PASSAGES AT NEW YORK
I have mentioned I was resolved to steal a march upon the Master; and
this, with the complicity of Captain M'Murtrie, was mighty easily
effected: a boat being partly loaded on the one side of our ship, and
the Master placed on board of it, the while a skiff put off from the
other, carrying me alone. I had no more trouble in finding a direction
to my lord's house, whither I went at top speed, and which I found to be
on the outskirts of the place, a very suitable mansion, in a fine
garden, with an extraordinary large barn, byre, and stable, all in one.
It was here my lord was walking when I arrived; indeed, it had become
his chief place of frequentation, and his mind was now filled with
farming. I burst in upon him breathless, and gave him my news: which was
indeed no news at all, several ships having outsailed the _Nonesuch_ in
the interval.
"We have been expecting you long," said my lord; "and indeed, of late
days, ceased to expect you any more. I am glad to take your hand again,
Mackellar. I thought you had been at the bottom of the sea."
"Ah! my lord, would God I had!" cried I. "Things would have been better
for yourself."
"Not in the least," says he grimly. "I could not ask better. There is a
long score to pay, and now--at last--I can begin to pay it."
I cried out against his security.
"O!" says he, "this is not Durrisdeer, and I have taken my precautions.
His reputation awaits him; I have prepared a welcome for my brother.
Indeed, fortune has served me; for I found here a merchant of Albany
who knew him after the 'Forty-five, and had mighty convenient suspicions
of a murder: some one of the name of Chew it was, another Albanian. No
one here will be surprised if I deny him my door; he will not be
suffered to address my children, nor even to salute my wife: as for
myself, I make so much exception for a brother that he may speak to me.
I should lose my pleasure else," says my lord, rubbing his palms.
Presently he bethought himself, and set men off running, with billets,
to summon the magnates of the province. I cannot recall what pretext he
employed; at least, it was successful; and when our ancient enemy
appeared upon the scene, he found my lord pacing in front of his house
under some trees of shade, with the Governor upon one hand and various
notables upon the other. My lady, who was seated in the verandah, rose
with a very pinched expression and carried her children into the house.
The Master, well dressed, and with an elegant walking-sword, bowed to
the company in a handsome manner and nodded to my lord with familiarity.
My lord did not accept the salutation, but looked upon his brother with
bended brows.
"Well, sir," says he at last, "what ill wind brings you hither of all
places, where (to our common disgrace) your reputation has preceded
you?"
"Your lordship is pleased to be civil," cries the Master, with a fine
start.
"I am pleased to be very plain," returned my lord; "because it is
needful you should clearly understand your situation. At home; where you
were so little known, it was still possible to keep appearances; that
would be quite vain in this province; and I have to tell you that I am
quite resolved to wash my hands of you. You have already ruined me
almost to the door, as you ruined my father before me;--whose heart you
also broke. Your crimes escape the law; but my friend the Governor has
promised protection to my family. Have a care, sir!" cries my lord,
shaking his cane at him: "if you are observed to utter two words to any
of my innocent household, the law shall be stretched to make you smart
for it."
"Ah!" says the Master, very slowly. "And so this is the advantage of a
foreign land! These gentlemen are unacquainted with our story, I
perceive. They do not know that I am the true Lord Durrisdeer; they do
not know you are my younger brother, sitting in my place under a sworn
family compact; they do not know (or they would not be seen with you in
familiar correspondence) that every acre is mine before God
Almighty--and every doit of the money you withhold from me, you do it as
a thief, a perjurer, and a disloyal brother!"
"General Clinton," I cried, "do not listen to his lies. I am the steward
of the estate, and there is not one word of truth in it. The man is a
forfeited rebel turned into a hired spy: there is his story in two
words."
It was thus (in the heat of the moment) I let slip his infamy.
"Fellow," said the Governor, turning his face sternly on the Master, "I
know more of you than you think for. We have some broken ends of your
adventures in the provinces, which you will do very well not to drive me
to investigate. There is the disappearance of Mr. Jacob Chew with all
his merchandise; there is the matter of where you came ashore from with
so much money and jewels, when you were picked up by a Bermudan out of
Albany. Believe me, if I let these matters lie, it is in commiseration
for your family, and out of respect for my valued friend, Lord
Durrisdeer."
There was a murmur of applause from the provincials.
"I should have remembered how a title would shine out in such a hole as
this," says the Master, white as a sheet: "no matter how unjustly come
by. It remains for me, then, to die at my lord's door, where my dead
body will form a very cheerful ornament."
"Away with your affectations!" cries my lord. "You know very well I have
no such meaning; only to protect myself from calumny, and my home from
your intrusion. I offer you a choice. Either I shall pay your passage
home on the first ship, when you may perhaps be able to resume your
occupations under Government, although God knows I would rather see you
on the highway! Or, if that likes you not, stay here and welcome! I have
inquired the least sum on which body and soul can be decently kept
together in New York; so much you shall have, paid weekly; and if you
cannot labour with your hands to better it, high time you should betake
yourself to learn. The condition is--that you speak with no member of my
family except myself," he added.
I do not think I have ever seen any man so pale as was the Master; but
he was erect and his mouth firm.
"I have been met here with some very unmerited insults," said he, "from
which I have certainly no idea to take refuge by flight. Give me your
pittance; I take it without shame, for it is mine already--like the
shirt upon your back; and I choose to stay until these gentlemen shall
understand me better. Already they must spy the cloven hoof, since with
all your pretended eagerness for the family honour, you take a pleasure
to degrade it in my person."
"This is all very fine," says my lord; "but to us who know you of old,
you must be sure it signifies nothing. You take that alternative out of
which you think that you can make the most. Take it, if you can, in
silence; it will serve you better in the long-run, you may believe me,
than this ostentation of ingratitude."
"O, gratitude, my lord!" cries the Master, with a mounting intonation,
and his forefinger very conspicuously lifted up. "Be at rest: it will
not fail you. It now remains that I should salute these gentlemen whom
we have wearied with our family affairs."
And he bowed to each in succession, settled his walking-sword, and took
himself off, leaving every one amazed at his behaviour, and me not less
so at my lord's.
* * * * *
We were now to enter on a changed phase of this family division. The
Master was by no manner of means so helpless as my lord supposed, having
at his hand, and entirely devoted to his service, an excellent artist in
all sorts of goldsmith work. With my lord's allowance, which was not so
scanty as he had described it, the pair could support life; and all the
earnings of Secundra Dass might be laid upon one side for any future
purpose. That this was done, I have no doubt. It was in all likelihood
the Master's design to gather a sufficiency, and then proceed in quest
of that treasure which he had buried long before among the mountains; to
which, if he had confined himself, he would have been more happily
inspired. But unfortunately for himself and all of us, he took counsel
of his anger. The public disgrace of his arrival--which I sometimes
wonder he could manage to survive--rankled in his bones; he was in that
humour when a man--in the words of the old adage--will cut off his nose
to spite his face; and he must make himself a public spectacle in the
hopes that some of the disgrace might spatter on my lord.
He chose, in a poor quarter of the town, a lonely, small house of
boards, overhung with some acacias. It was furnished in front with a
sort of hutch opening, like that of a dog's kennel, but about as high as
a table from the ground, in which the poor man that built it had
formerly displayed some wares; and it was this which took the Master's
fancy, and possibly suggested his proceedings. It appears, on board the
pirate ship he had acquired some quickness with the needle--enough, at
least, to play the part of tailor in the public eye, which was all that
was required by the nature of his vengeance. A placard was hung above
the hutch, bearing these words in something of the following
disposition:
JAMES DURIE,
FORMERLY MASTER OF BALLANTRAE.
CLOTHES NEATLY CLOUTED.
______
SECUNDRA DASS,
DECAYED GENTLEMAN OF INDIA.
FINE GOLDSMITH WORK.
Underneath this, when he had a job, my gentleman sat withinside
tailor-wise and busily stitching. I say, when he had a job; but such
customers as came were rather for Secundra, and the Master's sewing
would be more in the manner of Penelope's. He could never have designed
to gain even butter to his bread by such a means of livelihood: enough
for him that there was the name of Durie dragged in the dirt on the
placard, and the sometime heir of that proud family set up cross-legged
in public for a reproach upon his brother's meanness. And in so far his
device succeeded that there was murmuring in the town and a party formed
highly inimical to my lord. My lord's favour with the Governor laid him
more open on the other side; my lady (who was never so well received in
the colony) met with painful innuendoes; in a party of women, where it
would be the topic most natural to introduce, she was almost debarred
from the naming of needle-work; and I have seen her return with a
flushed countenance, and vow that she would go abroad no more.
In the meanwhile my lord dwelled in his decent mansion, immersed in
farming; a popular man with his intimates, and careless or unconscious
of the rest. He laid on flesh; had a bright, busy face; even the heat
seemed to prosper with him; and my lady--in despite of her own
annoyances--daily blessed Heaven her father should have left her such a
paradise. She had looked on from a window upon the Master's humiliation;
and from that hour appeared to feel at ease. I was not so sure myself;
as time went on, there seemed to me a something not quite wholesome in
my lord's condition. Happy he was, beyond a doubt, but the grounds of
this felicity were secret; even in the bosom of his family he brooded
with manifest delight upon some private thought; and I conceived at last
the suspicion (quite unworthy of us both) that he kept a mistress
somewhere in the town. Yet he went little abroad, and his day was very
fully occupied; indeed, there was but a single period, and that pretty
early in the morning, while Mr. Alexander was at his lesson-book, of
which I was not certain of the disposition. It should be borne in mind,
in the defence of that which I now did, that I was always in some fear
my lord was not quite justly in his reason; and with our enemy sitting
so still in the same town with us, I did well to be upon my guard.
Accordingly I made a pretext, had the hour changed at which I taught Mr.
Alexander the foundation of ciphering and the mathematic, and set myself
instead to dog my master's footsteps.
Every morning, fair or foul, he took his gold-headed cane, set his hat
on the back of his head--a recent habitude, which I thought to indicate
a burning brow--and betook himself to make a certain circuit. At the
first his way was among pleasant trees and beside a graveyard, where he
would sit a while, if the day were fine, in meditation. Presently the
path turned down to the water-side, and came back along the
harbour-front and past the Master's booth. As he approached this second
part of his circuit, my Lord Durrisdeer began to pace more leisurely,
like a man delighted with the air and scene; and before the booth,
half-way between that and the water's edge, would pause a little,
leaning on his staff. It was the hour when the Master sate within upon
his board and plied his needle. So these two brothers would gaze upon
each other with hard faces; and then my lord move on again, smiling to
himself.
It was but twice that I must stoop to that ungrateful necessity of
playing spy. I was then certain of my lord's purpose in his rambles and
of the secret source of his delight. Here was his mistress: it was
hatred and not love that gave him healthful colours. Some moralists
might have been relieved by the discovery; I confess that I was
dismayed. I found this situation of two brethren not only odious in
itself, but big with possibilities of further evil; and I made it my
practice, in so far as many occupations would allow, to go by a shorter
path and be secretly present at their meeting. Coming down one day a
little late, after I had been near a week prevented, I was struck with
surprise to find a new development. I should say there was a bench
against the Master's house, where customers might sit to parley with the
shopman; and here I found my lord seated, nursing his cane and looking
pleasantly forth upon the bay. Not three feet from him sate the Master,
stitching. Neither spoke; nor (in this new situation) did my lord so
much as cast a glance at his enemy. He tasted his neighbourhood, I must
suppose, less indirectly in the bare proximity of person; and, without
doubt, drank deep of hateful pleasures.
He had no sooner come away than I openly joined him.
"My lord, my lord," said I, "this is no manner of behaviour."
"I grow fat upon it," he replied: and not merely the words, which were
strange enough, but the whole character of his expression, shocked me.
"I warn you, my lord, against this indulgency of evil feeling," said I.
"I know not to which it is more perilous, the soul or the reason; but
you go the way to murder both."
"You cannot understand," said he. "You had never such mountains of
bitterness upon your heart."
"And if it were no more," I added, "you will surely goad the man to some
extremity."
"To the contrary; I am breaking his spirit," says my lord.
Every morning for hard upon a week my lord took his same place upon the
bench. It was a pleasant place, under the green acacias, with a sight
upon the bay and shipping, and a sound (from some way off) of mariners
singing at their employ. Here the two sate without speech or any
external movement, beyond that of the needle, or the Master biting off a
thread, for he still clung to his pretence of industry; and here I made
a point to join them, wondering at myself and my companions. If any of
my lord's friends went by, he would hail them cheerfully, and cry out he
was there to give some good advice to his brother, who was now (to his
delight) grown quite industrious. And even this the Master accepted with
a steady countenance; what was in his mind, God knows, or perhaps Satan
only.
All of a sudden, on a still day of what they call the Indian Summer,
when the woods were changed into gold and pink and scarlet, the Master
laid down his needle and burst into a fit of merriment. I think he must
have been preparing it a long while in silence, for the note in itself
was pretty naturally pitched; but breaking suddenly from so extreme a
silence, and in circumstances so averse from mirth, it sounded ominously
on my ear.
"Henry," said he, "I have for once made a false step, and for once you
have had the wit to profit by it. The farce of the cobbler ends to-day;
and I confess to you (with my compliments) that you have had the best of
it. Blood will out; and you have certainly a choice idea of how to make
yourself unpleasant."
Never a word said my lord; it was just as though the Master had not
broken silence.
"Come," resumed the Master, "do not be sulky; it will spoil your
attitude. You can now afford (believe me) to be a little gracious; for I
have not merely a defeat to accept. I had meant to continue this
performance till I had gathered enough money for a certain purpose; I
confess ingenuously I have not the courage. You naturally desire my
absence from this town; I have come round by another way to the same
idea. And I have a proposition to make; or, if your lordship prefers, a
favour to ask."
"Ask it," says my lord.
"You may have heard that I had once in this country a considerable
treasure," returned the Master; "it matters not whether or no--such is
the fact; and I was obliged to bury it in a spot of which I have
sufficient indications. To the recovery of this has my ambition now come
down; and, as it is my own, you will not grudge it me."
"Go and get it," says my lord. "I shall make no opposition."
"Yes," said the Master; "but to do so I must find men and carriage. The
way is long and rough, and the country infested with wild Indians.
Advance me only so much as shall be needful: either as a lump sum, in
lieu of my allowance; or, if you prefer it, as a loan, which I shall
repay on my return. And then, if you so decide, you may have seen the
last of me."
My lord stared him steadily in the eyes; there was a hard smile upon his
face, but he uttered nothing.
"Henry," said the Master, with a formidable quietness, and drawing at
the same time somewhat back--"Henry, I had the honour to address you."
"Let us be stepping homeward," says my lord to me, who was plucking at
his sleeve; and with that he rose, stretched himself, settled his hat,
and, still without a syllable of response, began to walk steadily along
the shore.
I hesitated a while between the two brothers, so serious a climax did we
seem to have reached. But the Master had resumed his occupation, his
eyes lowered, his hand seemingly as deft as ever; and I decided to
pursue my lord.
"Are you mad?" I cried, so soon as I had overtook him. "Would you cast
away so fair an opportunity?"
"Is it possible you should still believe in him?" inquired my lord,
almost with a sneer.
"I wish him forth of this town!" I cried. "I wish him anywhere and
anyhow but as he is."
"I have said my say," returned my lord, "and you have said yours. There
let it rest."
But I was bent on dislodging the Master. That sight of him patiently
returning to his needlework was more than my imagination could digest.
There was never a man made, and the Master the least of any, that could
accept so long a series of insults. The air smelt blood to me. And I
vowed there should be no neglect of mine if, through any chink of
possibility, crime could be yet turned aside. That same day, therefore,
I came to my lord in his business room, where he sat upon some trivial
occupation.
"My lord," said I, "I have found a suitable investment for my small
economies. But these are unhappily in Scotland; it will take some time
to lift them, and the affair presses. Could your lordship see his way to
advance me the amount against my note?"
He read me a while with keen eyes. "I have never inquired into the state
of your affairs, Mackellar," says he. "Beyond the amount of your
caution, you may not be worth a farthing, for what I know."
"I have been a long while in your service, and never told a lie, nor yet
asked a favour for myself," said I, "until to-day."
"A favour for the Master," he returned quietly. "Do you take me for a
fool, Mackellar? Understand it once and for all, I treat this beast in
my own way; fear nor favour shall not move me; and before I am
hoodwinked, it will require a trickster less transparent than yourself.
I ask service, loyal service; not that you should make and mar behind my
back, and steal my own money to defeat me."
"My lord," said I, "these are very unpardonable expressions."
"Think once more, Mackellar," he replied; "and you will see they fit the
fact. It is your own subterfuge that is unpardonable. Deny (if you can)
that you designed this money to evade my orders with, and I will ask
your pardon freely. If you cannot, you must have the resolution to hear
your conduct go by its own name."
"If you think I had any design but to save you----" I began.
"O! my old friend," said he, "you know very well what I think! Here is
my hand to you with all my heart; but of money, not one rap."
Defeated upon this side, I went straight to my room, wrote a letter, ran
with it to the harbour, for I knew a ship was on the point of sailing;
and came to the Master's door a little before dusk. Entering without the
form of any knock, I found him sitting with his Indian at a simple meal
of maize porridge with some milk. The house within was clean and poor;
only a few books upon a shelf distinguished it, and (in one corner)
Secundra's little bench.
"Mr. Bally," said I, "I have near five hundred pounds laid by in
Scotland, the economies of a hard life. A letter goes by yon ship to
have it lifted. Have so much patience till the return ship comes in, and
it is all yours, upon the same condition you offered to my lord this
morning."
He rose from the table, came forward, took me by the shoulders, and
looked me in the face, smiling.
"And yet you are very fond of money!" said he. "And yet you love money
beyond all things else, except my brother!"
"I fear old age and poverty," said I, "which is another matter."
"I will never quarrel for a name. Call it so," he replied.--"Ah!
Mackellar, Mackellar, if this were done from any love to me, how gladly
would I close upon your offer!"
"And yet," I eagerly answered--"I say it to my shame, but I cannot see
you in this poor place without compunction. It is not my single
thought, nor my first; and yet it's there! I would gladly see you
delivered. I do not offer it in love, and far from that; but, as God
judges me--and I wonder at it too!--quite without enmity."
"Ah!" says he, still holding my shoulders, and now gently shaking me,
"you think of me more than you suppose. 'And I wonder at it too,'" he
added, repeating my expression and, I suppose, something of my voice.
"You are an honest man, and for that cause I spare you."
"Spare me?" I cried.
"Spare you," he repeated, letting me go and turning away. And then,
fronting me once more: "You little know what I would do with it,
Mackellar! Did you think I had swallowed my defeat indeed? Listen: my
life has been a series of unmerited cast-backs. That fool, Prince
Charlie, mismanaged a most promising affair: there fell my first
fortune. In Paris I had my foot once more high up on the ladder: that
time it was an accident; a letter came to the wrong hand, and I was bare
again. A third time I found my opportunity; I built up a place for
myself in India with an infinite patience; and then Clive came, my rajah
was swallowed up, and I escaped out of the convulsion, like another
Æneas, with Secundra Dass upon my back. Three times I have had my hand
upon the highest station: and I am not yet three-and-forty. I know the
world as few men know it when they come to die--Court and camp, the East
and the West; I know where to go, I see a thousand openings. I am now at
the height of my resources, sound of health, of inordinate ambition.
Well, all this I resign; I care not if I die, and the world never hear
of me; I care only for one thing, and that I will have. Mind yourself;
lest, when the roof falls, you, too, should be crushed under the ruins."
* * * * *
As I came out of his house, all hope of intervention quite destroyed, I
was aware of a stir on the harbour-side, and, raising my eyes, there
was a great ship newly come to anchor. It seems strange I could have
looked upon her with so much indifference, for she brought death to the
brothers of Durrisdeer. After all the desperate episodes of this
contention, the insults, the opposing interests, the fraternal duel in
the shrubbery, it was reserved for some poor devil in Grub Street,
scribbling for his dinner, and not caring what he scribbled, to cast a
spell across four thousand miles of the salt sea, and send forth both
these brothers into savage and wintry deserts, there to die. But such a
thought was distant from my mind; and while all the provincials were
fluttered about me by the unusual animation of their port, I passed
throughout their midst on my return homeward, quite absorbed in the
recollection of my visit and the Master's speech.
The same night there was brought to us from the ship a little packet of
pamphlets. The next day my lord was under engagement to go with the
Governor upon some party of pleasure; the time was nearly due, and I
left him for a moment alone in his room and skimming through the
pamphlets. When I returned, his head had fallen upon the table, his arms
lying abroad amongst the crumpled papers.
"My lord, my lord!" I cried as I ran forward, for I supposed he was in
some fit.
He sprang up like a figure upon wires, his countenance deformed with
fury, so that in a strange place I should scarce have known him. His
hand at the same time flew above his head, as though to strike me down.
"Leave me alone!" he screeched, and I fled, as fast as my shaking legs
would bear me, for my lady. She, too, lost no time; but when we
returned, he had the door locked within, and only cried to us from the
other side to leave him be. We looked in each other's faces, very
white--each supposing the blow had come at last.
"I will write to the Governor to excuse him," says she. "We must keep
our strong friends." But when she took up the pen it flew out of her
fingers. "I cannot write," said she. "Can you?"
"I will make a shift, my lady," said I.
She looked over me as I wrote. "That will do," she said, when I had
done. "Thank God, Mackellar, I have you to lean upon! But what can it be
now? What, what can it be?"
In my own mind I believed there was no explanation possible, and none
required; it was my fear that the man's madness had now simply burst
forth its way, like the long-smothered flames of a volcano; but to this
(in mere mercy to my lady) I durst not give expression.
"It is more to the purpose to consider our own behaviour," said I. "Must
we leave him there alone?"
"I do not dare disturb him," she replied. "Nature may know best; it may
be Nature that cries to be alone; and we grope in the dark. O yes, I
would leave him as he is."
"I will, then, despatch this letter, my lady, and return here, if you
please, to sit with you," said I.
"Pray do," cries my lady.
All afternoon we sat together, mostly in silence, watching my lord's
door. My own mind was busy with the scene that had just passed, and its
singular resemblance to my vision. I must say a word upon this, for the
story has gone abroad with great exaggeration, and I have even seen it
printed, and my own name referred to for particulars. So much was the
same: here was my lord in a room, with his head upon the table, and when
he raised his face, it wore such an expression as distressed me to the
soul. But the room was different, my lord's attitude at the table not at
all the same, and his face, when he disclosed it, expressed a painful
degree of fury instead of that haunting despair which had always (except
once, already referred to) characterised it in the vision. There is the
whole truth at last before the public; and if the differences be great,
the coincidence was yet enough to fill me with uneasiness. All
afternoon, as I say, I sat and pondered upon this quite to myself; for
my lady had trouble of her own, and it was my last thought to vex her
with fancies. About the midst of our time of waiting, she conceived an
ingenious scheme, had Mr. Alexander fetched, and bid him knock at his
father's door. My lord sent the boy about his business, but without the
least violence, whether of manner or expression; so that I began to
entertain a hope the fit was over.
At last, as the night fell and I was lighting a lamp that stood there
trimmed, the door opened and my lord stood within upon the threshold.
The light was not so strong that we could read his countenance; when he
spoke, methought his voice a little altered, but yet perfectly steady.
"Mackellar," said he, "carry this note to its destination with your own
hand. It is highly private. Find the person alone when you deliver it."
"Henry," says my lady, "you are not ill?"
"No, no," says he querulously, "I am occupied. Not at all; I am only
occupied. It is a singular thing a man must be supposed to be ill when
he has any business! Send me supper to this room, and a basket of wine:
I expect the visit of a friend. Otherwise I am not to be disturbed."
And with that he once more shut himself in.
The note was addressed to one Captain Harris, at a tavern on the
port-side. I knew Harris (by reputation) for a dangerous adventurer,
highly suspected of piracy in the past, and now following the rude
business of an Indian trader. What my lord should have to say to him, or
he to my lord, it passed my imagination to conceive: or yet how my lord
had heard of him, unless by a disgraceful trial from which the man was
recently escaped. Altogether I went upon the errand with reluctance, and
from the little I saw of the captain, returned from it with sorrow. I
found him in a foul-smelling chamber, sitting by a guttering candle and
an empty bottle; he had the remains of a military carriage, or rather
perhaps it was an affectation, for his manners were low.
"Tell my lord, with my service, that I will wait upon his lordship in
the inside of half an hour," says he when he had read the note; and then
had the servility, pointing to his empty bottle, to propose that I
should buy him liquor.
Although I returned with my best speed, the captain followed close upon
my heels, and he stayed late into the night. The cock was crowing a
second time when I saw (from my chamber window) my lord lighting him to
the gate, both men very much affected with their potations, and
sometimes leaning one upon the other to confabulate. Yet the next
morning my lord was abroad again early with a hundred pounds of money in
his pocket. I never supposed that he returned with it; and yet I was
quite sure it did not find its way to the Master, for I lingered all
morning within view of the booth. That was the last time my Lord
Durrisdeer passed his own enclosure till we left New York; he walked in
his barn, or sat and talked with his family, all much as usual; but the
town saw nothing of him, and his daily visits to the Master seemed
forgotten. Nor yet did Harris reappear; or not until the end.
I was now much oppressed with a sense of the mysteries in which we had
begun to move. It was plain, if only from his change of habitude, my
lord had something on his mind of a grave nature; but what it was,
whence it sprang, or why he should now keep the house and garden, I
could make no guess at. It was clear, even to probation, the pamphlets
had some share in this revolution; I read all I could find, and they
were all extremely insignificant, and of the usual kind of party
scurrility; even to a high politician, I could spy out no particular
matter of offence, and my lord was a man rather indifferent on public
questions. The truth is, the pamphlet which was the spring of this
affair lay all the time on my lord's bosom. There it was that I found
it at last, after he was dead, in the midst of the north wilderness: in
such a place, in such dismal circumstances, I was to read for the first
time these idle, lying words of a Whig pamphleteer declaiming against
indulgency to Jacobites:--"Another notorious Rebel, the _M----r_ of
_B----e_, is to have his Title restored," the passage ran. "This
Business has been long in hand, since he rendered some very disgraceful
Services in Scotland and France. His Brother, _L----d_ _D----r_, is
known to be no better than himself in Inclination; and the supposed
Heir, who is now to be set aside, was bred up in the most detestable
Principles. In the old Phrase, it is _six of the one and half a dozen of
the other_; but the Favour of such a Reposition is too extreme to be
passed over." A man in his right wits could not have cared two straws
for a tale so manifestly false; that Government should ever entertain
the notion was inconceivable to any reasoning creature, unless possibly
the fool that penned it; and my lord, though never brilliant, was ever
remarkable for sense. That he should credit such a rodomontade, and
carry the pamphlet on his bosom and the words in his heart, is the clear
proof of the man's lunacy. Doubtless the mere mention of Mr. Alexander,
and the threat directly held out against the child's succession,
precipitated that which had so long impended. Or else my master had been
truly mad for a long time, and we were too dull or too much used to him,
and did not perceive the extent of his infirmity.
About a week after the day of the pamphlets I was late upon the
harbour-side, and took a turn towards the Master's, as I often did. The
door opened, a flood of light came forth upon the road, and I beheld a
man taking his departure with friendly salutations. I cannot say how
singularly I was shaken to recognise the adventurer Harris. I could not
but conclude it was the hand of my lord that had brought him there; and
prolonged my walk in very serious and apprehensive thought. It was late
when I came home, and there was my lord making up his portmanteau for a
voyage.
"Why do you come so late?" he cried. "We leave to-morrow for Albany, you
and I together; and it is high time you were about your preparations."
"For Albany, my lord?" I cried. "And for what earthly purpose?"
"Change of scene," said he.
And my lady, who appeared to have been weeping, gave me the signal to
obey without more parley. She told me a little later (when we found
occasion to exchange some words) that he had suddenly announced his
intention after a visit from Captain Harris, and her best endeavours,
whether to dissuade him from the journey, or to elicit some explanation
of its purpose, had alike proved unavailing.