MR. MACKELLAR'S JOURNEY WITH THE MASTER
The chaise came to the door in a strong drenching mist. We took our
leave in silence: the house of Durrisdeer standing with drooping gutters
and windows closed, like a place dedicate to melancholy. I observed the
Master kept his head out, looking back on these splashed walls and
glimmering roofs, till they were suddenly swallowed in the mist; and I
must suppose some natural sadness fell upon the man at this departure;
or was it some prevision of the end? At least, upon our mounting the
long brae from Durrisdeer, as we walked side by side in the wet, he
began first to whistle and then to sing the saddest of our country
tunes, which sets folk weeping in a tavern, "Wandering Willie." The set
of words he used with it I have not heard elsewhere, and could never
come by any copy; but some of them which were the most appropriate to
our departure linger in my memory. One verse began--
"Home was home then, my dear, full of kindly faces;
Home was home then, my dear, happy for the child."
And ended somewhat thus--
"Now, when day dawns on the brow of the moorland,
Lone stands the house, and the chimney-stone is cold,
Lone let it stand, now the folks are all departed,
The kind hearts, the true hearts, that loved the place of old."
I could never be a judge of the merit of these verses; they were so
hallowed by the melancholy of the air, and were sung (or rather
"soothed") to me by a master-singer at a time so fitting. He looked in
my face when he had done, and saw that my eyes watered.
"Ah! Mackellar," said he, "do you think I have never a regret?"
"I do not think you could be so bad a man," said I, "if you had not all
the machinery to be a good one."
"No, not all," says he: "not all. You are there in error. The malady of
not wanting, my evangelist." But methought he sighed as he mounted again
into the chaise.
All day long we journeyed in the same miserable weather: the mist
besetting us closely, the heavens incessantly weeping on my head. The
road lay over moorish hills, where was no sound but the crying of
moor-fowl in the wet heather and the pouring of the swollen burns.
Sometimes I would doze off in slumber, when I would find myself plunged
at once in some foul and ominous nightmare, from the which I would awake
strangling. Sometimes, if the way was steep and the wheels turning
slowly, I would overhear the voices from within, talking in that
tropical tongue which was to me as inarticulate as the piping of the
fowls. Sometimes, at a longer ascent, the Master would set foot to
ground and walk by my side, mostly without speech. And all the time,
sleeping or waking, I beheld the same black perspective of approaching
ruin; and the same pictures rose in my view, only they were now painted
upon hill-side mist. One, I remember, stood before me with the colours
of a true illusion. It showed me my lord seated at a table in a small
room; his head, which was at first buried in his hands, he slowly
raised, and turned upon me a countenance from which hope had fled. I saw
it first on the black window-panes, my last night in Durrisdeer; it
haunted and returned upon me half the voyage through; and yet it was no
effect of lunacy, for I have come to a ripe old age with no decay of my
intelligence; nor yet (as I was then tempted to suppose) a heaven-sent
warning of the future, for all manner of calamities befell, not that
calamity--and I saw many pitiful sights, but never that one.
It was decided we should travel on all night; and it was singular, once
the dusk had fallen, my spirits somewhat rose. The bright lamps, shining
forth into the mist and on the smoking horses and the hodding post-boy,
gave me perhaps an outlook intrinsically more cheerful than what day had
shown; or perhaps my mind had become wearied of its melancholy. At least
I spent some waking hours, not without satisfaction in my thoughts,
although wet and weary in my body; and fell at last into a natural
slumber without dreams. Yet I must have been at work even in the deepest
of my sleep; and at work with at least a measure of intelligence. For I
started broad awake, in the very act of crying out to myself
"Home was home then, my dear, happy for the child."
stricken to find in it an appropriateness, which I had not yesterday
observed, to the Master's detestable purpose in the present journey.
We were then close upon the city of Glascow, where we were soon
breakfasting together at an inn, and where (as the devil would have it)
we found a ship in the very article of sailing. We took our places in
the cabin; and, two days after, carried our effects on board. Her name
was the _Nonesuch_, a very ancient ship, and very happily named. By all
accounts this should be her last voyage; people shook their heads upon
the quays, and I had several warnings offered me by strangers in the
street to the effect that she was rotten as a cheese, too deeply loaden,
and must infallibly founder if we met a gale. From this it fell out we
were the only passengers; the Captain, M'Murtrie, was a silent, absorbed
man, with the Glascow or Gaelic accent; the mates ignorant rough
seafarers, come in through the hawsehole; and the Master and I were cast
upon each other's company.
The _Nonesuch_ carried a fair wind out of the Clyde, and for near upon
a week we enjoyed bright weather and a sense of progress. I found myself
(to my wonder) a born seaman, in so far at least as I was never sick;
yet I was far from tasting the usual serenity of my health. Whether it
was the motion of the ship on the billows, the confinement, the salted
food, or all of these together, I suffered from a blackness of spirit
and a painful strain upon my temper. The nature of my errand on that
ship perhaps contributed; I think it did no more; the malady (whatever
it was) sprang from my environment; and if the ship were not to blame,
then it was the Master. Hatred and fear are ill bed-fellows; but (to my
shame be it spoken) I have tasted those in other places, lain down and
got up with them, and eaten and drunk with them, and yet never before,
nor after, have I been so poisoned through and through, in soul and
body, as I was on board the _Nonesuch_. I freely confess my enemy set me
a fair example of forbearance; in our worst days displayed the most
patient geniality, holding me in conversation as long as I would suffer,
and when I had rebuffed his civility, stretching himself on deck to
read. The book he had on board with him was Mr. Richardson's famous
"Clarissa," and among other small attentions he would read me passages
aloud; nor could any elocutionist have given with greater potency the
pathetic portions of that work. I would retort upon him with passages
out of the Bible, which was all my library--and very fresh to me, my
religious duties (I grieve to say it) being always and even to this day
extremely neglected. He tasted the merits of the work like the
connoisseur he was; and would sometimes take it from my hand, turn the
leaves over like a man that knew his way, and give me, with his fine
declamation, a Roland for my Oliver. But it was singular how little he
applied his reading to himself; it passed high above his head like
summer thunder; Lovelace and Clarissa, the tales of David's generosity,
the psalms of his penitence, the solemn questions of the Book of Job,
the touching poetry of Isaiah--they were to him a source of
entertainment only, like the scraping of a fiddle in a change-house.
This outer sensibility and inner toughness set me against him; it seemed
of a piece with that impudent grossness which I knew to underlie the
veneer of his fine manners; and sometimes my gorge rose against him as
though he were deformed--and sometimes I would draw away as though from
something partly spectral. I had moments when I thought of him as of a
man of pasteboard--as though, if one should strike smartly through the
buckram of his countenance, there would be found a mere vacuity within.
This horror (not merely fanciful, I think) vastly increased my
detestation of his neighbourhood; I began to feel something shiver
within me on his drawing near; I had at times a longing to cry out;
there were days when I thought I could have struck him. This frame of
mind was doubtless helped by shame, because I had dropped during our
last days at Durrisdeer into a certain toleration of the man; and if any
one had then told me I should drop into it again, I must have laughed in
his face. It is possible he remained unconscious of this extreme fever
of my resentment; yet I think he was too quick; and rather that he had
fallen, in a long life of idleness, into a positive need of company,
which obliged him to confront and tolerate my unconcealed aversion.
Certain, at least, that he loved the note of his own tongue, as, indeed,
he entirely loved all the parts and properties of himself; a sort of
imbecility which almost necessarily attends on wickedness. I have seen
him driven, when I proved recalcitrant, to long discourses with the
skipper; and this, although the man plainly testified his weariness,
fiddling miserably with both hand and foot, and replying only with a
grunt.
After the first week out we fell in with foul winds and heavy weather.
The sea was high. The _Nonesuch_ being an old-fashioned ship, and badly
loaden, rolled beyond belief; so that the skipper trembled for his
masts, and I for my life. We made no progress on our course. An
unbearable ill-humour settled on the ship: men, mates, and master,
girding at one another all day long. A saucy word on the one hand, and a
blow on the other, made a daily incident. There were times when the
whole crew refused their duty; and we of the afterguard were twice got
under arms--being the first time that ever I bore weapons--in the fear
of mutiny.
In the midst of our evil season sprang up a hurricane of wind; so that
all supposed she must go down. I was shut in the cabin from noon of one
day till sundown of the next; the Master was somewhere lashed on deck;
Secundra had eaten of some drug and lay insensible; so you may say I
passed these hours in an unbroken solitude. At first I was terrified
beyond motion, and almost beyond thought, my mind appearing to be
frozen. Presently there stole in on me a ray of comfort. If the
_Nonesuch_ foundered, she would carry down with her into the deeps of
that unsounded sea the creature whom we all so feared and hated; there
would be no more Master of Ballantrae, the fish would sport among his
ribs; his schemes all brought to nothing, his harmless enemies at peace.
At first, I have said, it was but a ray of comfort; but it had soon
grown to be broad sunshine. The thought of the man's death, of his
deletion from this world, which he embittered for so many, took
possession of my mind. I hugged it, I found it sweet in my belly. I
conceived the ship's last plunge, the sea bursting upon all sides into
the cabin, the brief mortal conflict there, all by myself, in that
closed place; I numbered the horrors, I had almost said with
satisfaction; I felt I could bear all and more, if the _Nonesuch_
carried down with her, overtook by the same ruin, the enemy of my poor
master's house. Towards noon of the second day the screaming of the wind
abated; the ship lay not so perilously over, and it began to be clear to
me that we were past the height of the tempest. As I hope for mercy, I
was singly disappointed. In the selfishness of that vile, absorbing
passion of hatred, I forgot the case of our innocent shipmates, and
thought but of myself and my enemy. For myself, I was already old; I had
never been young, I was not formed for the world's pleasures, I had few
affections; it mattered not the toss of a silver tester whether I was
drowned there and then in the Atlantic, or dribbled out a few more
years, to die, perhaps no less terribly, in a deserted sick-bed. Down I
went upon my knees--holding on by the locker, or else I had been
instantly dashed across the tossing cabin--and, lifting up my voice in
the midst of that clamour of the abating hurricane, impiously prayed for
my own death. "O God!" I cried, "I would be liker a man if I rose and
struck this creature down; but Thou madest me a coward from my mother's
womb. O Lord, Thou madest me so, Thou knowest my weakness, Thou knowest
that any face of death will set me shaking in my shoes. But, lo! here is
Thy servant ready, his mortal weakness laid aside. Let me give my life
for this creature's; take the two of them, Lord! take the two, and have
mercy on the innocent!" In some such words as these, only yet more
irreverent and with more sacred adjurations, I continued to pour forth
my spirit. God heard me not, I must suppose in mercy; and I was still
absorbed in my agony of supplication when some one, removing the
tarpaulin cover, let the light of the sunset pour into the cabin. I
stumbled to my feet ashamed, and was seized with surprise to find myself
totter and ache like one that had been stretched upon the rack. Secundra
Dass, who had slept off the effects of his drug, stood in a corner not
far off, gazing at me with wild eyes; and from the open skylight the
captain thanked me for my supplications.
"It's you that saved the ship, Mr. Mackellar," says he. "There is no
craft of seamanship that could have kept her floating: well may we say,
'Except the Lord the city keep, the watchmen watch in vain'!"
I was abashed by the captain's error; abashed, also, by the surprise
and fear with which the Indian regarded me at first, and the obsequious
civilities with which he soon began to cumber me. I know now that he
must have overheard and comprehended the peculiar nature of my prayers.
It is certain, of course, that he at once disclosed the matter to his
patron; and looking back with greater knowledge, I can now understand
what so much puzzled me at the moment, those singular and (so to speak)
approving smiles with which the Master honoured me. Similarly, I can
understand a word that I remember to have fallen from him in
conversation that same night; when, holding up his hand and smiling,
"Ah! Mackellar," said he, "not every man is so great a coward as he
thinks he is--nor yet so good a Christian." He did not guess how true he
spoke! For the fact is, the thoughts which had come to me in the
violence of the storm retained their hold upon my spirit; and the words
that rose to my lips unbidden in the instancy of prayer continued to
sound in my ears: with what shameful consequences it is fitting I should
honestly relate; for I could not support a part of such disloyalty as to
describe the sins of others and conceal my own.
The wind fell, but the sea hove ever the higher. All night the
_Nonesuch_ rolled outrageously; the next day dawned, and the next, and
brought no change. To cross the cabin was scarce possible; old
experienced seamen were cast down upon the deck, and one cruelly mauled
in the concussion; every board and block in the old ship cried out
aloud; and the great bell by the anchor-bitts continually and dolefully
rang. One of these days the Master and I sate alone together at the
break of the poop. I should say the _Nonesuch_ carried a high, raised
poop. About the top of it ran considerable bulwarks, which made the ship
unweatherly: and these, as they approached the front on each side, ran
down in a fine, old-fashioned, carven scroll to join the bulwarks of the
waist. From this disposition, which seems designed rather for ornament
than use, it followed there was a discontinuance of protection: and
that, besides, at the very margin of the elevated part where (in certain
movements of the ship) it might be the most needful. It was here we were
sitting: our feet hanging down, the Master betwixt me and the side, and
I holding on with both hands to the grating of the cabin skylight; for
it struck me it was a dangerous position, the more so as I had
continually before my eyes a measure of our evolutions in the person of
the Master, which stood out in the break of the bulwarks against the
sun. Now his head would be in the zenith and his shadow fall quite
beyond the _Nonesuch_ on the farther side; and now he would swing down
till he was underneath my feet, and the line of the sea leaped high
above him like the ceiling of a room. I looked on upon this with a
growing fascination, as birds are said to look on snakes. My mind,
besides, was troubled with an astonishing diversity of noises; for now
that we had all sails spread in the vain hope to bring her to the sea,
the ship sounded like a factory with their reverberations. We spoke
first of the mutiny with which we had been threatened; this led us on to
the topic of assassination; and that offered a temptation to the Master
more strong than he was able to resist. He must tell me a tale, and show
me at the same time how clever he was, and how wicked. It was a thing he
did always with affectation and display; generally with a good effect.
But this tale, told in a high key in the midst of so great a tumult, and
by a narrator who was one moment looking down at me from the skies and
the next peering up from under the soles of my feet--this particular
tale, I say, took hold upon me in a degree quite singular.
"My friend the count," it was thus that he began his story, "had for an
enemy a certain German baron, a stranger in Rome. It matters not what
was the ground of the count's enmity; but as he had a firm design to be
revenged, and that with safety to himself, he kept it secret even from
the baron. Indeed, that is the first principle of vengeance; and hatred
betrayed is hatred impotent. The count was a man of a curious,
searching mind; he had something of the artist; if anything fell for him
to do, it must always be done with an exact perfection, not only as to
the result, but in the very means and instruments, or he thought the
thing miscarried. It chanced he was one day riding in the outer suburbs,
when he came to a disused by-road branching off into the moor which lies
about Rome. On the one hand was an ancient Roman tomb; on the other a
deserted house in a garden of evergreen trees. This road brought him
presently into a field of ruins, in the midst of which, in the side of a
hill, he saw an open door, and, not far off, a single stunted pine no
greater than a currant-bush. The place was desert and very secret; a
voice spoke in the count's bosom that there was something here to his
advantage. He tied his horse to the pine-tree, took his flint and steel
in his hand to make a light, and entered into the hill. The doorway
opened on a passage of old Roman masonry, which shortly after branched
in two. The count took the turning to the right, and followed it,
groping forward in the dark, till he was brought up by a kind of fence,
about elbow-high, which extended quite across the passage. Sounding
forward with his foot, he found an edge of polished stone, and then
vacancy. All his curiosity was now awakened, and, getting some rotten
sticks that lay about the floor, he made a fire. In front of him was a
profound well; doubtless some neighbouring peasant had once used it for
his water, and it was he that had set up the fence. A long while the
count stood leaning on the rail and looking down into the pit. It was of
Roman foundation, and, like all that nation set their hands to, built as
for eternity; the sides were still straight, and the joints smooth; to a
man who should fall in, no escape was possible. 'Now,' the count was
thinking, 'a strong impulsion brought me to this place. What for? what
have I gained? why should I be sent to gaze into this well?' when the
rail of the fence gave suddenly under his weight, and he came within an
ace of falling headlong in. Leaping back to save himself, he trod out
the last flicker of his fire, which gave him thenceforward no more
light, only an incommoding smoke. 'Was I sent here to my death?' says
he, and shook from head to foot. And then a thought flashed in his mind.
He crept forth on hands and knees to the brink of the pit, and felt
above him in the air. The rail had been fast to a pair of uprights; it
had only broken from the one, and still depended from the other. The
count set it back again as he had found it, so that the place meant
death to the first comer, and groped out of the catacomb like a sick
man. The next day, riding in the Corso with the baron, he purposely
betrayed a strong preoccupation. The other (as he had designed) inquired
into the cause; and he, after some fencing, admitted that his spirits
had been dashed by an unusual dream. This was calculated to draw on the
baron--a superstitious man, who affected the scorn of superstition. Some
rallying followed, and then the count, as if suddenly carried away,
called on his friend to beware, for it was of him that he had dreamed.
You know enough of human nature, my excellent Mackellar, to be certain
of one thing: I mean that the baron did not rest till he had heard the
dream. The count, sure that he would never desist, kept him in play till
his curiosity was highly inflamed, and then suffered himself, with
seeming reluctance, to be overborne. 'I warn you,' says he, 'evil will
come of it; something tells me so. But since there is to be no peace
either for you or me except on this condition, the blame be on your own
head! This was the dream:--I beheld you riding, I know not where, yet I
think it must have been near Rome, for on your one hand was an ancient
tomb, and on the other a garden of evergreen trees. Methought I cried
and cried upon you to come back in a very agony of terror; whether you
heard me I know not, but you went doggedly on. The road brought you to a
desert place among ruins, where was a door in a hill-side, and hard by
the door a misbegotten pine. Here you dismounted (I still crying on you
to beware), tied your horse to the pine-tree, and entered resolutely in
by the door. Within, it was dark; but in my dream I could still see you,
and still besought you to hold back. You felt your way along the
right-hand wall, took a branching passage to the right, and came to a
little chamber, where was a well with a railing. At this--I know not
why--my alarm for you increased a thousandfold, so that I seemed to
scream myself hoarse with warnings, crying it was still time, and
bidding you begone at once from that vestibule. Such was the word I used
in my dream, and it seemed then to have a clear significancy; but
to-day, and awake, I profess I know not what it means. To all my outcry
you rendered not the least attention, leaning the while upon the rail
and looking down intently in the water. And then there was made to you a
communication; I do not think I even gathered what it was, but the fear
of it plucked me clean out of my slumber, and I awoke shaking and
sobbing. And now,' continues the count, 'I thank you from my heart for
your insistency. This dream lay on me like a load; and now I have told
it in plain words and in the broad daylight, it seems no great
matter.'--'I do not know,' says the baron. 'It is in some points
strange. A communication, did you say! O! it is an odd dream. It will
make a story to amuse our friends.'--'I am not so sure,' says the count.
'I am sensible of some reluctancy. Let us rather forget it.'--'By all
means,' says the baron. And (in fact) the dream was not again referred
to. Some days after, the count proposed a ride in the fields, which the
baron (since they were daily growing faster friends) very readily
accepted. On the way back to Rome, the count led them insensibly by a
particular route. Presently he reined in his horse, clapped his hand
before his eyes, and cried out aloud. Then he showed his face again
(which was now quite white, for he was a consummate actor), and stared
upon the baron. 'What ails you?' cries the baron. 'What is wrong with
you?'--'Nothing,' cries the count. 'It is nothing. A seizure, I know
not what. Let us hurry back to Rome.' But in the meanwhile the baron had
looked about him; and there, on the left-hand side of the way as they
went back to Rome, he saw a dusty by-road with a tomb upon the one hand
and a garden of evergreen trees upon the other.--'Yes,' says he, with a
changed voice. 'Let us by all means hurry back to Rome. I fear you are
not well in health.'--'O, for God's sake!' cried the count, shuddering,
'back to Rome and let me get to bed.' They made their return with scarce
a word; and the count, who should by rights have gone into society, took
to his bed and gave out he had a touch of country fever. The next day
the baron's horse was found tied to the pine, but himself was never
heard of from that hour.--And now, was that a murder?" says the Master,
breaking sharply off.
"Are you sure he was a count?" I asked.
"I am not certain of the title," said he, "but he was a gentleman of
family: and the Lord deliver you, Mackellar, from an enemy so subtile!"
These last words he spoke down at me, smiling from high above; the next,
he was under my feet. I continued to follow his evolutions with a
childish fixity: they made me giddy and vacant, and I spoke as in a
dream.
"He hated the baron with a great hatred?" I asked.
"His belly moved when the man came near him," said the Master.
"I have felt that same," said I.
"Verily!" cries the Master. "Here is news indeed! I wonder--do I flatter
myself? or am I the cause of these ventral perturbations?"
He was quite capable of choosing out a graceful posture, even with no
one to behold him but myself, and all the more if there were any element
of peril. He sat now with one knee flung across the other, his arms on
his bosom, fitting the swing of the ship with an exquisite balance, such
as a featherweight might overthrow. All at once I had the vision of my
lord at the table, with his head upon his hands; only now, when he
showed me his countenance, it was heavy with reproach. The words of my
own prayer--_I were liker a man if I struck this creature down_--shot at
the same time into my memory. I called my energies together, and (the
ship then heeling downward toward my enemy) thrust at him swiftly with
my foot. It was written I should have the guilt of this attempt without
the profit. Whether from my own uncertainty or his incredible quickness,
he escaped the thrust, leaping to his feet and catching hold at the same
moment of a stay.
I do not know how long a time passed by: I lying where I was upon the
deck, overcome with terror and remorse and shame: he standing with the
stay in his hand, backed against the bulwarks, and regarding me with an
expression singularly mingled. At last he spoke.
"Mackellar," said he, "I make no reproaches, but I offer you a bargain.
On your side, I do not suppose you desire to have this exploit made
public; on mine, I own to you freely I do not care to draw my breath in
a perpetual terror of assassination by the man I sit at meat with.
Promise me--but no," says he, breaking off, "you are not yet in the
quiet possession of your mind; you might think I had extorted the
promise from your weakness; and I would leave no door open for casuistry
to come in--that dishonesty of the conscientious. Take time to
meditate."
With that he made off up the sliding deck like a squirrel, and plunged
into the cabin. About half an hour later he returned--I still lying as
he had left me.
"Now," says he, "will you give me your troth as a Christian, and a
faithful servant of my brother's, that I shall have no more to fear from
your attempts?"
"I give it you," said I.
"I shall require your hand upon it," says he.
"You have the right to make conditions," I replied, and we shook hands.
He sat down at once in the same place and the old perilous attitude.
"Hold on!" cried I, covering my eyes. "I cannot bear to see you in that
posture. The least irregularity of the sea might plunge you overboard."
"You are highly inconsistent," he replied, smiling, but doing as I
asked. "For all that, Mackellar, I would have you to know you have risen
forty feet in my esteem. You think I cannot set a price upon fidelity?
But why do you suppose I carry that Secundra Dass about the world with
me? Because he would die or do murder for me to-morrow; and I love him
for it. Well, you may think it odd, but I like you the better for this
afternoon. I thought you were magnetised with the Ten Commandments; but
no--God damn my soul!"--he cries, "the old wife has blood in his body
after all! Which does not change the fact," he continued, smiling again,
"that you have done well to give your promise; for I doubt if you would
ever shine in your new trade."
"I suppose," said I, "I should ask your pardon and God's for my attempt.
At any rate, I have passed my word, which I will keep faithfully. But
when I think of those you persecute----" I paused.
"Life is a singular thing," said he, "and mankind a very singular
people. You suppose yourself to love my brother. I assure you, it is
merely custom. Interrogate your memory; and when first you came to
Durrisdeer, you will find you considered him a dull, ordinary youth. He
is as dull and ordinary now, though not so young. Had you instead fallen
in with me, you would to-day be as strong upon my side."
"I would never say you were ordinary, Mr. Bally," I returned; "but here
you prove yourself dull. You have just shown your reliance on my
word--in other terms, that is, my conscience--the same which starts
instinctively back from you, like the eye from a strong light."
"Ah!" says he, "but I mean otherwise. I mean, had I met you in my
youth. You are to consider I was not always as I am to-day; nor (had I
met in with a friend of your description) should I have ever been so."
"Hut, Mr. Bally," says I, "you would have made a mock of me; you would
never have spent ten civil words on such a Square-toes."
But he was now fairly started on his new course of justification, with
which he wearied me throughout the remainder of the passage. No doubt in
the past he had taken pleasure to paint himself unnecessarily black, and
made a vaunt of his wickedness, bearing it for a coat-of-arms. Nor was
he so illogical as to abate one item of his old confessions. "But now
that I know you are a human being," he would say, "I can take the
trouble to explain myself. For I assure you I am human too, and have my
virtues like my neighbours." I say, he wearied me, for I had only the
one word to say in answer: twenty times I must have said it: "Give up
your present purpose and return with me to Durrisdeer: then I will
believe you."
Thereupon he would shake his head at me. "Ah! Mackellar, you might live
a thousand years and never understand my nature," he would say. "This
battle is now committed, the hour of reflection quite past, the hour for
mercy not yet come. It began between us when we span a coin in the hall
of Durrisdeer, now twenty years ago; we have had our ups and downs, but
never either of us dreamed of giving in; and as for me, when my glove is
cast, life and honour go with it."
"A fig for your honour!" I would say. "And by your leave, these warlike
similitudes are something too high-sounding for the matter in hand. You
want some dirty money; there is the bottom of your contention; and as
for your means, what are they? to stir up sorrow in a family that never
harmed you, to debauch (if you can) your own nephew, and to wring the
heart of your born brother! A footpad that kills an old granny in a
woollen mutch with a dirty bludgeon, and that for a shilling-piece and
a paper of snuff--there is all the warrior that you are."
When I would attack him thus (or somewhat thus) he would smile, and sigh
like a man misunderstood. Once, I remember, he defended himself more at
large and had some curious sophistries, worth repeating, for a light
upon his character.
"You are very like a civilian to think war consists in drums and
banners," said he. "War (as the ancients said very wisely) is _ultima
ratio_. When we take our advantage unrelentingly, then we make war. Ah!
Mackellar, you are a devil of a soldier in the steward's room at
Durrisdeer, or the tenants do you sad injustice!"
"I think little of what war is or is not," I replied. "But you weary me
with claiming my respect. Your brother is a good man, and you are a bad
one--neither more nor less."
"Had I been Alexander----" he began.
"It is so we all dupe ourselves," I cried. "Had I been St. Paul, it
would have been all one; I would have made the same hash of that career
that you now see me making of my own."
"I tell you," he cried, bearing down my interruption, "had I been the
least petty chieftain in the Highlands, had I been the least king of
naked negroes in the African desert, my people would have adored me. A
bad man, am I? Ah! but I was born for a good tyrant! Ask Secundra Dass;
he will tell you I treat him like a son. Cast in your lot with me
to-morrow, become my slave, my chattel, a thing I can command as I
command the powers of my own limbs and spirit--you will see no more that
dark side that I turn upon the world in anger. I must have all or none.
But where all is given I give it back with usury. I have a kingly
nature: there is my loss!"
"It has been hitherto rather the loss of others," I remarked, "which
seems a little on the hither side of royalty."
"Tilly-vally!" cried he. "Even now, I tell you, I would spare that
family in which you take so great an interest: yes, even now--to-morrow
I would leave them to their petty welfare, and disappear in that forest
of cut-throats and thimble-riggers that we call the world. I would do it
to-morrow!" says he. "Only--only----"
"Only what?" I asked.
"Only they must beg it on their bended knees. I think in public, too,"
he added, smiling. "Indeed, Mackellar, I doubt if there be a hall big
enough to serve my purpose for that act of reparation."
"Vanity, vanity!" I moralised. "To think that this great force for evil
should be swayed by the same sentiment that sets a lassie mincing to her
glass!"
"O! there are double words for everything: the word that swells, the
word that belittles; you cannot fight me with a word!" said he. "You
said the other day that I relied on your conscience: were I in your
humour of detraction, I might say I built upon your vanity. It is your
pretension to be _un homme de parole_; 'tis mine not to accept defeat.
Call it vanity, call it virtue, call it greatness of soul--what
signifies the expression? But recognise in each of us a common strain:
that we both live for an idea."
It will be gathered from so much familiar talk, and so much patience on
both sides, that we now lived together upon excellent terms. Such was
again the fact, and this time more seriously than before. Apart from
disputations such as that which I have tried to reproduce, not only
consideration reigned, but, I am tempted to say, even kindness. When I
fell sick (as I did shortly after our great storm), he sat by my berth
to entertain me with his conversation, and treated me with excellent
remedies, which I accepted with security. Himself commented on the
circumstance. "You see," says he, "you begin to know me better. A very
little while ago, upon this lonely ship, where no one but myself has any
smattering of science, you would have made sure I had designs upon your
life. And, observe, it is since I found you had designs upon my own that
I have shown you most respect. You will tell me if this speaks of a
small mind." I found little to reply. In so far as regarded myself, I
believed him to mean well; I am, perhaps, the more a dupe of his
dissimulation, but I believed (and I still believe) that he regarded me
with genuine kindness. Singular and sad fact! so soon as this change
began, my animosity abated, and these haunting visions of my master
passed utterly away. So that, perhaps, there was truth in the man's last
vaunting word to me, uttered on the twenty-second day of July, when our
long voyage was at last brought almost to an end, and we lay becalmed at
the sea end of the vast harbour of New York, in a gasping heat, which
was presently exchanged for a surprising waterfall of rain. I stood on
the poop, regarding the green shores near at hand, and now and then the
light smoke of the little town, our destination. And as I was even then
devising how to steal a march on my familiar enemy, I was conscious of a
shade of embarrassment when he approached me with his hand extended.
"I am now to bid you farewell," said he, "and that for ever. For now you
go among my enemies, where all your former prejudices will revive. I
never yet failed to charm a person when I wanted; even you, my good
friend--to call you so for once--even you have now a very different
portrait of me in your memory, and one that you will never quite forget.
The voyage has not lasted long enough, or I should have wrote the
impression deeper. But now all is at an end, and we are again at war.
Judge by this little interlude how dangerous I am; and tell those
fools"--pointing with his finger to the town--"to think twice and thrice
before they set me at defiance."