the game worth the candle,’ replied
the other with a shrug.
‘One would suppose you were never at the pains to observe her,’ said
Ballantrae.
‘I am not very observant,’ said Balmile. ‘She seems comely.’
‘You very dear and dull dog!’ cried Ballantrae; ‘chastity is the most
besotting of the virtues. Why, she has a look in her face beyond
singing! I believe, if you was to push me hard, I might trace it home to
a trifle of a squint. What matters? The height of beauty is in the
touch that’s wrong, that’s the modulation in a tune. ’Tis the devil we
all love; I owe many a conquest to my mole’—he touched it as he spoke
with a smile, and his eyes glittered;—‘we are all hunchbacks, and beauty
is only that kind of deformity that I happen to admire. But come!
Because you are chaste, for which I am sure I pay you my respects, that
is no reason why you should be blind. Look at her, look at the delicious
nose of her, look at her cheek, look at her ear, look at her hand and
wrist—look at the whole baggage from heels to crown, and tell me if she
wouldn’t melt on a man’s tongue.’
As Ballantrae spoke, half jesting, half enthusiastic, Balmile was
constrained to do as he was bidden. He looked at the woman, admired her
excellences, and was at the same time ashamed for himself and his
companion. So it befell that when Marie-Madeleine raised her eyes, she
met those of the subject of her contemplations fixed directly on herself
with a look that is unmistakable, the look of a person measuring and
valuing another—and, to clench the false impression, that his glance was
instantly and guiltily withdrawn. The blood beat back upon her heart and
leaped again; her obscure thoughts flashed clear before her; she flew in
fancy straight to his arms like a wanton, and fled again on the instant
like a nymph. And at that moment there chanced an interruption, which
not only spared her embarrassment, but set the last consecration on her
now articulate love.
Into the wine-shop there came a French gentleman, arrayed in the last
refinement of the fashion, though a little tumbled by his passage in the
wind. It was to be judged he had come from the same formal gathering at
which the others had preceded him; and perhaps that he had gone there in
the hope to meet with them, for he came up to Ballantrae with
unceremonious eagerness.
‘At last, here you are!’ he cried in French. ‘I thought I was to miss
you altogether.’
The Scotsmen rose, and Ballantrae, after the first greetings, laid his
hand on his companion’s shoulder.
‘My lord,’ said he, ‘allow me to present to you one of my best friends
and one of our best soldiers, the Lord Viscount Gladsmuir.’
The two bowed with the elaborate elegance of the period.
‘_Monseigneur_,’ said Balmile, ‘_je n’ai pas la prétention de m’affubler
d’un titre que la mauvaise fortune de mon roi ne me permet pas de porter
comma il sied_. _Je m’appelle_, _pour vous servir_, _Blair de Balmile
tout court_.’ [My lord, I have not the effrontery to cumber myself with
a title which the ill fortunes of my king will not suffer me to bear the
way it should be. I call myself, at your service, plain Blair of
Balmile.]
‘_Monsieur le Vicomte ou monsieur Blèr’ de Balmaïl_,’ replied the
newcomer, ‘_le nom n’y fait rien_, _et l’on connaît vos beaux faits_.’
[The name matters nothing, your gallant actions are known.]
A few more ceremonies, and these three, sitting down together to the
table, called for wine. It was the happiness of Marie-Madeleine to wait
unobserved upon the prince of her desires. She poured the wine, he drank
of it; and that link between them seemed to her, for the moment, close as
a caress. Though they lowered their tones, she surprised great names
passing in their conversation, names of kings, the names of de Gesvre and
Belle-Isle; and the man who dealt in these high matters, and she who was
now coupled with him in her own thoughts, seemed to swim in mid air in a
transfiguration. Love is a crude core, but it has singular and
far-reaching fringes; in that passionate attraction for the stranger that
now swayed and mastered her, his harsh incomprehensible language, and
these names of grandees in his talk, were each an element.
The Frenchman stayed not long, but it was plain he left behind him matter
of much interest to his companions; they spoke together earnestly, their
heads down, the woman of the wine-shop totally forgotten; and they were
still so occupied when Paradou returned.
This man’s love was unsleeping. The even bluster of the mistral, with
which he had been combating some hours, had not suspended, though it had
embittered, that predominant passion. His first look was for his wife, a
look of hope and suspicion, menace and humility and love, that made the
over-blooming brute appear for the moment almost beautiful. She returned
his glance, at first as though she knew him not, then with a swiftly
waxing coldness of intent; and at last, without changing their direction,
she had closed her eyes.
There passed across her mind during that period much that Paradou could
not have understood had it been told to him in words: chiefly the sense
of an enlightening contrast betwixt the man who talked of kings and the
man who kept a wine-shop, betwixt the love she yearned for and that to
which she had been long exposed like a victim bound upon the altar.
There swelled upon her, swifter than the Rhone, a tide of abhorrence and
disgust. She had succumbed to the monster, humbling herself below
animals; and now she loved a hero, aspiring to the semi-divine. It was
in the pang of that humiliating thought that she had closed her eyes.
Paradou—quick as beasts are quick, to translate silence—felt the insult
through his blood; his inarticulate soul bellowed within him for revenge.
He glanced about the shop. He saw the two indifferent gentlemen deep in
talk, and passed them over: his fancy flying not so high. There was but
one other present, a country lout who stood swallowing his wine, equally
unobserved by all and unobserving—to him he dealt a glance of murderous
suspicion, and turned direct upon his wife. The wine-shop had lain
hitherto, a space of shelter, the scene of a few ceremonial passages and
some whispered conversation, in the howling river of the wind; the clock
had not yet ticked a score of times since Paradou’s appearance; and now,
as he suddenly gave tongue, it seemed as though the mistral had entered
at his heels.
‘What ails you, woman?’ he cried, smiting on the counter.
‘Nothing ails me,’ she replied. It was strange; but she spoke and stood
at that moment like a lady of degree, drawn upward by her aspirations.
‘You speak to me, by God, as though you scorned me!’ cried the husband.
The man’s passion was always formidable; she had often looked on upon its
violence with a thrill, it had been one ingredient in her fascination;
and she was now surprised to behold him, as from afar off, gesticulating
but impotent. His fury might be dangerous like a torrent or a gust of
wind, but it was inhuman; it might be feared or braved, it should never
be respected. And with that there came in her a sudden glow of courage
and that readiness to die which attends so closely upon all strong
passions.
‘I do scorn you,’ she said.
‘What is that?’ he cried.
‘I scorn you,’ she repeated, smiling.
‘You love another man!’ said he.
‘With all my soul,’ was her reply.
The wine-seller roared aloud so that the house rang and shook with it.
‘Is this the—?’ he cried, using a foul word, common in the South; and he
seized the young countryman and dashed him to the ground. There he lay
for the least interval of time insensible; thence fled from the house,
the most terrified person in the county. The heavy measure had escaped
from his hands, splashing the wine high upon the wall. Paradou caught
it. ‘And you?’ he roared to his wife, giving her the same name in the
feminine, and he aimed at her the deadly missile. She expected it,
motionless, with radiant eyes.
But before it sped, Paradou was met by another adversary, and the
unconscious rivals stood confronted. It was hard to say at that moment
which appeared the more formidable. In Paradou, the whole muddy and
truculent depths of the half-man were stirred to frenzy; the lust of
destruction raged in him; there was not a feature in his face but it
talked murder. Balmile had dropped his cloak: he shone out at once in
his finery, and stood to his full stature; girt in mind and body all his
resources, all his temper, perfectly in command in his face the light of
battle. Neither spoke; there was no blow nor threat of one; it was war
reduced to its last element, the spiritual; and the huge wine-seller
slowly lowered his weapon. Balmile was a noble, he a commoner; Balmile
exulted in an honourable cause. Paradou already perhaps began to be
ashamed of his violence. Of a sudden, at least, the tortured brute
turned and fled from the shop in the footsteps of his former victim, to
whose continued flight his reappearance added wings.
So soon as Balmile appeared between her husband and herself,
Marie-Madeleine transferred to him her eyes. It might be her last
moment, and she fed upon that face; reading there inimitable courage and
illimitable valour to protect. And when the momentary peril was gone by,
and the champion turned a little awkwardly towards her whom he had
rescued, it was to meet, and quail before, a gaze of admiration more
distinct than words. He bowed, he stammered, his words failed him; he
who had crossed the floor a moment ago, like a young god, to smite,
returned like one discomfited; got somehow to his place by the table,
muffled himself again in his discarded cloak, and for a last touch of the
ridiculous, seeking for anything to restore his countenance, drank of the
wine before him, deep as a porter after a heavy lift. It was little
wonder if Ballantrae, reading the scene with malevolent eyes, laughed out
loud and brief, and drank with raised glass, ‘To the champion of the
Fair.’
Marie-Madeleine stood in her old place within the counter; she disdained
the mocking laughter; it fell on her ears, but it did not reach her
spirit. For her, the world of living persons was all resumed again into
one pair, as in the days of Eden; there was but the one end in life, the
one hope before her, the one thing needful, the one thing possible—to be
his.
CHAPTER I—THE PRINCE
That same night there was in the city of Avignon a young man in distress
of mind. Now he sat, now walked in a high apartment, full of draughts
and shadows. A single candle made the darkness visible; and the light
scarce sufficed to show upon the wall, where they had been recently and
rudely nailed, a few miniatures and a copper medal of the young man’s
head. The same was being sold that year in London, to admiring
thousands. The original was fair; he had beautiful brown eyes, a
beautiful bright open face; a little feminine, a little hard, a little
weak; still full of the light of youth, but already beginning to be
vulgarised; a sordid bloom come upon it, the lines coarsened with a touch
of puffiness. He was dressed, as for a gala, in peach-colour and silver;
his breast sparkled with stars and was bright with ribbons; for he had
held a levee in the afternoon and received a distinguished personage
incognito. Now he sat with a bowed head, now walked precipitately to and
fro, now went and gazed from the uncurtained window, where the wind was
still blowing, and the lights winked in the darkness.
The bells of Avignon rose into song as he was gazing; and the high notes
and the deep tossed and drowned, boomed suddenly near or were suddenly
swallowed up, in the current of the mistral. Tears sprang in the pale
blue eyes; the expression of his face was changed to that of a more
active misery, it seemed as if the voices of the bells reached, and
touched and pained him, in a waste of vacancy where even pain was
welcome. Outside in the night they continued to sound on, swelling and
fainting; and the listener heard in his memory, as it were their
harmonies, joy-bells clashing in a northern city, and the acclamations of
a multitude, the cries of battle, the gross voices of cannon, the stridor
of an animated life. And then all died away, and he stood face to face
with himself in the waste of vacancy, and a horror came upon his mind,
and a faintness on his brain, such as seizes men upon the brink of
cliffs.
On the table, by the side of the candle, stood a tray of glasses, a
bottle, and a silver bell. He went thither swiftly, then his hand
lowered first above the bell, then settled on the bottle. Slowly he
filled a glass, slowly drank it out; and, as a tide of animal warmth
recomforted the recesses of his nature, stood there smiling at himself.
He remembered he was young; the funeral curtains rose, and he saw his
life shine and broaden and flow out majestically, like a river sunward.
The smile still on his lips, he lit a second candle and a third; a fire
stood ready built in a chimney, he lit that also; and the fir-cones and
the gnarled olive billets were swift to break in flame and to crackle on
the hearth, and the room brightened and enlarged about him like his
hopes. To and fro, to and fro, he went, his hands lightly clasped, his
breath deeply and pleasurably taken. Victory walked with him; he marched
to crowns and empires among shouting followers; glory was his dress. And
presently again the shadows closed upon the solitary. Under the gilt of
flame and candle-light, the stone walls of the apartment showed down bare
and cold; behind the depicted triumph loomed up the actual failure:
defeat, the long distress of the flight, exile, despair, broken
followers, mourning faces, empty pockets, friends estranged. The memory
of his father rose in his mind: he, too, estranged and defied; despair
sharpened into wrath. There was one who had led armies in the field, who
had staked his life upon the family enterprise, a man of action and
experience, of the open air, the camp, the court, the council-room; and
he was to accept direction from an old, pompous gentleman in a home in
Italy, and buzzed about by priests? A pretty king, if he had not a
martial son to lean upon! A king at all?
‘There was a weaver (of all people) joined me at St. Ninians; he was more
of a man than my papa!’ he thought. ‘I saw him lie doubled in his blood
and a grenadier below him—and he died for my papa! All died for him, or
risked the dying, and I lay for him all those months in the rain and
skulked in heather like a fox; and now he writes me his advice! calls me
Carluccio—me, the man of the house, the only king in that king’s race.’
He ground his teeth. ‘The only king in Europe!’ Who else? Who has done
and suffered except me? who has lain and run and hidden with his faithful
subjects, like a second Bruce? Not my accursed cousin, Louis of France,
at least, the lewd effeminate traitor!’ And filling the glass to the
brim, he drank a king’s damnation. Ah, if he had the power of Louis,
what a king were here!
The minutes followed each other into the past, and still he persevered in
this debilitating cycle of emotions, still fed the fire of his excitement
with driblets of Rhine wine: a boy at odds with life, a boy with a spark
of the heroic, which he was now burning out and drowning down in futile
reverie and solitary excess.
From two rooms beyond, the sudden sound of a raised voice attracted him.
‘By . . .
HEATHERCAT
CHAPTER I—TRAQUAIRS OF MONTROYMONT
The period of this tale is in the heat of the _killing-time_; the scene
laid for the most part in solitary hills and morasses, haunted only by
the so-called Mountain Wanderers, the dragoons that came in chase of
them, the women that wept on their dead bodies, and the wild birds of the
moorland that have cried there since the beginning. It is a land of many
rain-clouds; a land of much mute history, written there in prehistoric
symbols. Strange green raths are to be seen commonly in the country,
above all by the kirkyards; barrows of the dead, standing stones; beside
these, the faint, durable footprints and handmarks of the Roman; and an
antiquity older perhaps than any, and still living and active—a complete
Celtic nomenclature and a scarce-mingled Celtic population. These rugged
and grey hills were once included in the boundaries of the Caledonian
Forest. Merlin sat here below his apple-tree and lamented Gwendolen;
here spoke with Kentigern; here fell into his enchanted trance. And the
legend of his slumber seems to body forth the story of that Celtic race,
deprived for so many centuries of their authentic speech, surviving with
their ancestral inheritance of melancholy perversity and patient,
unfortunate courage.
The Traquairs of Montroymont (_Mons Romanus_, as the erudite expound it)
had long held their seat about the head-waters of the Dule and in the
back parts of the moorland parish of Balweary. For two hundred years
they had enjoyed in these upland quarters a certain decency (almost to be
named distinction) of repute; and the annals of their house, or what is
remembered of them, were obscure and bloody. Ninian Traquair was
‘cruallie slochtered’ by the Crozers at the kirk-door of Balweary, anno
1482. Francis killed Simon Ruthven of Drumshoreland, anno 1540; bought
letters of slayers at the widow and heir, and, by a barbarous form of
compounding, married (without tocher) Simon’s daughter Grizzel, which is
the way the Traquairs and Ruthvens came first to an intermarriage. About
the last Traquair and Ruthven marriage, it is the business of this book,
among many other things, to tell.
The Traquairs were always strong for the Covenant; for the King also, but
the Covenant first; and it began to be ill days for Montroymont when the
Bishops came in and the dragoons at the heels of them. Ninian (then
laird) was an anxious husband of himself and the property, as the times
required, and it may be said of him, that he lost both. He was heavily
suspected of the Pentland Hills rebellion. When it came the length of
Bothwell Brig, he stood his trial before the Secret Council, and was
convicted of talking with some insurgents by the wayside, the subject of
the conversation not very clearly appearing, and of the reset and
maintenance of one Gale, a gardener man, who was seen before Bothwell
with a musket, and afterwards, for a continuance of months, delved the
garden at Montroymont. Matters went very ill with Ninian at the Council;
some of the lords were clear for treason; and even the boot was talked
of. But he was spared that torture; and at last, having pretty good
friendship among great men, he came off with a fine of seven thousand
marks, that caused the estate to groan. In this case, as in so many
others, it was the wife that made the trouble. She was a great keeper of
conventicles; would ride ten miles to one, and when she was fined,
rejoiced greatly to suffer for the Kirk; but it was rather her husband
that suffered. She had their only son, Francis, baptized privately by
the hands of Mr. Kidd; there was that much the more to pay for! She
could neither be driven nor wiled into the parish kirk; as for taking the
sacrament at the hands of any Episcopalian curate, and tenfold more at
those of Curate Haddo, there was nothing further from her purposes; and
Montroymont had to put his hand in his pocket month by month and year by
year. Once, indeed, the little lady was cast in prison, and the laird,
worthy, heavy, uninterested man, had to ride up and take her place; from
which he was not discharged under nine months and a sharp fine. It
scarce seemed she had any gratitude to him; she came out of gaol herself,
and plunged immediately deeper in conventicles, resetting recusants, and
all her old, expensive folly, only with greater vigour and openness,
because Montroymont was safe in the Tolbooth and she had no witness to
consider. When he was liberated and came back, with his fingers singed,
in December 1680, and late in the black night, my lady was from home. He
came into the house at his alighting, with a riding-rod yet in his hand;
and, on the servant-maid telling him, caught her by the scruff of the
neck, beat her violently, flung her down in the passageway, and went
upstairs to his bed fasting and without a light. It was three in the
morning when my lady returned from that conventicle, and, hearing of the
assault (because the maid had sat up for her, weeping), went to their
common chamber with a lantern in hand and stamping with her shoes so as
to wake the dead; it was supposed, by those that heard her, from a design
to have it out with the good man at once. The house-servants gathered on
the stair, because it was a main interest with them to know which of
these two was the better horse; and for the space of two hours they were
heard to go at the matter, hammer and tongs. Montroymont alleged he was
at the end of possibilities; it was no longer within his power to pay the
annual rents; she had served him basely by keeping conventicles while he
lay in prison for her sake; his friends were weary, and there was nothing
else before him but the entire loss of the family lands, and to begin
life again by the wayside as a common beggar. She took him up very sharp
and high: called upon him, if he were a Christian? and which he most
considered, the loss of a few dirty, miry glebes, or of his soul?
Presently he was heard to weep, and my lady’s voice to go on continually
like a running burn, only the words indistinguishable; whereupon it was
supposed a victory for her ladyship, and the domestics took themselves to
bed. The next day Traquair appeared like a man who had gone under the
harrows; and his lady wife thenceforward continued in her old course
without the least deflection.
Thenceforward Ninian went on his way without complaint, and suffered his
wife to go on hers without remonstrance. He still minded his estate, of
which it might be said he took daily a fresh farewell, and counted it
already lost; looking ruefully on the acres and the graves of his
fathers, on the moorlands where the wild-fowl consorted, the low,
gurgling pool of the trout, and the high, windy place of the calling
curlews—things that were yet his for the day and would be another’s
to-morrow; coming back again, and sitting ciphering till the dusk at his
approaching ruin, which no device of arithmetic could postpone beyond a
year or two. He was essentially the simple ancient man, the farmer and
landholder; he would have been content to watch the seasons come and go,
and his cattle increase, until the limit of age; he would have been
content at any time to die, if he could have left the estates
undiminished to an heir-male of his ancestors, that duty standing first
in his instinctive calendar. And now he saw everywhere the image of the
new proprietor come to meet him, and go sowing and reaping, or fowling
for his pleasure on the red moors, or eating the very gooseberries in the
Place garden; and saw always, on the other hand, the figure of Francis go
forth, a beggar, into the broad world.
It was in vain the poor gentleman sought to moderate; took every test and
took advantage of every indulgence; went and drank with the dragoons in
Balweary; attended the communion and came regularly to the church to
Curate Haddo, with his son beside him. The mad, raging, Presbyterian
zealot of a wife at home made all of no avail; and indeed the house must
have fallen years before if it had not been for the secret indulgence of
the curate, who had a great sympathy with the laird, and winked hard at
the doings in Montroymont. This curate was a man very ill reputed in the
countryside, and indeed in all Scotland. ‘Infamous Haddo’ is Shield’s
expression. But Patrick Walker is more copious. ‘Curate Hall Haddo,’
says he, _sub voce_ Peden, ‘or _Hell_ Haddo, as he was more justly to be
called, a pokeful of old condemned errors and the filthy vile lusts of
the flesh, a published whore-monger, a common gross drunkard, continually
and godlessly scraping and skirling on a fiddle, continually breathing
flames against the remnant of Israel. But the Lord put an end to his
piping, and all these offences were composed into one bloody grave.’ No
doubt this was written to excuse his slaughter; and I have never heard it
claimed for Walker that he was either a just witness or an indulgent
judge. At least, in a merely human character, Haddo comes off not wholly
amiss in the matter of these Traquairs: not that he showed any graces of
the Christian, but had a sort of Pagan decency, which might almost tempt
one to be concerned about his sudden, violent, and unprepared fate.
CHAPTER II—FRANCIE
Francie was eleven years old, shy, secret, and rather childish of his
age, though not backward in schooling, which had been pushed on far by a
private governor, one M‘Brair, a forfeited minister harboured in that
capacity at Montroymont. The boy, already much employed in secret by his
mother, was the most apt hand conceivable to run upon a message, to carry
food to lurking fugitives, or to stand sentry on the skyline above a
conventicle. It seemed no place on the moorlands was so naked but what
he would find cover there; and as he knew every hag, boulder, and
heather-bush in a circuit of seven miles about Montroymont, there was
scarce any spot but what he could leave or approach it unseen. This
dexterity had won him a reputation in that part of the country; and among
the many children employed in these dangerous affairs, he passed under
the by-name of Heathercat.
How much his father knew of this employment might be doubted. He took
much forethought for the boy’s future, seeing he was like to be left so
poorly, and would sometimes assist at his lessons, sighing heavily,
yawning deep, and now and again patting Francie on the shoulder if he
seemed to be doing ill, by way of a private, kind encouragement. But a
great part of the day was passed in aimless wanderings with his eyes
sealed, or in his cabinet sitting bemused over the particulars of the
coming bankruptcy; and the boy would be absent a dozen times for once
that his father would observe it.
On 2nd of July 1682 the boy had an errand from his mother, which must be
kept private from all, the father included in the first of them.
Crossing the braes, he hears the clatter of a horse’s shoes, and claps
down incontinent in a hag by the wayside. And presently he spied his
father come riding from one direction, and Curate Haddo walking from
another; and Montroymont leaning down from the saddle, and Haddo getting
on his toes (for he was a little, ruddy, bald-pated man, more like a
dwarf), they greeted kindly, and came to a halt within two fathoms of the
child.
‘Montroymont,’ the curate said, ‘the deil’s in ’t but I’ll have to
denunciate your leddy again.’
‘Deil’s in ’t indeed!’ says the laird.
‘Man! can ye no induce her to come to the kirk?’ pursues Haddo; ‘or to a
communion at the least of it? For the conventicles, let be! and the same
for yon solemn fule, M‘Brair: I can blink at them. But she’s got to come
to the kirk, Montroymont.’
‘Dinna speak of it,’ says the laird. ‘I can do nothing with her.’
‘Couldn’t ye try the stick to her? it works wonders whiles,’ suggested
Haddo. ‘No? I’m wae to hear it. And I suppose ye ken where you’re
going?’
‘Fine!’ said Montroymont. ‘Fine do I ken where: bankrup’cy and the Bass
Rock!’
‘Praise to my bones that I never married!’ cried the curate. ‘Well, it’s
a grievous thing to me to see an auld house dung down that was here
before Flodden Field. But naebody can say it was with my wish.’
‘No more they can, Haddo!’ says the laird. ‘A good friend ye’ve been to
me, first and last. I can give you that character with a clear
conscience.’
Whereupon they separated, and Montroymont rode briskly down into the Dule
Valley. But of the curate Francis was not to be quit so easily. He went
on with his little, brisk steps to the corner of a dyke, and stopped and
whistled and waved upon a lassie that was herding cattle there. This
Janet M‘Clour was a big lass, being taller than the curate; and what made
her look the more so, she was kilted very high. It seemed for a while
she would not come, and Francie heard her calling Haddo a ‘daft auld
fule,’ and saw her running and dodging him among the whins and hags till
he was fairly blown. But at the last he gets a bottle from his
plaid-neuk and holds it up to her; whereupon she came at once into a
composition, and the pair sat, drinking of the bottle, and daffing and
laughing together, on a mound of heather. The boy had scarce heard of
these vanities, or he might have been minded of a nymph and satyr, if
anybody could have taken long-leggit Janet for a nymph. But they seemed
to be huge friends, he thought; and was the more surprised, when the
curate had taken his leave, to see the lassie fling stones after him with
screeches of laughter, and Haddo turn about and caper, and shake his
staff at her, and laugh louder than herself. A wonderful merry pair,
they seemed; and when Francie had crawled out of the hag, he had a great
deal to consider in his mind. It was possible they were all fallen in
error about Mr. Haddo, he reflected—having seen him so tender with
Montroymont, and so kind and playful with the lass Janet; and he had a
temptation to go out of his road and question her herself upon the
matter. But he had a strong spirit of duty on him; and plodded on
instead over the braes till he came near the House of Cairngorm. There,
in a hollow place by the burnside that was shaded by some birks, he was
aware of a barefoot boy, perhaps a matter of three years older than
himself. The two approached with the precautions of a pair of strange
dogs, looking at each other queerly.
‘It’s ill weather on the hills,’ said the stranger, giving the watchword.
‘For a season,’ said Francie, ‘but the Lord will appear.’
‘Richt,’ said the barefoot boy; ‘wha’re ye frae?’
‘The Leddy Montroymont,’ says Francie.
‘Ha’e, then!’ says the stranger, and handed him a folded paper, and they
stood and looked at each other again. ‘It’s unco het,’ said the boy.
‘Dooms het,’ says Francie.
‘What do they ca’ ye?’ says the other.
‘Francie,’ says he. ‘I’m young Montroymont. They ca’ me Heathercat.’
‘I’m Jock Crozer,’ said the boy. And there was another pause, while each
rolled a stone under his foot.
‘Cast your jaiket and I’ll fecht ye for a bawbee,’ cried the elder boy
with sudden violence, and dramatically throwing back his jacket.
‘Na, I’ve nae time the now,’ said Francie, with a sharp thrill of alarm,
because Crozer was much the heavier boy.
‘Ye’re feared. Heathercat indeed!’ said Crozer, for among this infantile
army of spies and messengers, the fame of Crozer had gone forth and was
resented by his rivals. And with that they separated.
On his way home Francie was a good deal occupied with the recollection of
this untoward incident. The challenge had been fairly offered and basely
refused: the tale would be carried all over the country, and the lustre
of the name of Heathercat be dimmed. But the scene between Curate Haddo
and Janet M‘Clour had also given him much to think of: and he was still
puzzling over the case of the curate, and why such ill words were said of
him, and why, if he were so merry-spirited, he should yet preach so dry,
when coming over a knowe, whom should he see but Janet, sitting with her
back to him, minding her cattle! He was always a great child for secret,
stealthy ways, having been employed by his mother on errands when the
same was necessary; and he came behind the lass without her hearing.
‘Jennet,’ says he.
‘Keep me,’ cries Janet, springing up. ‘O, it’s you, Maister Francie!
Save us, what a fricht ye gied me.’
‘Ay, it’s me,’ said Francie. ‘I’ve been thinking, Jennet; I saw you and
the curate a while back—’
‘Brat!’ cried Janet, and coloured up crimson; and the one moment made as
if she would have stricken him with a ragged stick she had to chase her
bestial with, and the next was begging and praying that he would mention
it to none. It was ‘naebody’s business, whatever,’ she said; ‘it would
just start a clash in the country’; and there would be nothing left for
her but to drown herself in Dule Water.
‘Why?’ says Francie.
The girl looked at him and grew scarlet again.
‘And it isna that, anyway,’ continued Francie. ‘It was just that he
seemed so good to ye—like our Father in heaven, I thought; and I thought
that mebbe, perhaps, we had all been wrong about him from the first. But
I’ll have to tell Mr. M‘Brair; I’m under a kind of a bargain to him to
tell him all.’
‘Tell it to the divil if ye like for me!’ cried the lass. ‘I’ve naething
to be ashamed of. Tell M‘Brair to mind his ain affairs,’ she cried
again: ‘they’ll be hot eneugh for him, if Haddie likes!’ And so strode
off, shoving her beasts before her, and ever and again looking back and
crying angry words to the boy, where he stood mystified.
By the time he had got home his mind was made up that he would say
nothing to his mother. My Lady Montroymont was in the keeping-room,
reading a godly book; she was a wonderful frail little wife to make so
much noise in the world and be able to steer about that patient sheep her
husband; her eyes were like sloes, the fingers of her hands were like
tobacco-pipe shanks, her mouth shut tight like a trap; and even when she
was the most serious, and still more when she was angry, there hung about
her face the terrifying semblance of a smile.
‘Have ye gotten the billet, Francie said she; and when he had handed it
over, and she had read and burned it, ‘Did you see anybody?’ she asked.
‘I saw the laird,’ said Francie.
‘He didna see you, though?’ asked his mother.
‘Deil a fear,’ from Francie.
‘Francie!’ she cried. ‘What’s that I hear? an aith? The Lord forgive
me, have I broughten forth a brand for the burning, a fagot for
hell-fire?’
‘I’m very sorry, ma’am,’ said Francie. ‘I humbly beg the Lord’s pardon,
and yours, for my wickedness.’
‘H’m,’ grunted the lady. ‘Did ye see nobody else?’
‘No, ma’am,’ said Francie, with the face of an angel, ‘except Jock
Crozer, that gied me the billet.’
‘Jock Crozer!’ cried the lady. ‘I’ll Crozer them! Crozers indeed! What
next? Are we to repose the lives of a suffering remnant in Crozers? The
whole clan of them wants hanging, and if I had my way of it, they wouldna
want it long. Are you aware, sir, that these Crozers killed your
forebear at the kirk-door?’
‘You see, he was bigger ’n me,’ said Francie.
‘Jock Crozer!’ continued the lady. ‘That’ll be Clement’s son, the
biggest thief and reiver in the country-side. To trust a note to him!
But I’ll give the benefit of my opinions to Lady Whitecross when we two
forgather. Let her look to herself! I have no patience with
half-hearted carlines, that complies on the Lord’s day morning with the
kirk, and comes taigling the same night to the conventicle. The one or
the other! is what I say: hell or heaven—Haddie’s abominations or the
pure word of God dreeping from the lips of Mr. Arnot,
‘“Like honey from the honeycomb
That dreepeth, sweeter far.”’
My lady was now fairly launched, and that upon two congenial subjects:
the deficiencies of the Lady Whitecross and the turpitudes of the whole
Crozer race—which, indeed, had never been conspicuous for respectability.
She pursued the pair of them for twenty minutes on the clock with
wonderful animation and detail, something of the pulpit manner, and the
spirit of one possessed. ‘O hellish compliance!’ she exclaimed. ‘I
would not suffer a complier to break bread with Christian folk. Of all
the sins of this day there is not one so God-defying, so
Christ-humiliating, as damnable compliance’: the boy standing before her
meanwhile, and brokenly pursuing other thoughts, mainly of Haddo and
Janet, and Jock Crozer stripping off his jacket. And yet, with all his
distraction, it might be argued that he heard too much: his father and
himself being ‘compliers’—that is to say, attending the church of the
parish as the law required.
Presently, the lady’s passion beginning to decline, or her flux of ill
words to be exhausted, she dismissed her audience. Francie bowed low,
left the room, closed the door behind him: and then turned him about in
the passage-way, and with a low voice, but a prodigious deal of
sentiment, repeated the name of the evil one twenty times over, to the
end of which, for the greater efficacy, he tacked on ‘damnable’ and
‘hellish.’ _Fas est ab hoste doceri_—disrespect is made more pungent by
quotation; and there is no doubt but he felt relieved, and went upstairs
into his tutor’s chamber with a quiet mind. M‘Brair sat by the cheek of
the peat-fire and shivered, for he had a quartan ague and this was his
day. The great night-cap and plaid, the dark unshaven cheeks of the man,
and the white, thin hands that held the plaid about his chittering body,
made a sorrowful picture. But Francie knew and loved him; came straight
in, nestled close to the refugee, and told his story. M‘Brair had been
at the College with Haddo; the Presbytery had licensed both on the same
day; and at this tale, told with so much innocency by the boy, the heart
of the tutor was commoved.
‘Woe upon him! Woe upon that man!’ he cried. ‘O the unfaithful
shepherd! O the hireling and apostate minister! Make my matters hot for
me? quo’ she! the shameless limmer! And true it is, that he could repose
me in that nasty, stinking hole, the Canongate Tolbooth, from which your
mother drew me out—the Lord reward her for it!—or to that cold, unbieldy,
marine place of the Bass Rock, which, with my delicate kist, would be
fair ruin to me. But I will be valiant in my Master’s service. I have a
duty here: a duty to my God, to myself, and to Haddo: in His strength, I
will perform it.’
Then he straitly discharged Francie to repeat the tale, and bade him in
the future to avert his very eyes from the doings of the curate. ‘You
must go to his place of idolatry; look upon him there!’ says he, ‘but
nowhere else. Avert your eyes, close your ears, pass him by like a three
days’ corp. He is like that damnable monster Basiliscus, which
defiles—yea, poisons!—by the sight.’—All which was hardly claratory to
the boy’s mind.
Presently Montroymont came home, and called up the stairs to Francie.
Traquair was a good shot and swordsman: and it was his pleasure to walk
with his son over the braes of the moorfowl, or to teach him arms in the
back court, when they made a mighty comely pair, the child being so lean,
and light, and active, and the laird himself a man of a manly, pretty
stature, his hair (the periwig being laid aside) showing already white
with many anxieties, and his face of an even, flaccid red. But this day
Francie’s heart was not in the fencing.
‘Sir,’ says he, suddenly lowering his point, ‘will ye tell me a thing if
I was to ask it?’
‘Ask away,’ says the father.
‘Well, it’s this,’ said Francie: ‘Why do you and me comply if it’s so
wicked?’
‘Ay, ye have the cant of it too!’ cries Montroymont. ‘But I’ll tell ye
for all that. It’s to try and see if we can keep the rigging on this
house, Francie. If she had her way, we would be beggar-folk, and hold
our hands out by the wayside. When ye hear her—when ye hear folk,’ he
corrected himself briskly, ‘call me a coward, and one that betrayed the
Lord, and I kenna what else, just mind it was to keep a bed to ye to
sleep in and a bite for ye to eat.—On guard!’ he cried, and the lesson
proceeded again till they were called to supper.
‘There’s another thing yet,’ said Francie, stopping his father. ‘There’s
another thing that I am not sure that I am very caring for. She—she
sends me errands.’
‘Obey her, then, as is your bounden duty,’ said Traquair.
‘Ay, but wait till I tell ye,’ says the boy. ‘If I was to see you I was
to hide.’
Montroymont sighed. ‘Well, and that’s good of her too,’ said he. ‘The
less that I ken of thir doings the better for me; and the best thing you
can do is just to obey her, and see and be a good son to her, the same as
ye are to me, Francie.’
At the tenderness of this expression the heart of Francie swelled within
his bosom, and his remorse was poured out. ‘Faither!’ he cried, ‘I said
“deil” to-day; many’s the time I said it, and _damnable_ too, and
_hellitsh_. I ken they’re all right; they’re beeblical. But I didna say
them beeblically; I said them for sweir words—that’s the truth of it.’
‘Hout, ye silly bairn!’ said the father, ‘dinna do it nae mair, and come
in by to your supper.’ And he took the boy, and drew him close to him a
moment, as they went through the door, with something very fond and
secret, like a caress between a pair of lovers.
The next day M‘Brair was abroad in the afternoon, and had a long advising
with Janet on the braes where she herded cattle. What passed was never
wholly known; but the lass wept bitterly, and fell on her knees to him
among the whins. The same night, as soon as it was dark, he took the
road again for Balweary. In the Kirkton, where the dragoons quartered,
he saw many lights, and heard the noise of a ranting song and people
laughing grossly, which was highly offensive to his mind. He gave it the
wider berth, keeping among fields; and came down at last by the
water-side, where the manse stands solitary between the river and the
road. He tapped at the back door, and the old woman called upon him to
come in, and guided him through the house to the study, as they still
called it, though there was little enough study there in Haddo’s days,
and more song-books than theology.
‘Here’s yin to speak wi’ ye, Mr. Haddie!’ cries the old wife.
And M‘Brair, opening the door and entering, found the little, round, red
man seated in one chair and his feet upon another. A clear fire and a
tallow dip lighted him barely. He was taking tobacco in a pipe, and
smiling to himself; and a brandy-bottle and glass, and his fiddle and
bow, were beside him on the table.
‘Hech, Patey M‘Briar, is this you?’ said he, a trifle tipsily. ‘Step in
by, man, and have a drop brandy: for the stomach’s sake! Even the deil
can quote Scripture—eh, Patey?’
‘I will neither eat nor drink with you,’ replied M‘Brair. ‘I am come
upon my Master’s errand: woe be upon me if I should anyways mince the
same. Hall Haddo, I summon you to quit this kirk which you encumber.’
‘Muckle obleeged!’ says Haddo, winking.
‘You and me have been to kirk and market together,’ pursued M‘Brair; ‘we
have had blessed seasons in the kirk, we have sat in the same
teaching-rooms and read in the same book; and I know you still retain for
me some carnal kindness. It would be my shame if I denied it; I live
here at your mercy and by your favour, and glory to acknowledge it. You
have pity on my wretched body, which is but grass, and must soon be
trodden under: but O, Haddo! how much greater is the yearning with which
I yearn after and pity your immortal soul! Come now, let us reason
together! I drop all points of controversy, weighty though these be; I
take your defaced and damnified kirk on your own terms; and I ask you,
Are you a worthy minister? The communion season approaches; how can you
pronounce thir solemn words, “The elders will now bring forrit the
elements,” and not quail? A parishioner may be summoned to-night; you
may have to rise from your miserable orgies; and I ask you, Haddo, what
does your conscience tell you? Are you fit? Are you fit to smooth the
pillow of a parting Christian? And if the summons should be for
yourself, how then?’
Haddo was startled out of all composure and the better part of his
temper. ‘What’s this of it?’ he cried. ‘I’m no waur than my neebours.
I never set up to be speeritual; I never did. I’m a plain, canty
creature; godliness is cheerfulness, says I; give me my fiddle and a
dram, and I wouldna hairm a flee.’
‘And I repeat my question,’ said M‘Brair: ‘Are you fit—fit for this great
charge? fit to carry and save souls?’
‘Fit? Blethers! As fit’s yoursel’,’ cried Haddo.
‘Are you so great a self-deceiver?’ said M‘Brair. ‘Wretched man,
trampler upon God’s covenants, crucifier of your Lord afresh. I will
ding you to the earth with one word: How about the young woman, Janet
M‘Clour?’
‘Weel, what about her? what do I ken?’ cries Haddo. ‘M’Brair, ye daft
auld wife, I tell ye as true’s truth, I never meddled her. It was just
daffing, I tell ye: daffing, and nae mair: a piece of fun, like! I’m no
denying but what I’m fond of fun, sma’ blame to me! But for onything
sarious—hout, man, it might come to a deposeetion! I’ll sweir it to ye.
Where’s a Bible, till you hear me sweir?’
‘There is nae Bible in your study,’ said M‘Brair severely.
And Haddo, after a few distracted turns, was constrained to accept the
fact.
‘Weel, and suppose there isna?’ he cried, stamping. ‘What mair can ye
say of us, but just that I’m fond of my joke, and so’s she? I declare to
God, by what I ken, she might be the Virgin Mary—if she would just keep
clear of the dragoons. But me! na, deil haet o’ me!’
‘She is penitent at least,’ says M‘Brair.
‘Do you mean to actually up and tell me to my face that she accused me?’
cried the curate.
‘I canna just say that,’ replied M‘Brair. ‘But I rebuked her in the name
of God, and she repented before me on her bended knees.’
‘Weel, I daursay she’s been ower far wi’ the dragoons,’ said Haddo. ‘I
never denied that. I ken naething by it.’
‘Man, you but show your nakedness the more plainly,’ said M‘Brair.
‘Poor, blind, besotted creature—and I see you stoytering on the brink of
dissolution: your light out, and your hours numbered. Awake, man!’ he
shouted with a formidable voice, ‘awake, or it be ower late.’
‘Be damned if I stand this!’ exclaimed Haddo, casting his tobacco-pipe
violently on the table, where it was smashed in pieces. ‘Out of my house
with ye, or I’ll call for the dragoons.’
‘The speerit of the Lord is upon me,’ said M‘Brair with solemn ecstasy.
‘I sist you to compear before the Great White Throne, and I warn you the
summons shall be bloody and sudden.’
And at this, with more agility than could have been expected, he got
clear of the room and slammed the door behind him in the face of the
pursuing curate. The next Lord’s day the curate was ill, and the kirk
closed, but for all his ill words, Mr. M‘Brair abode unmolested in the
house of Montroymont.
CHAPTER III—THE HILL-END OF DRUMLOWE
This was a bit of a steep broken hill that overlooked upon the west a
moorish valley, full of ink-black pools. These presently drained into a
burn that made off, with little noise and no celerity of pace, about the
corner of the hill. On the far side the ground swelled into a bare
heath, black with junipers, and spotted with the presence of the standing
stones for which the place was famous. They were many in that part,
shapeless, white with lichen—you would have said with age: and had made
their abode there for untold centuries, since first the heathens shouted
for their installation. The ancients had hallowed them to some ill
religion, and their neighbourhood had long been avoided by the prudent
before the fall of day; but of late, on the upspringing of new
requirements, these lonely stones on the moor had again become a place of
assembly. A watchful picket on the Hill-end commanded all the northern
and eastern approaches; and such was the disposition of the ground, that
by certain cunningly posted sentries the west also could be made secure
against surprise: there was no place in the country where a conventicle
could meet with more quiet of mind or a more certain retreat open, in the
case of interference from the dragoons. The minister spoke from a knowe
close to the edge of the ring, and poured out the words God gave him on
the very threshold of the devils of yore. When they pitched a tent
(which was often in wet weather, upon a communion occasion) it was rigged
over the huge isolated pillar that had the name of Anes-Errand, none knew
why. And the congregation sat partly clustered on the slope below, and
partly among the idolatrous monoliths and on the turfy soil of the Ring
itself. In truth the situation was well qualified to give a zest to
Christian doctrines, had there been any wanted. But these congregations
assembled under conditions at once so formidable and romantic as made a
zealot of the most cold. They were the last of the faithful; God, who
had averted His face from all other countries of the world, still leaned
from heaven to observe, with swelling sympathy, the doings of His
moorland remnant; Christ was by them with His eternal wounds, with
dropping tears; the Holy Ghost (never perfectly realised nor firmly
adopted by Protestant imaginations) was dimly supposed to be in the heart
of each and on the lips of the minister. And over against them was the
army of the hierarchies, from the men Charles and James Stuart, on to
King Lewie and the Emperor; and the scarlet Pope, and the muckle black
devil himself, peering out the red mouth of hell in an ecstasy of hate
and hope. ‘One pull more!’ he seemed to cry; ‘one pull more, and it’s
done. There’s only Clydesdale and the Stewartry, and the three
Bailiaries of Ayr, left for God.’ And with such an august assistance of
powers and principalities looking on at the last conflict of good and
evil, it was scarce possible to spare a thought to those old, infirm,
debile, _ab agendo_ devils whose holy place they were now violating.
There might have been three hundred to four hundred present. At least
there were three hundred horses tethered for the most part in the ring;
though some of the hearers on the outskirts of the crowd stood with their
bridles in their hand, ready to mount at the first signal. The circle of
faces was strangely characteristic; long, serious, strongly marked, the
tackle standing out in the lean brown cheeks, the mouth set and the eyes
shining with a fierce enthusiasm; the shepherd, the labouring man, and
the rarer laird, stood there in their broad blue bonnets or laced hats,
and presenting an essential identity of type. From time to time a
long-drawn groan of adhesion rose in this audience, and was propagated
like a wave to the outskirts, and died away among the keepers of the
horses. It had a name; it was called ‘a holy groan.’
A squall came up; a great volley of flying mist went out before it and
whelmed the scene; the wind stormed with a sudden fierceness that carried
away the minister’s voice and twitched his tails and made him stagger,
and turned the congregation for a moment into a mere pother of blowing
plaid-ends and prancing horses; and the rain followed and was dashed
straight into their faces. Men and women panted aloud in the shock of
that violent shower-bath; the teeth were bared along all the line in an
involuntary grimace; plaids, mantles, and riding-coats were proved vain,
and the worshippers felt the water stream on their naked flesh. The
minister, reinforcing his great and shrill voice, continued to contend
against and triumph over the rising of the squall and the dashing of the
rain.
‘In that day ye may go thirty mile and not hear a crawing cock,’ he said;
‘and fifty mile and not get a light to your pipe; and an hundred mile and
not see a smoking house. For there’ll be naething in all Scotland but
deid men’s banes and blackness, and the living anger of the Lord. O,
where to find a bield—O sirs, where to find a bield from the wind of the
Lord’s anger? Do ye call _this_ a wind? Bethankit! Sirs, this is but a
temporary dispensation; this is but a puff of wind, this is but a spit of
rain and by with it. Already there’s a blue bow in the west, and the sun
will take the crown of the causeway again, and your things’ll be dried
upon ye, and your flesh will be warm upon your bones. But O, sirs, sirs!
for the day of the Lord’s anger!’
His rhetoric was set forth with an ear-piercing elocution, and a voice
that sometimes crashed like cannon. Such as it was, it was the gift of
all hill-preachers, to a singular degree of likeness or identity. Their
images scarce ranged beyond the red horizon of the moor and the rainy
hill-top, the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling-piece, a spade, a pipe, a
dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of the sun. An
occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent patches of big
Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue. It was a poetry apart;
bleak, austere, but genuine, and redolent of the soil.
A little before the coming of the squall there was a different scene
enacting at the outposts. For the most part, the sentinels were faithful
to their important duty; the Hill-end of Drumlowe was known to be a safe
meeting-place; and the out-pickets on this particular day had been
somewhat lax from the beginning, and grew laxer during the inordinate
length of the discourse. Francie lay there in his appointed hiding-hole,
looking abroad between two whin-bushes. His view was across the course
of the burn, then over a piece of plain moorland, to a gap between two
hills; nothing moved but grouse, and some cattle who slowly traversed his
field of view, heading northward: he heard the psalms, and sang words of
his own to the savage and melancholy music; for he had his own design in
hand, and terror and cowardice prevailed in his bosom alternately, like
the hot and the cold fit of an ague. Courage was uppermost during the
singing, which he accompanied through all its length with this impromptu
strain:
‘And I will ding Jock Crozer down
No later than the day.’
Presently the voice of the preacher came to him in wafts, at the wind’s
will, as by the opening and shutting of a door; wild spasms of screaming,
as of some undiscerned gigantic hill-bird stirred with inordinate
passion, succeeded to intervals of silence; and Francie heard them with a
critical ear. ‘Ay,’ he thought at last, ‘he’ll do; he has the bit in his
mou’ fairly.’
He had observed that his friend, or rather his enemy, Jock Crozer, had
been established at a very critical part of the line of outposts; namely,
where the burn issues by an abrupt gorge from the semicircle of high
moors. If anything was calculated to nerve him to battle it was this.
The post was important; next to the Hill-end itself, it might be called
the key to the position; and it was where the cover was bad, and in which
it was most natural to place a child. It should have been Heathercat’s;
why had it been given to Crozer? An exquisite fear of what should be the
answer passed through his marrow every time he faced the question. Was
it possible that Crozer could have boasted? that there were rumours
abroad to his—Heathercat’s—discredit? that his honour was publicly
sullied? All the world went dark about him at the thought; he sank
without a struggle into the midnight pool of despair; and every time he
so sank, he brought back with him—not drowned heroism indeed, but
half-drowned courage by the locks. His heart beat very slowly as he
deserted his station, and began to crawl towards that of Crozer.
Something pulled him back, and it was not the sense of duty, but a
remembrance of Crozer’s build and hateful readiness of fist. Duty, as he
conceived it, pointed him forward on the rueful path that he was
travelling. Duty bade him redeem his name if he were able, at the risk
of broken bones; and his bones and every tooth in his head ached by
anticipation. An awful subsidiary fear whispered him that if he were
hurt, he should disgrace himself by weeping. He consoled himself,
boy-like, with the consideration that he was not yet committed; he could
easily steal over unseen to Crozer’s post, and he had a continuous
private idea that he would very probably steal back again. His course
took him so near the minister that he could hear some of his words: ‘What
news, minister, of Claver’se? He’s going round like a roaring rampaging
lion. . . .
* * * * *
* * * * *
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press.
Footnotes:
{0} With special reference to _Father Damien_, pp. 63–81.
{65} From the Sydney _Presbyterian_, October 26, 1889.
{85} _Theater of Mortality_, p. 10; Edin. 1713.
{86} _History of My Own Times_, beginning 1660, by Bishop Gilbert
Burnet, p. 158.
{87a} Wodrow’s _Church History_, Book II. chap. i. sect. I.
{87b} Crookshank’s _Church History_, 1751, second ed. p. 202.
{88} Burnet, p. 348.
{89} _Fuller’s Historie of the Holy Warre_, fourth ed. 1651.
{90} Wodrow, vol. ii. p. 17.
{92} Sir J. Turner’s _Memoirs_, pp. 148–50.
{93} _A Cloud of Witnesses_, p. 376.
{94a} Wodrow, pp. 19, 20.
{94b} _A Hind Let Loose_, p. 123.
{95} Turner, p. 163.
{96a} Turner, p. 198.
{96b} _Ibid._ p. 167.
{97} Wodrow, p. 29.
{98} Turner, Wodrow, and _Church History_ by James Kirkton, an outed
minister of the period.
{99} Kirkton, p. 244.
{101a} Kirkton.
{101b} Turner.
{102} Kirkton.
{103} Kirkton.
{104} _Cloud of Witnesses_, p. 389; Edin. 1765.
{105a} Kirkton, p. 247.
{105b} Ibid. p. 254.
{105c} _Ibid._ p. 247.
{105d} _Ibid._ pp. 247, 248.
{106} Kirkton, p. 248.
{107a} Kirkton, p. 249.
{107b} _Naphtali_, p. 205; Glasgow, 1721.
{107c} Wodrow, p. 59.
{108a} Kirkton, p. 246.
{108b} Defoe’s _History of the Church of Scotland_.
{151} ‘This paper was written in collaboration with James Waiter
Ferrier, and if reprinted this is to be stated, though his principal
collaboration was to lie back in an easy-chair and laugh.’—[R.L.S., Oct.
25, 1894.]
{183} The illustrator was, in fact, a lady, Miss Eunice Bagster, eldest
daughter of the publisher, Samuel Bagster; except in the case of the cuts
depicting the fight with Apollyon, which were designed by her brother,
Mr. Jonathan Bagster. The edition was published in 1845. I am indebted
for this information to the kindness of Mr. Robert Bagster, the present
managing director of the firm.—[SIR SIDNEY COLVIN’S NOTE.]
{205} See a short essay of De Quincey’s.
{206a} _Religio Medici_, Part ii.
{206b} _Duchess of Malfi_.