On the roof of a high old church with as little architectural elegance
as a dry-stone barn, a bell jerked by a rope from the church-yard
indicated the close association of law and the kirk by ringing a sort
of triumphal peal to the procession of the judges between the court-room
and the inn. Contesting with its not too dulcet music blared forth the
fanfare of two gorgeous trumpeters in scarlet and gold lace, tie wigs,
silk stockings, and huge cocked hats, who filled the street with a
brassy melody that suggested Gabriel's stern and awful judgment-summons
rather than gave lightness and rhythm to the feet of those who made
up the procession. The procession itself had some dreadful aspects and
elements as well as others incongruous and comical. The humorous fancy
might see something to smile at in the two grey-wigged bent old men
in long scarlet coats who went in front of the trumpeters, prepared
to clear the way if necessary (though a gust of shrewd wind would have
blown them off their feet), by means of the long-poled halberts they
carried; but this impression of the farcical was modified by the nature
of the body whereof they were the pioneers or advance guard.
Sleek magistrates and councillors in unaccustomed black suits and
silver-buckled shoes, the provost ermined at their head, showed the way
to the more actual, the more dignified embodiment of stern Scots law. At
least a score of wigs were there from the Parliament House of Edinburgh,
a score of dusty gowns, accustomed to sweep the lobbies of the Courts
of Session, gathered the sand of the burgh street, and in their
midst walked the representatives of that old feudal law at long-last
ostensibly abandoned, and of the common law of the land. Argyll was in
a demure equivalent for some Court costume, with a dark velvet coat, a
ribbon of the Thistle upon his shoulder, a sword upon his haunch, and
for all his sixty-six years he carried himself less like the lawyer made
at Utrecht--like Justice-General and Extraordinary Lord of Session--than
like the old soldier who had served with Marlborough and took the field
for the House of Hanover in 1715. My Lords Elchies and Kilkerran
walked on either side of him--Kilkerran with the lack-lustre eye of the
passionate mathematician, the studious moralist devoted to midnight oil,
a ruddy, tall, sturdy man, well filling the crimson and white silk gown;
Elchies, a shrivelled atomy with a hirpling walk, leaning heavily upon a
rattan, both with the sinister black tri-corne hats in their hands, and
flanked by a company of musketeers.
A great band of children lent the ludicrous element again to the company
by following close upon its heels, chanting a doggerel song to the tune
of the trumpets; the populace stood at the close-mouths or leaned over
their windows looking at the spectacle, wondering at the pomp given to
the punishment of a Stewart who a few years ago would have been sent to
the gallows by his Grace with no more formality than might have attended
the sentence of a kipper salmon-poacher to whipping at the hands of Long
Davie the dempster.
His Grace was entertaining the Lords, the Counsel (all but the convict's
lawyers--a lot of disaffected Jacobites, who took their food by
themselves at the inn, and brusquely refused his Grace's hospitality),
the magistracy, and some county friends, to a late dinner at the castle
that night, and an hour after saw them round the ducal board.
If Count Victor was astonished at the squalid condition of things in the
castle of the poor Baron of Doom, he would have been surprised to find
here, within an hour or two's walk of it, so imposing and luxuriant a
domesticity. Many lands, many hands, great wealth won by law, battle,
and the shrewdness of generations, enabled Argyll to give his castle
grandeur and his table the opulence of any southern palace. And it was a
bright company that sat about his board, with several ladies in it, for
his duchess loved to have her sojourn in her Highland home made gay by
the company of young women who might by their beauty and light hearts
recall her own lost youth.
A bagpipe stilled in the hall, a lute breathed a melody from a
neighbouring room, the servants in claret and yellow livery noiselessly
served wine.
Elchies sourly pursed his lips over his liquor, to the mingled amusement
and vexation of his Grace, who knew his lordship's cellar, or even the
Justiciary Vault in the town (for the first act of the Court had been
to send down bins from Edinburgh for their use on circuit), contained
no vintage half so good, and “Your Grace made reference on the way up to
some one killed in the neighbourhood,” he said, as one resuming a topic
begun elsewhere.
“Not six miles from where we sit,” replied the Duke, his cultivated
English accent in a strong contrast with the broad burr of the Edinburgh
justiciar, “and scarcely a day before you drove past. The man shot, so
far as we have yet learned, was a Macfarlane, one of a small but ancient
and extremely dishonest clan whose country used to be near the head of
Loch Lomond. Scarcely more than half a hundred of them survive, but
they give us considerable trouble, for they survive at the cost of their
neighbour's gear and cattle. They are robbers and footpads, and it looks
as if the fatality to one of their number near Doom has been incurred
during a raid. We still have our raids, Lord Elchies, in spite of what
you were saying on the bench as to the good example this part of the
country sets the rest of the Highlands--not the raids of old fashion,
perhaps, but more prosaic, simply thefts indeed. That is why I have had
these troops brought here. It is reported to me pretty circumstantially
that some of the Appin people are in the key to attempt a rescue of
James Stewart on his way to the place of execution at Lettermore. They
would think nothing of attempting it once he was brought the length of
Benderloch, if only a law officer or two had him in charge.”
“I would have thought the duty of keeping down a ploy of that kind
would have been congenial to your own folk,” said Elchies, drenching his
nostrils vulgarly with macabaw.
Argyll smiled. “You may give us credit for willingness to take our share
of the responsibility of keeping Appin in order,” said he. “I should
not wonder if there are half a hundred claymores with hands in them
somewhere about our old barracks in Maltland. Eh! Simon?” and he smiled
down the table to his Chamberlain.
“Five-and-forty, to be strict,” said the gentleman appealed to, and
never a word more but a sudden stop, for his half-eaten plum had
miraculously gone from his plate in the moment he had looked up at the
Duke.
“Was't in your lands?” asked Elchies, indifferent, but willing to
help on a good topic in a company where a variety of classes made the
conversation anything but brisk.
“No,” said Argyll, “it was in Doom, the place of a small landowner,
Lamond, whose castle--it is but a ramshackle old bigging now--you may
have noticed on your left as you rode round. Lamond himself is a man I
have a sort of softness for, though, to tell the truth, he has forced me
into more litigation than he had money to pay for and I had patience to
take any lasting interest in.”
“The Baron of Doom, is that the man?” cried Elchies, dryly. “Faith,
I ken him well. Some years syne he was living months at a time in the
Court of Session, and eating and sleeping in John's Coffee-house, and
his tale--it's a gey old one--was that the litigation was always from
the other side. I mind the man weel; Baron he called himself, though, if
I mind right, his title had never been confirmed by the king _n liberam
baroniam_ He had no civil nor criminal jurisdiction. A black-avised man;
the last time he came before me--Mr. Petullo, ye were there--it was in a
long-standing case o' multiple poinding, and if I'm no'mistaken, a place
ca'd Drimadry or Drimdarry, or something like that, changed hands ower
the head o't.”
Petullo the writer, shrinking near the foot of the table in an adequate
sense of his insignificance, almost choked himself by gulping the
whole glass of wine at his lips in his confusion, and broke into a
perspiration at the attention of the company thus drawn to him. He
squeaked back an unintelligible acquiescence; and completed his own
torture by upsetting a compote of fruit upon his black knee-breeches.
Opposite the unhappy lawyer sat a lady of extraordinary beauty--a
haughty, cold, supercilious sort of beauty, remarkable mainly from
the consciousness of its display. Her profile might have been cut from
marble by a Greek; her neck and bust were perfect, but her shoulders,
more angular than was common in that time of bottle-shape, were carried
somewhat too grandly for a gentle nature. The cruelty of her
character betrayed itself in a faint irrestrainable smile at Petullo's
discomfiture, all the more cruel because his eyes were entreatingly on
hers as he mopped up awkwardly the consequences of his gaucherie. She
smiled, but that was not the strangest part of her conduct, for at the
same time she nudged with her knee the Chamberlain who sat next to her,
and who had brought her into the room. To cap the marvel, he showed no
surprise, but took her hint with a conspirator's enforced composure.
He looked at the little, dried-up, squeaking creature opposite,
and--refused the lady the gratification of a single sign of the
amusement she had apparently expected. She reddened, bit her nether
lip, and “Your poor man of business is in a sore plight,” she whispered,
using the name Sim with significant freedom.
“My dear Kate,” said he quietly, “as God's my judge, I can find nothing
to laugh at in the misery of a poor wretch like yon.”
“That's the second time!” she whispered with well-concealed ill-humour,
a smile compelled upon her face but a serpent in her voice.
“The second time?” he repeated, lifting his eyebrows questioning, and
always keeping a shoulder to her--a most chilly exterior. “Your ladyship
is in the humour to give guesses.”
She gave a swift reply to some only half-heard remark by her next-hand
neighbour, then whispered to him, “It's the second time you have been
cruel to me to-day. You seem bent on making me unhappy, and it is not
what you promised. Am I not looking nice?”
“My dear girl,” said he calmly, “do you know I am not in the mood for
making sport of an old fool to prove my Kindness of heart to you.”
“To me, Sim!” she whispered, the serpent all gone from her voice, and a
warm, dulcet, caressing accent in it, while her eyes were melting with
discreetly veiled love. “And I plotted so much to get beside you.”
“That is the damned thing,” he replied between his teeth, and smiling
the while to some comment of his other neighbour, “you plot too much,
my dear. I do not want to be unkind, but a little less plotting would
become you more. I have no great liking for your husband, as you may
guess; but there he's covered with compote and confusion, and for the
look of the thing, if for no more, it would suit his wife to pretend
some sympathy. In any case, for God's sake do not look at me as if I
shared your amusement at his trouble. And I'm sure that Elchies by his
glowering saw you eat my plum.”
Mrs. Petullo cast a glance of disdain at the poor object she was bound
to by a marriage for position and money, and for a moment or two gave
no attention to the society of his Grace's Chamberlain, who was so
suspiciously in her confidence.
Simon MacTaggart played idly with the stem of his glass. He was odd
in that bibulous age, inasmuch as he never permitted wine to tempt his
palate to the detriment of his brains, and he listened gravely to the
conversation that was being monopolised at the head of the table round
the Duke.
Women liked him. Indeed women loved this Chamberlain of Argyll readily,
more for his eyes and for his voice and for some odd air of mystery and
romance in his presence than for what generally pass for good looks.
He had just the history and the career and reputation that to men
and women, except the very wisest and the somewhat elderly, have an
attraction all unreasonable; for his youth had been stormy; he had
known great dangers, tremendous misfortunes, overcoming both by a
natural--sometimes spendthrift--courage; he was credited with more than
one amorous intrigue, that being in high quarters was considered rather
in his favour than otherwise; he was high in the esteem of families in
the social scale considerably above his own (that had greatly declined
since his people could first boast a coat impaled with the galley
of Lome); he was alert, mind and body, polite to punctilio, a far
traveller, a good talker, and above all a lover of his kind, so that he
went about with a smile (just touched a little by a poetic melancholy)
for all. To the women at Argyll's table he was the most interesting man
there, and though materially among the least eminent and successful,
had it been his humour to start a topic of his own in opposition to
his patron's, he could have captured the interest of the gathering in a
sentence.
But Simon MacTaggart was for once not in the mood for the small change
of conversation. Some weighty thought possessed him that gave his eye a
remote quality even when he seemed to be sharing the general attention
in the conversation, and it was as much resentment at the summons from
his abstraction and his mood as a general disinclination to laugh at a
wretch's misery on the bidding of the wretch's wife, that made him so
curt to Mrs. Petullo's advances. To him the dinner seemed preposterously
unending. More than once his hand went to his fob with an unconscious
response to his interest in the passage of the time; with difficulty he
clenched his teeth upon the yawns that followed his forced smiles at the
murmured pleasantries of the humble bailies and town councillors in
his midst, who dared only venture on a joke of their own, and that
discreetly muffled, when there was a pause in the conversation of the
Duke and the Judges. And to the woman at his shoulder (the one on his
left--the wife of the Provost, a little fair-haired doll with a giggling
appreciation of the importance of her situation in such grand company,
and a half-frightened gladness at being so near MacTaggart) he seemed
more mysterious and wonderful than ever. Mrs. Petullo, without looking
at his half-averted face, knew by the mere magnetic current from his
cold shoulder that of her he was just now weary, that with his company
as a whole he was bored, and that some interest beyond that noisy hall
engaged his abstracted thought.
“No,” the Duke was saying; “the murderer has not been discovered, nor
indeed have we the most important evidence that there was a murder at
all--for the body itself is as yet a mere matter of rumour, though of
its existence there is no reasonable ground for doubt. It was carried
off, as I am informed, by the Macfarlanes, whose anxiety to hush the
affair is our main proof that they were on no honest expedition when
this happened. But an affair like that gets bruited abroad: it came to
us from Cairndhu that the corpse of a Macfarlane was carried past in
the gloaming by some of his friends, anxious to get it smuggled through
Ard-kinglas with as little public notice as possible.”
“_Acta exteriora indicant interiora seceta_, to somewhat misapply a
well-kent maxim. The _res gesto_ show, I think, that it was a murder on
the part of the robbers themselves.” It was Elchies who spoke, cracking
filberts the while with his great yellow teeth that gave him so cruel a
look upon the bench.
“As a matter of fact,” said the Chamberlain suddenly, “the man was shot
by a French pistol,” and a hush fell on the table in expectation of
further details, but they were not forthcoming.
“Well, I'm astonished to hear it, and I hope you know where to lay hands
on the homicide,” said the Duke.
“It's none of our affair--nowadays,” said the Chamberlain. “And, forbye,
I'm only telling a carried tale after all. There may be no more in it
than the fancy of the Glen Fyne folk who told me of it.”
The Duke looked at his Chamberlain, saw that the topic, so far as he
was concerned, was ended, and signalled to the Duchess. It was not the
custom of the time, but her Grace had introduced into her Highland court
the practice of withdrawing the ladies for some time after dinner, and
leaving the men to their birling of the wine, as they phrased it. Out
she swept at her husband's signal with her company--Lady Strachur, Lady
Charlotte, Mrs. Petullo, the Provost's wife, and three or four of no
greater importance to our story--and of all that were left behind,
perhaps there was none but her husband, who, oddly' enough (as people
thought) for a duke, loved her as if he were a boy courting still, to
reflect that the room was colder and less human wanting the presence
of her and her bright company. His Grace, who cared for the bottle
even less than did his Chamberlain, slid round the wine sun-wise for a
Highlander's notion of luck; the young advocates, who bleared somewhat
at the eyes when they forgot themselves, felt the menacing sleepiness
and glowing content of potations carried to the verge of indiscretion;
Kilkerran hummed, Petullo hawed, the Provost humbly ventured a
sculduddery tale, the Duke politely listening the while to some argument
of Elchies upon the right of any one who had been attacked by the
Macfarlanes to use arms against them.
“It's a well-allowed principle, your Grace,” he maintained. “_Arma in
armatos sumere jura sinunt_--the possessor may use violence to maintain
his possession, but not to recover that of which he has been deprived.”
He looked like a Barbary ape as his shrunk jaws masticated the kernels
he fed to his mouth with shaking claws: something deep and foxishly
cunning peered forth below his bristling red eyebrows. The Duke could
not but look at his protruding ears and experience an old sensation of
his in the company of the more animal of his fellows, that, after all,
man with a little practice might easily swing among trees or burrow in
the earth.
An ill-trained servant removing empty bottles left the door open behind
his Grace's chair, and through it came the strains of a duet in women's
voices, accompanied by the strumming of a harp. They sang an English air
touching upon groves and moonlit waterfalls, Lady Charlotte lending a
dulcet second to the air of the Duchess, who accompanied them upon her
instrument in sweeping chords and witching faint arpeggios. Into the
room that fumed with tobacco and wine (and the Provost at the second
of his tales in the ear of the advocate) the harmony floated like the
praise of cherubim, and stilled at once the noisy disquisition round the
board.
“Leave the door open,” said the Duke to his servants, and they did so.
When the song was done he felt his Jean was calling to him irresistible,
and he suggested that they had better join the ladies. They rose--some
of them reluctantly--from the bottles, Elchies strewing his front again
with snuff to check his hiccoughs. MacTaggart, in an aside to the
Duke, pleaded to be excused for his withdrawal immediately, as he felt
indisposed.
“I noticed that you were gey glum to-night,” said Argyll with a kind and
even fraternal tone, for they were cousins and confidants as well as
in a purely business relation to each-other. “I'm thinking we both want
some of the stimulant Elchies and the Provost and the advocate lads take
so copiously.”
“Bah!” said the Chamberlain; “but Sassenachs, Argyll, but Sassenachs,
and they need it all. As for us, we're born with a flagon of heather
ale within us, and we may be doing without the drug they must have, poor
bodies, to make them sparkle.”
Argyll laughed. “Good-night, then,” said he, “and a riddance to your
vapours before the morning's morning.”
Mrs. Petullo had begun a song before the Duke entered, a melody of
the Scots mode, wedded to words that at that period hummed round the
country. It was the one triumphant moment of her life--her musically
vocal--when she seemed, even to the discriminating who dive for
character below the mere skin, to be a perfect angel. Pathos, regret,
faith, hope, and love, she could simulate marvellously: the last was
all that was really hers, and even that was lawless. She had not
half-finished the air when the Duke came into the room softly on his
tiptoes, humming her refrain. A keen ear might have perceived the
slightest of alterations in the tone of her next stanza; a quick eye
might have noticed a shade of disappointment come to her face when
her intent but momentary glance at the door revealed that some one she
sought was not entering. The only ear that heard, the only eye that
saw, was Kilkerran's. He was a moralist by repute, and he would have
suspected without reasons. When Mrs. Petullo broke down miserably--in
her third verse, he smiled to himself pawkily, went up to her with a
compliment, and confirmed his suspicions by her first question, which
was as to the Chamberlain's absence.
As for the Chamberlain, he was by now hurrying with great speed through
the castle garden. Only once he slacked his pace, and that was when the
garden path joined the more open policies of the Duke, and another step
or two would place a thicket of laburnums and hawthorns between him and
the sight of the litten windows. He hung on his heel and looked back for
a minute or two at the castle, looming blackly in the darkness against
the background of Dunchuach; he could hear the broken stanza of Mrs.
Petullo's ballad.
“Amn't I the damned fool?” said he half-aloud to himself with bitter
certainty in the utterance. “There's my punishment: by something
sham--and I ken it's sham too--I must go through life beguiled from
right and content. Here's what was to be the close of my folly, and Sim
MacTaggart eager to be a good man if he got anything like a chance, but
never the chance for poor Sim MacTaggart!”
He plunged into the darkness of the road that led to the Maltland
barracks where the fifty claymores were quartered.