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 dropping
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 provision 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 hillside 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, McMurtrie, 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 bedfellows;
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 word 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 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 hillside, 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? Oh! 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.’—‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ cries 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’s performance. 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!”
“Oh! 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 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.”