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The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter's Tale

by Robert Louis Stevenson · English · Gutenberg #864 · 484,120 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter's Tale

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson


        
Release date: March 1, 1997 [eBook #864]
                Most recently updated: August 24, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/864

Credits: David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE: A WINTER'S TALE ***

[Illustration]




The Master of Ballantrae

A Winter’s Tale

by Robert Louis Stevenson


Contents

 PREFACE
 CHAPTER I. SUMMARY OF EVENTS DURING THIS MASTER’S WANDERINGS
 CHAPTER II. SUMMARY OF EVENTS (_continued_)
 CHAPTER III. THE MASTER’S WANDERINGS
 CHAPTER IV. PERSECUTIONS ENDURED BY MR. HENRY
 CHAPTER V. ACCOUNT OF ALL THAT PASSED ON THE NIGHT ON FEBRUARY 27TH, 1757
 CHAPTER VI. SUMMARY OF EVENTS DURING THE MASTER’S SECOND ABSENCE
 CHAPTER VII. ADVENTURE OF CHEVALIER BURKE IN INDIA
 CHAPTER VIII. THE ENEMY IN THE HOUSE
 CHAPTER IX. MR. MACKELLAR’S JOURNEY WITH THE MASTER
 CHAPTER X. PASSAGES AT NEW YORK
 CHAPTER XI. THE JOURNEY IN THE WILDERNESS
 _Narrative of the Trader, Mountain_
 CHAPTER XII. THE JOURNEY IN THE WILDERNESS (_continued_)




To Sir Percy Florence and Lady Shelley


Here is a tale which extends over many years and travels into many
countries. By a peculiar fitness of circumstance the writer began,
continued it, and concluded it among distant and diverse scenes. Above
all, he was much upon the sea. The character and fortune of the
fraternal enemies, the hall and shrubbery of Durrisdeer, the problem of
Mackellar’s homespun and how to shape it for superior flights; these
were his company on deck in many star-reflecting harbours, ran often in
his mind at sea to the tune of slatting canvas, and were dismissed
(something of the suddenest) on the approach of squalls. It is my hope
that these surroundings of its manufacture may to some degree find
favour for my story with seafarers and sea-lovers like yourselves.

And at least here is a dedication from a great way off: written by the
loud shores of a subtropical island near upon ten thousand miles from
Boscombe Chine and Manor: scenes which rise before me as I write, along
with the faces and voices of my friends.

Well, I am for the sea once more; no doubt Sir Percy also. Let us make
the signal B. R. D.!

R. L. S.

Waikiki, _May_ 17, 1889




PREFACE


Although an old, consistent exile, the editor of the following pages
revisits now and again the city of which he exults to be a native; and
there are few things more strange, more painful, or more salutary, than
such revisitations. Outside, in foreign spots, he comes by surprise and
awakens more attention than he had expected; in his own city, the
relation is reversed, and he stands amazed to be so little recollected.
Elsewhere he is refreshed to see attractive faces, to remark possible
friends; there he scouts the long streets, with a pang at heart, for
the faces and friends that are no more. Elsewhere he is delighted with
the presence of what is new, there tormented by the absence of what is
old. Elsewhere he is content to be his present self; there he is
smitten with an equal regret for what he once was and for what he once
hoped to be.

He was feeling all this dimly, as he drove from the station, on his
last visit; he was feeling it still as he alighted at the door of his
friend Mr. Johnstone Thomson, W.S., with whom he was to stay. A hearty
welcome, a face not altogether changed, a few words that sounded of old
days, a laugh provoked and shared, a glimpse in passing of the snowy
cloth and bright decanters and the Piranesis on the dining-room wall,
brought him to his bed-room with a somewhat lightened cheer, and when
he and Mr. Thomson sat down a few minutes later, cheek by jowl, and
pledged the past in a preliminary bumper, he was already almost
consoled, he had already almost forgiven himself his two unpardonable
errors, that he should ever have left his native city, or ever returned
to it.

“I have something quite in your way,” said Mr. Thomson. “I wished to do
honour to your arrival; because, my dear fellow, it is my own youth
that comes back along with you; in a very tattered and withered state,
to be sure, but—well!—all that’s left of it.”

“A great deal better than nothing,” said the editor. “But what is this
which is quite in my way?”

“I was coming to that,” said Mr. Thomson: “Fate has put it in my power
to honour your arrival with something really original by way of
dessert. A mystery.”

“A mystery?” I repeated.

“Yes,” said his friend, “a mystery. It may prove to be nothing, and it
may prove to be a great deal. But in the meanwhile it is truly
mysterious, no eye having looked on it for near a hundred years; it is
highly genteel, for it treats of a titled family; and it ought to be
melodramatic, for (according to the superscription) it is concerned
with death.”

“I think I rarely heard a more obscure or a more promising
annunciation,” the other remarked. “But what is It?”

“You remember my predecessor’s, old Peter M’Brair’s business?”

“I remember him acutely; he could not look at me without a pang of
reprobation, and he could not feel the pang without betraying it. He
was to me a man of a great historical interest, but the interest was
not returned.”

“Ah well, we go beyond him,” said Mr. Thomson. “I daresay old Peter
knew as little about this as I do. You see, I succeeded to a prodigious
accumulation of old law-papers and old tin boxes, some of them of
Peter’s hoarding, some of his father’s, John, first of the dynasty, a
great man in his day. Among other collections, were all the papers of
the Durrisdeers.”

“The Durrisdeers!” cried I. “My dear fellow, these may be of the
greatest interest. One of them was out in the ’45; one had some strange
passages with the devil—you will find a note of it in Law’s
_Memorials_, I think; and there was an unexplained tragedy, I know not
what, much later, about a hundred years ago—”

“More than a hundred years ago,” said Mr. Thomson. “In 1783.”

“How do you know that? I mean some death.”

“Yes, the lamentable deaths of my Lord Durrisdeer and his brother, the
Master of Ballantrae (attainted in the troubles),” said Mr. Thomson
with something the tone of a man quoting. “Is that it?”

“To say truth,” said I, “I have only seen some dim reference to the
things in memoirs; and heard some traditions dimmer still, through my
uncle (whom I think you knew). My uncle lived when he was a boy in the
neighbourhood of St. Bride’s; he has often told me of the avenue closed
up and grown over with grass, the great gates never opened, the last
lord and his old maid sister who lived in the back parts of the house,
a quiet, plain, poor, hum-drum couple it would seem—but pathetic too,
as the last of that stirring and brave house—and, to the country folk,
faintly terrible from some deformed traditions.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Thomson. “Henry Graeme Durie, the last lord, died in
1820; his sister, the honourable Miss Katherine Durie, in ’27; so much
I know; and by what I have been going over the last few days, they were
what you say, decent, quiet people and not rich. To say truth, it was a
letter of my lord’s that put me on the search for the packet we are
going to open this evening. Some papers could not be found; and he
wrote to Jack M’Brair suggesting they might be among those sealed up by
a Mr. Mackellar. M’Brair answered, that the papers in question were all
in Mackellar’s own hand, all (as the writer understood) of a purely
narrative character; and besides, said he, ‘I am bound not to open them
before the year 1889.’ You may fancy if these words struck me: I
instituted a hunt through all the M’Brair repositories; and at last hit
upon that packet which (if you have had enough wine) I propose to show
you at once.”

In the smoking-room, to which my host now led me, was a packet,
fastened with many seals and enclosed in a single sheet of strong paper
thus endorsed:


Papers relating to the lives and lamentable deaths of the late Lord
Durisdeer, and his elder brother James, commonly called Master of
Ballantrae, attainted in the troubles: entrusted into the hands of John
M’Brair in the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh, W.S.; this 20th day of
September Anno Domini 1789; by him to be kept secret until the
revolution of one hundred years complete, or until the 20th day of
September 1889: the same compiled and written by me, Ephraim Mackellar,

For near forty years Land Steward on the estates of his Lordship.


As Mr. Thomson is a married man, I will not say what hour had struck
when we laid down the last of the following pages; but I will give a
few words of what ensued.

“Here,” said Mr. Thomson, “is a novel ready to your hand: all you have
to do is to work up the scenery, develop the characters, and improve
the style.”

“My dear fellow,” said I, “they are just the three things that I would
rather die than set my hand to. It shall be published as it stands.”

“But it’s so bald,” objected Mr. Thomson.

“I believe there is nothing so noble as baldness,” replied I, “and I am
sure there is nothing so interesting. I would have all literature bald,
and all authors (if you like) but one.”

“Well, well,” add Mr. Thomson, “we shall see.”




CHAPTER I.
SUMMARY OF EVENTS DURING THIS MASTER’S WANDERINGS.


The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been
looking for, and public curiosity is sure to welcome. It so befell that
I was intimately mingled with the last years and history of the house;
and there does not live one man so able as myself to make these matters
plain, or so desirous to narrate them faithfully. I knew the Master; on
many secret steps of his career I have an authentic memoir in my hand;
I sailed with him on his last voyage almost alone; I made one upon that
winter’s journey of which so many tales have gone abroad; and I was
there at the man’s death. As for my late Lord Durrisdeer, I served him
and loved him near twenty years; and thought more of him the more I
knew of him. Altogether, I think it not fit that so much evidence
should perish; the truth is a debt I owe my lord’s memory; and I think
my old years will flow more smoothly, and my white hair lie quieter on
the pillow, when the debt is paid.

The Duries of Durrisdeer and Ballantrae were a strong family in the
south-west from the days of David First. A rhyme still current in the
countryside—

Kittle folk are the Durrisdeers,
They ride wi’ over mony spears—


bears the mark of its antiquity; and the name appears in another, which
common report attributes to Thomas of Ercildoune himself—I cannot say
how truly, and which some have applied—I dare not say with how much
justice—to the events of this narration:

Twa Duries in Durrisdeer,
    Ane to tie and ane to ride,
An ill day for the groom
    And a waur day for the bride.


Authentic history besides is filled with their exploits which (to our
modern eyes) seem not very commendable: and the family suffered its
full share of those ups and downs to which the great houses of Scotland
have been ever liable. But all these I pass over, to come to that
memorable year 1745, when the foundations of this tragedy were laid.

At that time there dwelt a family of four persons in the house of
Durrisdeer, near St. Bride’s, on the Solway shore; a chief hold of
their race since the Reformation. My old lord, eighth of the name, was
not old in years, but he suffered prematurely from the disabilities of
age; his place was at the chimney side; there he sat reading, in a
lined gown, with few words for any man, and wry words for none: the
model of an old retired housekeeper; and yet his mind very well
nourished with study, and reputed in the country to be more cunning
than he seemed. The master of Ballantrae, James in baptism, took from
his father the love of serious reading; some of his tact perhaps as
well, but that which was only policy in the father became black
dissimulation in the son. The face of his behaviour was merely popular
and wild: he sat late at wine, later at the cards; had the name in the
country of “an unco man for the lasses;” and was ever in the front of
broils. But for all he was the first to go in, yet it was observed he
was invariably the best to come off; and his partners in mischief were
usually alone to pay the piper. This luck or dexterity got him several
ill-wishers, but with the rest of the country, enhanced his reputation;
so that great things were looked for in his future, when he should have
gained more gravity. One very black mark he had to his name; but the
matter was hushed up at the time, and so defaced by legends before I
came into those parts, that I scruple to set it down. If it was true,
it was a horrid fact in one so young; and if false, it was a horrid
calumny. I think it notable that he had always vaunted himself quite
implacable, and was taken at his word; so that he had the addition
among his neighbours of “an ill man to cross.” Here was altogether a
young nobleman (not yet twenty-four in the year ’45) who had made a
figure in the country beyond his time of life. The less marvel if there
were little heard of the second son, Mr. Henry (my late Lord
Durrisdeer), who was neither very bad nor yet very able, but an honest,
solid sort of lad like many of his neighbours. Little heard, I say; but
indeed it was a case of little spoken. He was known among the salmon
fishers in the firth, for that was a sport that he assiduously
followed; he was an excellent good horse-doctor besides; and took a
chief hand, almost from a boy, in the management of the estates. How
hard a part that was, in the situation of that family, none knows
better than myself; nor yet with how little colour of justice a man may
there acquire the reputation of a tyrant and a miser. The fourth person
in the house was Miss Alison Graeme, a near kinswoman, an orphan, and
the heir to a considerable fortune which her father had acquired in
trade. This money was loudly called for by my lord’s necessities;
indeed the land was deeply mortgaged; and Miss Alison was designed
accordingly to be the Master’s wife, gladly enough on her side; with
how much good-will on his, is another matter. She was a comely girl,
and in those days very spirited and self-willed; for the old lord
having no daughter of his own, and my lady being long dead, she had
grown up as best she might.

To these four came the news of Prince Charlie’s landing, and set them
presently by the ears. My lord, like the chimney-keeper that he was,
was all for temporising. Miss Alison held the other side, because it
appeared romantical; and the Master (though I have heard they did not
agree often) was for this once of her opinion. The adventure tempted
him, as I conceive; he was tempted by the opportunity to raise the
fortunes of the house, and not less by the hope of paying off his
private liabilities, which were heavy beyond all opinion. As for Mr.
Henry, it appears he said little enough at first; his part came later
on. It took the three a whole day’s disputation, before they agreed to
steer a middle course, one son going forth to strike a blow for King
James, my lord and the other staying at home to keep in favour with
King George. Doubtless this was my lord’s decision; and, as is well
known, it was the part played by many considerable families. But the
one dispute settled, another opened. For my lord, Miss Alison, and Mr.
Henry all held the one view: that it was the cadet’s part to go out;
and the Master, what with restlessness and vanity, would at no rate
consent to stay at home. My lord pleaded, Miss Alison wept, Mr. Henry
was very plain spoken: all was of no avail.

“It is the direct heir of Durrisdeer that should ride by his King’s
bridle,” says the Master.

“If we were playing a manly part,” says Mr. Henry, “there might be
sense in such talk. But what are we doing? Cheating at cards!”

“We are saving the house of Durrisdeer, Henry,” his father said.

“And see, James,” said Mr. Henry, “if I go, and the Prince has the
upper hand, it will be easy to make your peace with King James. But if
you go, and the expedition fails, we divide the right and the title.
And what shall I be then?”

“You will be Lord Durrisdeer,” said the Master. “I put all I have upon
the table.”

“I play at no such game,” cries Mr. Henry. “I shall be left in such a
situation as no man of sense and honour could endure. I shall be
neither fish nor flesh!” he cried. And a little after he had another
expression, plainer perhaps than he intended. “It is your duty to be
here with my father,” said he. “You know well enough you are the
favourite.”

“Ay?” said the Master. “And there spoke Envy! Would you trip up my
heels—Jacob?” said he, and dwelled upon the name maliciously.

Mr. Henry went and walked at the low end of the hall without reply; for
he had an excellent gift of silence. Presently he came back.

“I am the cadet and I _should_ go,” said he. “And my lord here is the
master, and he says I _shall_ go. What say ye to that, my brother?”

“I say this, Harry,” returned the Master, “that when very obstinate
folk are met, there are only two ways out: Blows—and I think none of us
could care to go so far; or the arbitrament of chance—and here is a
guinea piece. Will you stand by the toss of the coin?”

“I will stand and fall by it,” said Mr. Henry. “Heads, I go; shield, I
stay.”

The coin was spun, and it fell shield. “So there is a lesson for
Jacob,” says the Master.

“We shall live to repent of this,” says Mr. Henry, and flung out of the
hall.

As for Miss Alison, she caught up that piece of gold which had just
sent her lover to the wars, and flung it clean through the family
shield in the great painted window.

“If you loved me as well as I love you, you would have stayed,” cried
she.

“‘I could not love you, dear, so well, loved I not honour more,’” sang
the Master.

“Oh!” she cried, “you have no heart—I hope you may be killed!” and she
ran from the room, and in tears, to her own chamber.

It seems the Master turned to my lord with his most comical manner, and
says he, “This looks like a devil of a wife.”

“I think you are a devil of a son to me,” cried his father, “you that
have always been the favourite, to my shame be it spoken. Never a good
hour have I gotten of you, since you were born; no, never one good
hour,” and repeated it again the third time. Whether it was the
Master’s levity, or his insubordination, or Mr. Henry’s word about the
favourite son, that had so much disturbed my lord, I do not know; but I
incline to think it was the last, for I have it by all accounts that
Mr. Henry was more made up to from that hour.

Altogether it was in pretty ill blood with his family that the Master
rode to the North; which was the more sorrowful for others to remember
when it seemed too late. By fear and favour he had scraped together
near upon a dozen men, principally tenants’ sons; they were all pretty
full when they set forth, and rode up the hill by the old abbey,
roaring and singing, the white cockade in every hat. It was a desperate
venture for so small a company to cross the most of Scotland
unsupported; and (what made folk think so the more) even as that poor
dozen was clattering up the hill, a great ship of the king’s navy, that
could have brought them under with a single boat, lay with her broad
ensign streaming in the bay. The next afternoon, having given the
Master a fair start, it was Mr. Henry’s turn; and he rode off, all by
himself, to offer his sword and carry letters from his father to King
George’s Government. Miss Alison was shut in her room, and did little
but weep, till both were gone; only she stitched the cockade upon the
Master’s hat, and (as John Paul told me) it was wetted with tears when
he carried it down to him.

In all that followed, Mr. Henry and my old lord were true to their
bargain. That ever they accomplished anything is more than I could
learn; and that they were anyway strong on the king’s side, more than
believe. But they kept the letter of loyalty, corresponded with my Lord
President, sat still at home, and had little or no commerce with the
Master while that business lasted. Nor was he, on his side, more
communicative. Miss Alison, indeed, was always sending him expresses,
but I do not know if she had many answers. Macconochie rode for her
once, and found the highlanders before Carlisle, and the Master riding
by the Prince’s side in high favour; he took the letter (so Macconochie
tells), opened it, glanced it through with a mouth like a man
whistling, and stuck it in his belt, whence, on his horse passageing,
it fell unregarded to the ground. It was Macconochie who picked it up;
and he still kept it, and indeed I have seen it in his hands. News came
to Durrisdeer of course, by the common report, as it goes travelling
through a country, a thing always wonderful to me. By that means the
family learned more of the Master’s favour with the Prince, and the
ground it was said to stand on: for by a strange condescension in a man
so proud—only that he was a man still more ambitious—he was said to
have crept into notability by truckling to the Irish. Sir Thomas
Sullivan, Colonel Burke and the rest, were his daily comrades, by which
course he withdrew himself from his own country-folk. All the small
intrigues he had a hand in fomenting; thwarted my Lord George upon a
thousand points; was always for the advice that seemed palatable to the
Prince, no matter if it was good or bad; and seems upon the whole (like
the gambler he was all through life) to have had less regard to the
chances of the campaign than to the greatness of favour he might aspire
to, if, by any luck, it should succeed. For the rest, he did very well
in the field; no one questioned that; for he was no coward.

The next was the news of Culloden, which was brought to Durrisdeer by
one of the tenants’ sons—the only survivor, he declared, of all those
that had gone singing up the hill. By an unfortunate chance John Paul
and Macconochie had that very morning found the guinea piece—which was
the root of all the evil—sticking in a holly bush; they had been “up
the gait,” as the servants say at Durrisdeer, to the change-house; and
if they had little left of the guinea, they had less of their wits.
What must John Paul do but burst into the hall where the family sat at
dinner, and cry the news to them that “Tam Macmorland was but new
lichtit at the door, and—wirra, wirra—there were nane to come behind
him”?

They took the word in silence like folk condemned; only Mr. Henry
carrying his palm to his face, and Miss Alison laying her head outright
upon her hands. As for my lord, he was like ashes.

“I have still one son,” says he. “And, Henry, I will do you this
justice—it is the kinder that is left.”

It was a strange thing to say in such a moment; but my lord had never
forgotten Mr. Henry’s speech, and he had years of injustice on his
conscience. Still it was a strange thing, and more than Miss Alison
could let pass. She broke out and blamed my lord for his unnatural
words, and Mr. Henry because he was sitting there in safety when his
brother lay dead, and herself because she had given her sweetheart ill
words at his departure, calling him the flower of the flock, wringing
her hands, protesting her love, and crying on him by his name—so that
the servants stood astonished.

Mr. Henry got to his feet, and stood holding his chair. It was he that
was like ashes now.

“Oh!” he burst out suddenly, “I know you loved him.”

“The world knows that, glory be to God!” cries she; and then to Mr.
Henry: “There is none but me to know one thing—that you were a traitor
to him in your heart.”

“God knows,” groans he, “it was lost love on both sides.”

Time went by in the house after that without much change; only they
were now three instead of four, which was a perpetual reminder of their
loss. Miss Alison’s money, you are to bear in mind, was highly needful
for the estates; and the one brother being dead, my old lord soon set
his heart upon her marrying the other. Day in, day out, he would work
upon her, sitting by the chimney-side with his finger in his Latin
book, and his eyes set upon her face with a kind of pleasant intentness
that became the old gentleman very well. If she wept, he would condole
with her like an ancient man that has seen worse times and begins to
think lightly even of sorrow; if she raged, he would fall to reading
again in his Latin book, but always with some civil excuse; if she
offered, as she often did, to let them have her money in a gift, he
would show her how little it consisted with his honour, and remind her,
even if he should consent, that Mr. Henry would certainly refuse. _Non
vi sed sæpe cadendo_ was a favourite word of his; and no doubt this
quiet persecution wore away much of her resolve; no doubt, besides, he
had a great influence on the girl, having stood in the place of both
her parents; and, for that matter, she was herself filled with the
spirit of the Duries, and would have gone a great way for the glory of
Durrisdeer; but not so far, I think, as to marry my poor patron, had it
not been—strangely enough—for the circumstance of his extreme
unpopularity.

This was the work of Tam Macmorland. There was not much harm in Tam;
but he had that grievous weakness, a long tongue; and as the only man
in that country who had been out—or, rather, who had come in again—he
was sure of listeners. Those that have the underhand in any fighting, I
have observed, are ever anxious to persuade themselves they were
betrayed. By Tam’s account of it, the rebels had been betrayed at every
turn and by every officer they had; they had been betrayed at Derby,
and betrayed at Falkirk; the night march was a step of treachery of my
Lord George’s; and Culloden was lost by the treachery of the
Macdonalds. This habit of imputing treason grew upon the fool, till at
last he must have in Mr. Henry also. Mr. Henry (by his account) had
betrayed the lads of Durrisdeer; he had promised to follow with more
men, and instead of that he had ridden to King George. “Ay, and the
next day!” Tam would cry. “The puir bonnie Master, and the puir, kind
lads that rade wi’ him, were hardly ower the scaur, or he was aff—the
Judis! Ay, weel—he has his way o’t: he’s to be my lord, nae less, and
there’s mony a cold corp amang the Hieland heather!” And at this, if
Tam had been drinking, he would begin to weep.

Let anyone speak long enough, he will get believers. This view of Mr.
Henry’s behaviour crept about the country by little and little; it was
talked upon by folk that knew the contrary, but were short of topics;
and it was heard and believed and given out for gospel by the ignorant
and the ill-willing. Mr. Henry began to be shunned; yet awhile, and the
commons began to murmur as he went by, and the women (who are always
the most bold because they are the most safe) to cry out their
reproaches to his face. The Master was cried up for a saint. It was
remembered how he had never any hand in pressing the tenants; as,
indeed, no more he had, except to spend the money. He was a little wild
perhaps, the folk said; but how much better was a natural, wild lad
that would soon have settled down, than a skinflint and a sneckdraw,
sitting, with his nose in an account book, to persecute poor tenants!
One trollop, who had had a child to the Master, and by all accounts
been very badly used, yet made herself a kind of champion of his
memory. She flung a stone one day at Mr. Henry.

“Whaur’s the bonnie lad that trustit ye?” she cried.

Mr. Henry reined in his horse and looked upon her, the blood flowing
from his lip. “Ay, Jess?” says he. “You too? And yet ye should ken me
better.” For it was he who had helped her with money.

The woman had another stone ready, which she made as if she would cast;
and he, to ward himself, threw up the hand that held his riding-rod.

“What, would ye beat a lassie, ye ugly—?” cries she, and ran away
screaming as though he had struck her.

Next day word went about the country like wildfire that Mr. Henry had
beaten Jessie Broun within an inch of her life. I give it as one
instance of how this snowball grew, and one calumny brought another;
until my poor patron was so perished in reputation that he began to
keep the house like my lord. All this while, you may be very sure, he
uttered no complaints at home; the very ground of the scandal was too
sore a matter to be handled; and Mr. Henry was very proud and strangely
obstinate in silence. My old lord must have heard of it, by John Paul,
if by no one else; and he must at least have remarked the altered
habits of his son. Yet even he, it is probable, knew not how high the
feeling ran; and as for Miss Alison, she was ever the last person to
hear news, and the least interested when she heard them.

In the height of the ill-feeling (for it died away as it came, no man
could say why) there was an election forward in the town of St.
Bride’s, which is the next to Durrisdeer, standing on the Water of
Swift; some grievance was fermenting, I forget what, if ever I heard;
and it was currently said there would be broken heads ere night, and
that the sheriff had sent as far as Dumfries for soldiers. My lord
moved that Mr. Henry should be present, assuring him it was necessary
to appear, for the credit of the house. “It will soon be reported,”
said he, “that we do not take the lead in our own country.”

“It is a strange lead that I can take,” said Mr. Henry; and when they
had pushed him further, “I tell you the plain truth,” he said, “I dare
not show my face.”

“You are the first of the house that ever said so,” cries Miss Alison.

“We will go all three,” said my lord; and sure enough he got into his
boots (the first time in four years—a sore business John Paul had to
get them on), and Miss Alison into her riding-coat, and all three rode
together to St. Bride’s.

The streets were full of the riff-raff of all the countryside, who had
no sooner clapped eyes on Mr. Henry than the hissing began, and the
hooting, and the cries of “Judas!” and “Where was the Master?” and
“Where were the poor lads that rode with him?” Even a stone was cast;
but the more part cried shame at that, for my old lord’s sake, and Miss
Alison’s. It took not ten minutes to persuade my lord that Mr. Henry
had been right. He said never a word, but turned his horse about, and
home again, with his chin upon his bosom. Never a word said Miss
Alison; no doubt she thought the more; no doubt her pride was stung,
for she was a bone-bred Durie; and no doubt her heart was touched to
see her cousin so unjustly used. That night she was never in bed; I
have often blamed my lady—when I call to mind that night, I readily
forgive her all; and the first thing in the morning she came to the old
lord in his usual seat.

“If Henry still wants me,” said she, “he can have me now.” To himself
she had a different speech: “I bring you no love, Henry; but God knows,
all the pity in the world.”

June the 1st, 1748, was the day of their marriage. It was December of
the same year that first saw me alighting at the doors of the great
house; and from there I take up the history of events as they befell
under my own observation, like a witness in a court.




CHAPTER II.
SUMMARY OF EVENTS (_continued_)


I made the last of my journey in the cold end of December, in a mighty
dry day of frost, and who should be my guide but Patey Macmorland,
brother of Tam! For a tow-headed, bare-legged brat of ten, he had more
ill tales upon his tongue than ever I heard the match of; having
drunken betimes in his brother’s cup. I was still not so old myself;
pride had not yet the upper hand of curiosity; and indeed it would have
taken any man, that cold morning, to hear all the old clashes of the
country, and be shown all the places by the way where strange things
had fallen out. I had tales of Claverhouse as we came through the bogs,
and tales of the devil, as we came over the top of the scaur. As we
came in by the abbey I heard somewhat of the old monks, and more of the
freetraders, who use its ruins for a magazine, landing for that cause
within a cannon-shot of Durrisdeer; and along all the road the Duries
and poor Mr. Henry were in the first rank of slander. My mind was thus
highly prejudiced against the family I was about to serve, so that I
was half surprised when I beheld Durrisdeer itself, lying in a pretty,
sheltered bay, under the Abbey Hill; the house most commodiously built
in the French fashion, or perhaps Italianate, for I have no skill in
these arts; and the place the most beautified with gardens, lawns,
shrubberies, and trees I had ever seen. The money sunk here
unproductively would have quite restored the family; but as it was, it
cost a revenue to keep it up.

Mr. Henry came himself to the door to welcome me: a tall dark young
gentleman (the Duries are all black men) of a plain and not cheerful
face, very strong in body, but not so strong in health: taking me by
the hand without any pride, and putting me at home with plain kind
speeches. He led me into the hall, booted as I was, to present me to my
lord. It was still daylight; and the first thing I observed was a
lozenge of clear glass in the midst of the shield in the painted
window, which I remember thinking a blemish on a room otherwise so
handsome, with its family portraits, and the pargeted ceiling with
pendants, and the carved chimney, in one corner of which my old lord
sat reading in his Livy. He was like Mr. Henry, with much the same
plain countenance, only more subtle and pleasant, and his talk a
thousand times more entertaining. He had many questions to ask me, I
remember, of Edinburgh College, where I had just received my mastership
of arts, and of the various professors, with whom and their proficiency
he seemed well acquainted; and thus, talking of things that I knew, I
soon got liberty of speech in my new home.

In the midst of this came Mrs. Henry into the room; she was very far
gone, Miss Katharine being due in about six weeks, which made me think
less of her beauty at the first sight; and she used me with more of
condescension than the rest; so that, upon all accounts, I kept her in
the third place of my esteem.

It did not take long before all Patey Macmorland’s tales were blotted
out of my belief, and I was become, what I have ever since remained, a
loving servant of the house of Durrisdeer. Mr. Henry had the chief part
of my affection. It was with him I worked; and I found him an exacting
master, keeping all his kindness for those hours in which we were
unemployed, and in the steward’s office not only loading me with work,
but viewing me with a shrewd supervision. At length one day he looked
up from his paper with a kind of timidness, and says he, “Mr.
Mackellar, I think I ought to tell you that you do very well.” That was
my first word of commendation; and from that day his jealousy of my
performance was relaxed; soon it was “Mr. Mackellar” here, and “Mr.
Mackellar” there, with the whole family; and for much of my service at
Durrisdeer, I have transacted everything at my own time, and to my own
fancy, and never a farthing challenged. Even while he was driving me, I
had begun to find my heart go out to Mr. Henry; no doubt, partly in
pity, he was a man so palpably unhappy. He would fall into a deep muse
over our accounts, staring at the page or out of the window; and at
those times the look of his face, and the sigh that would break from
him, awoke in me strong feelings of curiosity and commiseration. One
day, I remember, we were late upon some business in the steward’s room.

This room is in the top of the house, and has a view upon the bay, and
over a little wooded cape, on the long sands; and there, right over
against the sun, which was then dipping, we saw the freetraders, with a
great force of men and horses, scouring on the beach. Mr. Henry had
been staring straight west, so that I marvelled he was not blinded by
the sun; suddenly he frowns, rubs his hand upon his brow, and turns to
me with a smile.

“You would not guess what I was thinking,” says he. “I was thinking I
would be a happier man if I could ride and run the danger of my life,
with these lawless companions.”

I told him I had observed he did not enjoy good spirits; and that it
was a common fancy to envy others and think we should be the better of
some change; quoting Horace to the point, like a young man fresh from
college.

“Why, just so,” said he. “And with that we may get back to our
accounts.”

It was not long before I began to get wind of the causes that so much
depressed him. Indeed a blind man must have soon discovered there was a
shadow on that house, the shadow of the Master of Ballantrae. Dead or
alive (and he was then supposed to be dead) that man was his brother’s
rival: his rival abroad, where there was never a good word for Mr.
Henry, and nothing but regret and praise for the Master; and his rival
at home, not only with his father and his wife, but with the very
servants.

They were two old serving-men that were the leaders. John Paul, a
little, bald, solemn, stomachy man, a great professor of piety and
(take him for all in all) a pretty faithful servant, was the chief of
the Master’s faction. None durst go so far as John. He took a pleasure
in disregarding Mr. Henry publicly, often with a slighting comparison.
My lord and Mrs. Henry took him up, to be sure, but never so resolutely
as they should; and he had only to pull his weeping face and begin his
lamentations for the Master—“his laddie,” as he called him—to have the
whole condoned. As for Henry, he let these things pass in silence,
sometimes with a sad and sometimes with a black look. There was no
rivalling the dead, he knew that; and how to censure an old serving-man
for a fault of loyalty, was more than he could see. His was not the
tongue to do it.

Macconochie was chief upon the other side; an old, ill-spoken,
swearing, ranting, drunken dog; and I have often thought it an odd
circumstance in human nature that these two serving-men should each
have been the champion of his contrary, and blackened their own faults
and made light of their own virtues when they beheld them in a master.
Macconochie had soon smelled out my secret inclination, took me much
into his confidence, and would rant against the Master by the hour, so
that even my work suffered. “They’re a’ daft here,” he would cry, “and
be damned to them! The Master—the deil’s in their thrapples that should
call him sae! it’s Mr. Henry should be master now! They were nane sae
fond o’ the Master when they had him, I’ll can tell ye that. Sorrow on
his name! Never a guid word did I hear on his lips, nor naebody else,
but just fleering and flyting and profane cursing—deil hae him! There’s
nane kent his wickedness: him a gentleman! Did ever ye hear tell, Mr.
Mackellar, o’ Wully White the wabster? No? Aweel, Wully was an unco
praying kind o’ man; a dreigh body, nane o’ my kind, I never could
abide the sight o’ him; onyway he was a great hand by his way of it,
and he up and rebukit the Master for some of his on-goings. It was a
grand thing for the Master o’ Ball’ntrae to tak up a feud wi’ a’
wabster, wasnae’t?” Macconochie would sneer; indeed, he never took the
full name upon his lips but with a sort of a whine of hatred. “But he
did! A fine employ it was: chapping at the man’s door, and crying ‘boo’
in his lum, and puttin’ poother in his fire, and pee-oys [1] in his
window; till the man thocht it was auld Hornie was come seekin’ him.
Weel, to mak a lang story short, Wully gaed gyte. At the hinder end,
they couldnae get him frae his knees, but he just roared and prayed and
grat straucht on, till he got his release. It was fair murder, a’body
said that. Ask John Paul—he was brawly ashamed o’ that game, him that’s
sic a Christian man! Grand doin’s for the Master o’ Ball’ntrae!” I
asked him what the Master had thought of it himself. “How would I ken?”
says he. “He never said naething.” And on again in his usual manner of
banning and swearing, with every now and again a “Master of Ballantrae”
sneered through his nose. It was in one of these confidences that he
showed me the Carlisle letter, the print of the horse-shoe still
stamped in the paper. Indeed, that was our last confidence; for he then
expressed himself so ill-naturedly of Mrs. Henry that I had to
reprimand him sharply, and must thenceforth hold him at a distance.

My old lord was uniformly kind to Mr. Henry; he had even pretty ways of
gratitude, and would sometimes clap him on the shoulder and say, as if
to the world at large: “This is a very good son to me.” And grateful he
was, no doubt, being a man of sense and justice. But I think that was
all, and I am sure Mr. Henry thought so. The love was all for the dead
son. Not that this was often given breath to; indeed, with me but once.
My lord had asked me one day how I got on with Mr. Henry, and I had
told him the truth.

“Ay,” said he, looking sideways on the burning fire, “Henry is a good
lad, a very good lad,” said he. “You have heard, Mr. Mackellar, that I
had another son? I am afraid he was not so virtuous a lad as Mr. Henry;
but dear me, he’s dead, Mr. Mackellar! and while he lived we were all
very proud of him, all very proud. If he was not all he should have
been in some ways, well, perhaps we loved him better!” This last he
said looking musingly in the fire; and then to me, with a great deal of
briskness, “But I am rejoiced you do so well with Mr. Henry. You will
find him a good master.” And with that he opened his book, which was
the customary signal of dismission. But it would be little that he
read, and less that he understood; Culloden field and the Master, these
would be the burthen of his thought; and the burthen of mine was an
unnatural jealousy of the dead man for Mr. Henry’s sake, that had even
then begun to grow on me.

I am keeping Mrs. Henry for the last, so that this expression of my
sentiment may seem unwarrantably strong: the reader shall judge for
himself when I have done. But I must first tell of another matter,
which was the means of bringing me more intimate. I had not yet been
six months at Durrisdeer when it chanced that John Paul fell sick and
must keep his bed; drink was the root of his malady, in my poor
thought; but he was tended, and indeed carried himself, like an
afflicted saint; and the very minister, who came to visit him,
professed himself edified when he went away. The third morning of his
sickness, Mr. Henry comes to me with something of a hang-dog look.

“Mackellar,” says he, “I wish I could trouble you upon a little
service. There is a pension we pay; it is John’s part to carry it, and
now that he is sick I know not to whom I should look unless it was
yourself. The matter is very delicate; I could not carry it with my own
hand for a sufficient reason; I dare not send Macconochie, who is a
talker, and I am—I have—I am desirous this should not come to Mrs.
Henry’s ears,” says he, and flushed to his neck as he said it.

To say truth, when I found I was to carry money to one Jessie Broun,
who was no better than she should be, I supposed it was some trip of
his own that Mr. Henry was dissembling. I was the more impressed when
the truth came out.

It was up a wynd off a side street in St. Bride’s that Jessie had her
lodging. The place was very ill inhabited, mostly by the freetrading
sort. There was a man with a broken head at the entry; half-way up, in
a tavern, fellows were roaring and singing, though it was not yet nine
in the day. Altogether, I had never seen a worse neighbourhood, even in
the great city of Edinburgh, and I was in two minds to go back.
Jessie’s room was of a piece with her surroundings, and herself no
better. She would not give me the receipt (which Mr. Henry had told me
to demand, for he was very methodical) until she had sent out for
spirits, and I had pledged her in a glass; and all the time she carried
on in a light-headed, reckless way—now aping the manners of a lady, now
breaking into unseemly mirth, now making coquettish advances that
oppressed me to the ground. Of the money she spoke more tragically.

“It’s blood money!” said she; “I take it for that: blood money for the
betrayed! See what I’m brought down to! Ah, if the bonnie lad were back
again, it would be changed days. But he’s deid—he’s lyin’ deid amang
the Hieland hills—the bonnie lad, the bonnie lad!”

She had a rapt manner of crying on the bonnie lad, clasping her hands
and casting up her eyes, that I think she must have learned of
strolling players; and I thought her sorrow very much of an
affectation, and that she dwelled upon the business because her shame
was now all she had to be proud of. I will not say I did not pity her,
but it was a loathing pity at the best; and her last change of manner
wiped it out. This was when she had had enough of me for an audience,
and had set her name at last to the receipt. “There!” says she, and
taking the most unwomanly oaths upon her tongue, bade me begone and
carry it to the Judas who had sent me. It was the first time I had
heard the name applied to Mr. Henry; I was staggered besides at her
sudden vehemence of word and manner, and got forth from the room, under
this shower of curses, like a beaten dog. But even then I was not quit,
for the vixen threw up her window, and, leaning forth, continued to
revile me as I went up the wynd; the freetraders, coming to the tavern
door, joined in the mockery, and one had even the inhumanity to set
upon me a very savage small dog, which bit me in the ankle. This was a
strong lesson, had I required one, to avoid ill company; and I rode
home in much pain from the bite and considerable indignation of mind.

Mr. Henry was in the steward’s room, affecting employment, but I could
see he was only impatient to hear of my errand.

“Well?” says he, as soon as I came in; and when I had told him
something of what passed, and that Jessie seemed an undeserving woman
and far from grateful: “She is no friend to me,” said he; “but, indeed,
Mackellar, I have few friends to boast of, and Jessie has some cause to
be unjust. I need not dissemble what all the country knows: she was not
very well used by one of our family.” This was the first time I had
heard him refer to the Master even distantly; and I think he found his
tongue rebellious even for that much, but presently he resumed—“This is
why I would have nothing said. It would give pain to Mrs. Henry . . .
and to my father,” he added, with another flush.

“Mr. Henry,” said I, “if you will take a freedom at my hands, I would
tell you to let that woman be. What service is your money to the like
of her? She has no sobriety and no economy—as for gratitude, you will
as soon get milk from a whinstone; and if you will pretermit your
bounty, it will make no change at all but just to save the ankles of
your messengers.”

Mr. Henry smiled. “But I am grieved about your ankle,” said he, the
next moment, with a proper gravity.

“And observe,” I continued, “I give you this advice upon consideration;
and yet my heart was touched for the woman in the beginning.”

“Why, there it is, you see!” said Mr. Henry. “And you are to remember
that I knew her once a very decent lass. Besides which, although I
speak little of my family, I think much of its repute.”

And with that he broke up the talk, which was the first we had together
in such confidence. But the same afternoon I had the proof that his
father was perfectly acquainted with the business, and that it was only
from his wife that Mr. Henry kept it secret.

“I fear you had a painful errand to-day,” says my lord to me, “for
which, as it enters in no way among your duties, I wish to thank you,
and to remind you at the same time (in case Mr. Henry should have
neglected) how very desirable it is that no word of it should reach my
daughter. Reflections on the dead, Mr. Mackellar, are doubly painful.”

Anger glowed in my heart; and I could have told my lord to his face how
little he had to do, bolstering up the image of the dead in Mrs.
Henry’s heart, and how much better he were employed to shatter that
false idol; for by this time I saw very well how the land lay between
my patron and his wife.

My pen is clear enough to tell a plain tale; but to render the effect
of an infinity of small things, not one great enough in itself to be
narrated; and to translate the story of looks, and the message of
voices when they are saying no great matter; and to put in half a page
the essence of near eighteen months—this is what I despair to
accomplish. The fault, to be very blunt, lay all in Mrs. Henry. She
felt it a merit to have consented to the marriage, and she took it like
a martyrdom; in which my old lord, whether he knew it or not, fomented
her. She made a merit, besides, of her constancy to the dead, though
its name, to a nicer conscience, should have seemed rather disloyalty
to the living; and here also my lord gave her his countenance. I
suppose he was glad to talk of his loss, and ashamed to dwell on it
with Mr. Henry. Certainly, at least, he made a little coterie apart in
that family of three, and it was the husband who was shut out. It seems
it was an old custom when the family were alone in Durrisdeer, that my
lord should take his wine to the chimney-side, and Miss Alison, instead
of withdrawing, should bring a stool to his knee, and chatter to him
privately; and after she had become my patron’s wife the same manner of
doing was continued. It should have been pleasant to behold this
ancient gentleman so loving with his daughter, but I was too much a
partisan of Mr. Henry’s to be anything but wroth at his exclusion.
Many’s the time I have seen him make an obvious resolve, quit the
table, and go and join himself to his wife and my Lord Durrisdeer; and
on their part, they were never backward to make him welcome, turned to
him smilingly as to an intruding child, and took him into their talk
with an effort so ill-concealed that he was soon back again beside me
at the table, whence (so great is the hall of Durrisdeer) we could but
hear the murmur of voices at the chimney. There he would sit and watch,
and I along with him; and sometimes by my lord’s head sorrowfully
shaken, or his hand laid on Mrs. Henry’s head, or hers upon his knee as
if in consolation, or sometimes by an exchange of tearful looks, we
would draw our conclusion that the talk had gone to the old subject and
the shadow of the dead was in the hall.

I have hours when I blame Mr. Henry for taking all too patiently; yet
we are to remember he was married in pity, and accepted his wife upon
that term. And, indeed, he had small encouragement to make a stand.
Once, I remember, he announced he had found a man to replace the pane
of the stained window, which, as it was he that managed all the
business, was a thing clearly within his attributions. But to the
Master’s fancies, that pane was like a relic; and on the first word of
any change, the blood flew to Mrs. Henry’s face.

“I wonder at you!” she cried.

“I wonder at myself,” says Mr. Henry, with more of bitterness than I
had ever heard him to express.

Thereupon my old lord stepped in with his smooth talk, so that before
the meal was at an end all seemed forgotten; only that, after dinner,
when the pair had withdrawn as usual to the chimney-side, we could see
her weeping with her head upon his knee. Mr. Henry kept up the talk
with me upon some topic of the estates—he could speak of little else
but business, and was never the best of company; but he kept it up that
day with more continuity, his eye straying ever and again to the
chimney, and his voice changing to another key, but without check of
delivery. The pane, however, was not replaced; and I believe he counted
it a great defeat.

Whether he was stout enough or no, God knows he was kind enough. Mrs.
Henry had a manner of condescension with him, such as (in a wife) would
have pricked my vanity into an ulcer; he took it like a favour. She
held him at the staff’s end; forgot and then remembered and unbent to
him, as we do to children; burthened him with cold kindness; reproved
him with a change of colour and a bitten lip, like one shamed by his
disgrace: ordered him with a look of the eye, when she was off her
guard; when she was on the watch, pleaded with him for the most natural
attentions, as though they were unheard-of favours. And to all this he
replied with the most unwearied service, loving, as folk say, the very
ground she trod on, and carrying that love in his eyes as bright as a
lamp. When Miss Katharine was to be born, nothing would serve but he
must stay in the room behind the head of the bed. There he sat, as
white (they tell me) as a sheet, and the sweat dropping from his brow;
and the handkerchief he had in his hand was crushed into a little ball
no bigger than a musket-bullet. Nor could he bear the sight of Miss
Katharine for many a day; indeed, I doubt if he was ever what he should
have been to my young lady; for the which want of natural feeling he
was loudly blamed.

Such was the state of this family down to the 7th April, 1749, when
there befell the first of that series of events which were to break so
many hearts and lose so many lives.

 On that day I was sitting in my room a little before supper, when John
 Paul burst open the door with no civility of knocking, and told me
 there was one below that wished to speak with the steward; sneering at
 the name of my office.

I asked what manner of man, and what his name was; and this disclosed
the cause of John’s ill-humour; for it appeared the visitor refused to
name himself except to me, a sore affront to the major-domo’s
consequence.

“Well,” said I, smiling a little, “I will see what he wants.”

I found in the entrance hall a big man, very plainly habited, and
wrapped in a sea-cloak, like one new landed, as indeed he was. Not, far
off Macconochie was standing, with his tongue out of his mouth and his
hand upon his chin, like a dull fellow thinking hard; and the stranger,
who had brought his cloak about his face, appeared uneasy. He had no
sooner seen me coming than he went to meet me with an effusive manner.

“My dear man,” said he, “a thousand apologies for disturbing you, but
I’m in the most awkward position. And there’s a son of a ramrod there
that I should know the looks of, and more betoken I believe that he
knows mine. Being in this family, sir, and in a place of some
responsibility (which was the cause I took the liberty to send for
you), you are doubtless of the honest party?”

“You may be sure at least,” says I, “that all of that party are quite
safe in Durrisdeer.”

“My dear man, it is my very thought,” says he. “You see, I have just
been set on shore here by a very honest man, whose name I cannot
remember, and who is to stand off and on for me till morning, at some
danger to himself; and, to be clear with you, I am a little concerned
lest it should be at some to me. I have saved my life so often, Mr. —,
I forget your name, which is a very good one—that, faith, I would be
very loath to lose it after all. And the son of a ramrod, whom I
believe I saw before Carlisle . . . ”

“Oh, sir,” said I, “you can trust Macconochie until to-morrow.”

“Well, and it’s a delight to hear you say so,” says the stranger. “The
truth is that my name is not a very suitable one in this country of
Scotland. With a gentleman like you, my dear man, I would have no
concealments of course; and by your leave I’ll just breathe it in your
ear. They call me Francis Burke—Colonel Francis Burke; and I am here,
at a most damnable risk to myself, to see your masters—if you’ll excuse
me, my good man, for giving them the name, for I’m sure it’s a
circumstance I would never have guessed from your appearance. And if
you would just be so very obliging as to take my name to them, you
might say that I come bearing letters which I am sure they will be very
rejoiced to have the reading of.”

Colonel Francis Burke was one of the Prince’s Irishmen, that did his
cause such an infinity of hurt, and were so much distasted of the Scots
at the time of the rebellion; and it came at once into my mind, how the
Master of Ballantrae had astonished all men by going with that party.
In the same moment a strong foreboding of the truth possessed my soul.

“If you will step in here,” said I, opening a chamber door, “I will let
my lord know.”

“And I am sure it’s very good of you, Mr. What-is-your-name,” says the
Colonel.

Up to the hall I went, slow-footed. There they were, all three—my old
lord in his place, Mrs. Henry at work by the window, Mr. Henry (as was
much his custom) pacing the low end. In the midst was the table laid
for supper. I told them briefly what I had to say. My old lord lay back
in his seat. Mrs. Henry sprang up standing with a mechanical motion,
and she and her husband stared at each other’s eyes across the room; it
was the strangest, challenging look these two exchanged, and as they
looked, the colour faded in their faces. Then Mr. Henry turned to me;
not to speak, only to sign with his finger; but that was enough, and I
went down again for the Colonel.

When we returned, these three were in much the same position I same
left them in; I believe no word had passed.

“My Lord Durrisdeer, no doubt?” says the Colonel, bowing, and my lord
bowed in answer. “And this,” continues the Colonel, “should be the
Master of Ballantrae?”

“I have never taken that name,” said Mr. Henry; “but I am Henry Durie,
at your service.”

Then the Colonel turns to Mrs. Henry, bowing with his hat upon his
heart and the most killing airs of gallantry. “There can be no mistake
about so fine a figure of a lady,” says he. “I address the seductive
Miss Alison, of whom I have so often heard?”

Once more husband and wife exchanged a look.

“I am Mrs. Henry Durie,” said she; “but before my marriage my name was
Alison Graeme.”

Then my lord spoke up. “I am an old man, Colonel Burke,” said he, “and
a frail one. It will be mercy on your part to be expeditious. Do you
bring me news of—” he hesitated, and then the words broke from him with
a singular change of voice—“my son?”

“My dear lord, I will be round with you like a soldier,” said the
Colonel. “I do.”

My lord held out a wavering hand; he seemed to wave a signal, but
whether it was to give him time or to speak on, was more than we could
guess. At length he got out the one word, “Good?”

“Why, the very best in the creation!” cries the Colonel. “For my good
friend and admired comrade is at this hour in the fine city of Paris,
and as like as not, if I know anything of his habits, he will be
drawing in his chair to a piece of dinner.—Bedad, I believe the lady’s
fainting.”

Mrs. Henry was indeed the colour of death, and drooped against the
window-frame. But when Mr. Henry made a movement as if to run to her,
she straightened with a sort of shiver. “I am well,” she said, with her
white lips.

Mr. Henry stopped, and his face had a strong twitch of anger. The next
moment he had turned to the Colonel. “You must not blame yourself,”
says he, “for this effect on Mrs. Durie. It is only natural; we were
all brought up like brother and sister.”

Mrs. Henry looked at her husband with something like relief or even
gratitude. In my way of thinking, that speech was the first step he
made in her good graces.

“You must try to forgive me, Mrs. Durie, for indeed and I am just an
Irish savage,” said the Colonel; “and I deserve to be shot for not
breaking the matter more artistically to a lady. But here are the
Master’s own letters; one for each of the three of you; and to be sure
(if I know anything of my friend’s genius) he will tell his own story
with a better grace.”

He brought the three letters forth as he spoke, arranged them by their
superscriptions, presented the first to my lord, who took it greedily,
and advanced towards Mrs. Henry holding out the second.

But the lady waved it back. “To my husband,” says she, with a choked
voice.

The Colonel was a quick man, but at this he was somewhat nonplussed.
“To be sure!” says he; “how very dull of me! To be sure!” But he still
held the letter.

At last Mr. Henry reached forth his hand, and there was nothing to be
done but give it up. Mr. Henry took the letters (both hers and his
own), and looked upon their outside, with his brows knit hard, as if he
were thinking. He had surprised me all through by his excellent
behaviour; but he was to excel himself now.

“Let me give you a hand to your room,” said he to his wife. “This has
come something of the suddenest; and, at any rate, you will wish to
read your letter by yourself.”

Again she looked upon him with the same thought of wonder; but he gave
her no time, coming straight to where she stood. “It will be better so,
believe me,” said he; “and Colonel Burke is too considerate not to
excuse you.” And with that he took her hand by the fingers, and led her
from the hall.

Mrs. Henry returned no more that night; and when Mr. Henry went to
visit her next morning, as I heard long afterwards, she gave him the
letter again, still unopened.

“Oh, read it and be done!” he had cried.

“Spare me that,” said she.

And by these two speeches, to my way of thinking, each undid a great
part of what they had previously done well. But the letter, sure
enough, came into my hands, and by me was burned, unopened.

 To be very exact as to the adventures of the Master after Culloden, I
 wrote not long ago to Colonel Burke, now a Chevalier of the Order of
 St. Louis, begging him for some notes in writing, since I could scarce
 depend upon my memory at so great an interval. To confess the truth, I
 have been somewhat embarrassed by his response; for he sent me the
 complete memoirs of his life, touching only in places on the Master;
 running to a much greater length than my whole story, and not
 everywhere (as it seems to me) designed for edification. He begged in
 his letter, dated from Ettenheim, that I would find a publisher for
 the whole, after I had made what use of it I required; and I think I
 shall best answer my own purpose and fulfil his wishes by printing
 certain parts of it in full. In this way my readers will have a
 detailed, and, I believe, a very genuine account of some essential
 matters; and if any publisher should take a fancy to the Chevalier’s
 manner of narration, he knows where to apply for the rest, of which
 there is plenty at his service. I put in my first extract here, so
 that it may stand in the place of what the Chevalier told us over our
 wine in the hall of Durrisdeer; but you are to suppose it was not the
 brutal fact, but a very varnished version that he offered to my lord.




CHAPTER III.
THE MASTER’S WANDERINGS.


_From the Memoirs of the Chevalier de Burke_.


. . . I left Ruthven (it’s hardly necessary to remark) with much
greater satisfaction than I had come to it; but whether I missed my way
in the deserts, or whether my companions failed me, I soon found myself
alone. This was a predicament very disagreeable; for I never understood
this horrid country or savage people, and the last stroke of the
Prince’s withdrawal had made us of the Irish more unpopular than ever.
I was reflecting on my poor chances, when I saw another horseman on the
hill, whom I supposed at first to have been a phantom, the news of his
death in the very front at Culloden being current in the army
generally. This was the Master of Ballantrae, my Lord Durrisdeer’s son,
a young nobleman of the rarest gallantry and parts, and equally
designed by nature to adorn a Court and to reap laurels in the field.
Our meeting was the more welcome to both, as he was one of the few
Scots who had used the Irish with consideration, and as he might now be
of very high utility in aiding my escape. Yet what founded our
particular friendship was a circumstance, by itself as romantic as any
fable of King Arthur.

This was on the second day of our flight, after we had slept one night
in the rain upon the inclination of a mountain. There was an Appin man,
Alan Black Stewart (or some such name, [2] but I have seen him since in
France) who chanced to be passing the same way, and had a jealousy of
my companion. Very uncivil expressions were exchanged; and Stewart
calls upon the Master to alight and have it out.

“Why, Mr. Stewart,” says the Master, “I think at the present time I
would prefer to run a race with you.” And with the word claps spurs to
his horse.

Stewart ran after us, a childish thing to do, for more than a mile; and
I could not help laughing, as I looked back at last and saw him on a
hill, holding his hand to his side, and nearly burst with running.

“But, all the same,” I could not help saying to my companion, “I would
let no man run after me for any such proper purpose, and not give him
his desire. It was a good jest, but it smells a trifle cowardly.”

He bent his brows at me. “I do pretty well,” says he, “when I saddle
myself with the most unpopular man in Scotland, and let that suffice
for courage.”

“O, bedad,” says I, “I could show you a more unpopular with the naked
eye. And if you like not my company, you can ‘saddle’ yourself on some
one else.”

“Colonel Burke,” says he, “do not let us quarrel; and, to that effect,
let me assure you I am the least patient man in the world.”

“I am as little patient as yourself,” said I. “I care not who knows
that.”

“At this rate,” says he, reining in, “we shall not go very far. And I
propose we do one of two things upon the instant: either quarrel and be
done; or make a sure bargain to bear everything at each other’s hands.”

“Like a pair of brothers?” said I.

“I said no such foolishness,” he replied. “I have a brother of my own,
and I think no more of him than of a colewort. But if we are to have
our noses rubbed together in this course of flight, let us each dare to
be ourselves like savages, and each swear that he will neither resent
nor deprecate the other. I am a pretty bad fellow at bottom, and I find
the pretence of virtues very irksome.”

“O, I am as bad as yourself,” said I. “There is no skim milk in Francis
Burke. But which is it to be? Fight or make friends?”

“Why,” says he, “I think it will be the best manner to spin a coin for
it.”

This proposition was too highly chivalrous not to take my fancy; and,
strange as it may seem of two well-born gentlemen of to-day, we span a
half-crown (like a pair of ancient paladins) whether we were to cut
each other’s throats or be sworn friends. A more romantic circumstance
can rarely have occurred; and it is one of those points in my memoirs,
by which we may see the old tales of Homer and the poets are equally
true to-day—at least, of the noble and genteel. The coin fell for
peace, and we shook hands upon our bargain. And then it was that my
companion explained to me his thought in running away from Mr. Stewart,
which was certainly worthy of his political intellect. The report of
his death, he said, was a great guard to him; Mr. Stewart having
recognised him, had become a danger; and he had taken the briefest road
to that gentleman’s silence. “For,” says he, “Alan Black is too vain a
man to narrate any such story of himself.”

Towards afternoon we came down to the shores of that loch for which we
were heading; and there was the ship, but newly come to anchor. She was
the _Sainte-Marie-des-Anges_, out of the port of Havre-de-Grace. The
Master, after we had signalled for a boat, asked me if I knew the
captain. I told him he was a countryman of mine, of the most
unblemished integrity, but, I was afraid, a rather timorous man.

“No matter,” says he. “For all that, he should certainly hear the
truth.”

I asked him if he meant about the battle? for if the captain once knew
the standard was down, he would certainly put to sea again at once.

“And even then!” said he; “the arms are now of no sort of utility.”

“My dear man,” said I, “who thinks of the arms? But, to be sure, we
must remember our friends. They will be close upon our heels, perhaps
the Prince himself, and if the ship be gone, a great number of valuable
lives may be imperilled.”

“The captain and the crew have lives also, if you come to that,” says
Ballantrae.

This I declared was but a quibble, and that I would not hear of the
captain being told; and then it was that Ballantrae made me a witty
answer, for the sake of which (and also because I have been blamed
myself in this business of the _Sainte-Marie-des-Anges_) I have related
the whole conversation as it passed.

“Frank,” says he, “remember our bargain. I must not object to your
holding your tongue, which I hereby even encourage you to do; but, by
the same terms, you are not to resent my telling.”

I could not help laughing at this; though I still forewarned him what
would come of it.

“The devil may come of it for what I care,” says the reckless fellow.
“I have always done exactly as I felt inclined.”

As is well known, my prediction came true. The captain had no sooner
heard the news than he cut his cable and to sea again; and before
morning broke, we were in the Great Minch.

The ship was very old; and the skipper, although the most honest of men
(and Irish too), was one of the least capable. The wind blew very
boisterous, and the sea raged extremely. All that day we had little
heart whether to eat or drink; went early to rest in some concern of
mind; and (as if to give us a lesson) in the night the wind chopped
suddenly into the north-east, and blew a hurricane. We were awaked by
the dreadful thunder of the tempest and the stamping of the mariners on
deck; so that I supposed our last hour was certainly come; and the
terror of my mind was increased out of all measure by Ballantrae, who
mocked at my devotions. It is in hours like these that a man of any
piety appears in his true light, and we find (what we are taught as
babes) the small trust that can be set in worldly friends. I would be
unworthy of my religion if I let this pass without particular remark.
For three days we lay in the dark in the cabin, and had but a biscuit
to nibble. On the fourth the wind fell, leaving the ship dismasted and
heaving on vast billows. The captain had not a guess of whither we were
blown; he was stark ignorant of his trade, and could do naught but
bless the Holy Virgin; a very good thing, too, but scarce the whole of
seamanship. It seemed, our one hope was to be picked up by another
vessel; and if that should prove to be an English ship, it might be no
great blessing to the Master and myself.

The fifth and sixth days we tossed there helpless. The seventh some
sail was got on her, but she was an unwieldy vessel at the best, and we
made little but leeway. All the time, indeed, we had been drifting to
the south and west, and during the tempest must have driven in that
direction with unheard-of violence. The ninth dawn was cold and black,
with a great sea running, and every mark of foul weather. In this
situation we were overjoyed to sight a small ship on the horizon, and
to perceive her go about and head for the _Sainte-Marie_. But our
gratification did not very long endure; for when she had laid to and
lowered a boat, it was immediately filled with disorderly fellows, who
sang and shouted as they pulled across to us, and swarmed in on our
deck with bare cutlasses, cursing loudly. Their leader was a horrible
villain, with his face blacked and his whiskers curled in ringlets;
Teach, his name; a most notorious pirate. He stamped about the deck,
raving and crying out that his name was Satan, and his ship was called
Hell. There was something about him like a wicked child or a
half-witted person, that daunted me beyond expression. I whispered in
the ear of Ballantrae that I would not be the last to volunteer, and
only prayed God they might be short of hands; he approved my purpose
with a nod.

“Bedad,” said I to Master Teach, “if you are Satan, here is a devil for
ye.”

The word pleased him; and (not to dwell upon these shocking incidents)
Ballantrae and I and two others were taken for recruits, while the
skipper and all the rest were cast into the sea by the method of
walking the plank. It was the first time I had seen this done; my heart
died within me at the spectacle; and Master Teach or one of his
acolytes (for my head was too much lost to be precise) remarked upon my
pale face in a very alarming manner. I had the strength to cut a step
or two of a jig, and cry out some ribaldry, which saved me for that
time; but my legs were like water when I must get down into the skiff
among these miscreants; and what with my horror of my company and fear
of the monstrous billows, it was all I could do to keep an Irish tongue
and break a jest or two as we were pulled aboard. By the blessing of
God, there was a fiddle in the pirate ship, which I had no sooner seen
than I fell upon; and in my quality of crowder I had the heavenly good
luck to get favour in their eyes. _Crowding Pat_ was the name they
dubbed me with; and it was little I cared for a name so long as my skin
was whole.

What kind of a pandemonium that vessel was, I cannot describe, but she
was commanded by a lunatic, and might be called a floating Bedlam.
Drinking, roaring, singing, quarrelling, dancing, they were never all
sober at one time; and there were days together when, if a squall had
supervened, it must have sent us to the bottom; or if a king’s ship had
come along, it would have found us quite helpless for defence. Once or
twice we sighted a sail, and, if we were sober enough, overhauled it,
God forgive us! and if we were all too drunk, she got away, and I would
bless the saints under my breath. Teach ruled, if you can call that
rule which brought no order, by the terror he created; and I observed
the man was very vain of his position. I have known marshals of
France—ay, and even Highland chieftains—that were less openly puffed
up; which throws a singular light on the pursuit of honour and glory.
Indeed, the longer we live, the more we perceive the sagacity of
Aristotle and the other old philosophers; and though I have all my life
been eager for legitimate distinctions, I can lay my hand upon my
heart, at the end of my career, and declare there is not one—no, nor
yet life itself—which is worth acquiring or preserving at the slightest
cost of dignity.

It was long before I got private speech of Ballantrae; but at length
one night we crept out upon the boltsprit, when the rest were better
employed, and commiserated our position.

“None can deliver us but the saints,” said I.

“My mind is very different,” said Ballantrae; “for I am going to
deliver myself. This Teach is the poorest creature possible; we make no
profit of him, and lie continually open to capture; and,” says he, “I
am not going to be a tarry pirate for nothing, nor yet to hang in
chains if I can help it.” And he told me what was in his mind to better
the state of the ship in the way of discipline, which would give us
safety for the present, and a sooner hope of deliverance when they
should have gained enough and should break up their company.

I confessed to him ingenuously that my nerve was quite shook amid these
horrible surroundings, and I durst scarce tell him to count upon me.

“I am not very easy frightened,” said he, “nor very easy beat.”

A few days after, there befell an accident which had nearly hanged us
all; and offers the most extraordinary picture of the folly that ruled
in our concerns. We were all pretty drunk: and some bedlamite spying a
sail, Teach put the ship about in chase without a glance, and we began
to bustle up the arms and boast of the horrors that should follow. I
observed Ballantrae stood quiet in the bows, looking under the shade of
his hand; but for my part, true to my policy among these savages, I was
at work with the busiest and passing Irish jests for their diversion.

“Run up the colours,” cries Teach. “Show the —s the Jolly Roger!”

It was the merest drunken braggadocio at such a stage, and might have
lost us a valuable prize; but I thought it no part of mine to reason,
and I ran up the black flag with my own hand.

Ballantrae steps presently aft with a smile upon his face.

“You may perhaps like to know, you drunken dog,” says he, “that you are
chasing a king’s ship.”

Teach roared him the lie; but he ran at the same time to the bulwarks,
and so did they all. I have never seen so many drunken men struck
suddenly sober. The cruiser had gone about, upon our impudent display
of colours; she was just then filling on the new tack; her ensign blew
out quite plain to see; and even as we stared, there came a puff of
smoke, and then a report, and a shot plunged in the waves a good way
short of us. Some ran to the ropes, and got the _Sarah_ round with an
incredible swiftness. One fellow fell on the rum barrel, which stood
broached upon the deck, and rolled it promptly overboard. On my part, I
made for the Jolly Roger, struck it, tossed it in the sea; and could
have flung myself after, so vexed was I with our mismanagement. As for
Teach, he grew as pale as death, and incontinently went down to his
cabin. Only twice he came on deck that afternoon; went to the taffrail;
took a long look at the king’s ship, which was still on the horizon
heading after us; and then, without speech, back to his cabin. You may
say he deserted us; and if it had not been for one very capable sailor
we had on board, and for the lightness of the airs that blew all day,
we must certainly have gone to the yard-arm.

It is to be supposed Teach was humiliated, and perhaps alarmed for his
position with the crew; and the way in which he set about regaining
what he had lost, was highly characteristic of the man. Early next day
we smelled him burning sulphur in his cabin and crying out of “Hell,
hell!” which was well understood among the crew, and filled their minds
with apprehension. Presently he comes on deck, a perfect figure of fun,
his face blacked, his hair and whiskers curled, his belt stuck full of
pistols; chewing bits of glass so that the blood ran down his chin, and
brandishing a dirk. I do not know if he had taken these manners from
the Indians of America, where he was a native; but such was his way,
and he would always thus announce that he was wound up to horrid deeds.
The first that came near him was the fellow who had sent the rum
overboard the day before; him he stabbed to the heart, damning him for
a mutineer; and then capered about the body, raving and swearing and
daring us to come on. It was the silliest exhibition; and yet dangerous
too, for the cowardly fellow was plainly working himself up to another
murder.

All of a sudden Ballantrae stepped forth. “Have done with this
play-acting,” says he. “Do you think to frighten us with making faces?
We saw nothing of you yesterday, when you were wanted; and we did well
without you, let me tell you that.”

There was a murmur and a movement in the crew, of pleasure and alarm, I
thought, in nearly equal parts. As for Teach, he gave a barbarous howl,
and swung his dirk to fling it, an art in which (like many seamen) he
was very expert.

“Knock that out of his hand!” says Ballantrae, so sudden and sharp that
my arm obeyed him before my mind had understood.

Teach stood like one stupid, never thinking on his pistols.

“Go down to your cabin,” cries Ballantrae, “and come on deck again when
you are sober. Do you think we are going to hang for you, you
black-faced, half-witted, drunken brute and butcher? Go down!” And he
stamped his foot at him with such a sudden smartness that Teach fairly
ran for it to the companion.

“And now, mates,” says Ballantrae, “a word with you. I don’t know if
you are gentlemen of fortune for the fun of the thing, but I am not. I
want to make money, and get ashore again, and spend it like a man. And
on one thing my mind is made up: I will not hang if I can help it.
Come: give me a hint; I’m only a beginner! Is there no way to get a
little discipline and common sense about this business?”

One of the men spoke up: he said by rights they should have a
quartermaster; and no sooner was the word out of his mouth than they
were all of that opinion. The thing went by acclamation, Ballantrae was
made quartermaster, the rum was put in his charge, laws were passed in
imitation of those of a pirate by the name of Roberts, and the last
proposal was to make an end of Teach. But Ballantrae was afraid of a
more efficient captain, who might be a counterweight to himself, and he
opposed this stoutly. Teach, he said, was good enough to board ships
and frighten fools with his blacked face and swearing; we could scarce
get a better man than Teach for that; and besides, as the man was now
disconsidered and as good as deposed, we might reduce his proportion of
the plunder. This carried it; Teach’s share was cut down to a mere
derision, being actually less than mine; and there remained only two
points: whether he would consent, and who was to announce to him this
resolution.

“Do not let that stick you,” says Ballantrae, “I will do that.”

And he stepped to the companion and down alone into the cabin to face
that drunken savage.

“This is the man for us,” cries one of the hands. “Three cheers for the
quartermaster!” which were given with a will, my own voice among the
loudest, and I dare say these plaudits had their effect on Master Teach
in the cabin, as we have seen of late days how shouting in the streets
may trouble even the minds of legislators.

What passed precisely was never known, though some of the heads of it
came to the surface later on; and we were all amazed, as well as
gratified, when Ballantrae came on deck with Teach upon his arm, and
announced that all had been consented.

I pass swiftly over those twelve or fifteen months in which we
continued to keep the sea in the North Atlantic, getting our food and
water from the ships we over-hauled, and doing on the whole a pretty
fortunate business. Sure, no one could wish to read anything so
ungenteel as the memoirs of a pirate, even an unwilling one like me!
Things went extremely better with our designs, and Ballantrae kept his
lead, to my admiration, from that day forth. I would be tempted to
suppose that a gentleman must everywhere be first, even aboard a rover:
but my birth is every whit as good as any Scottish lord’s, and I am not
ashamed to confess that I stayed Crowding Pat until the end, and was
not much better than the crew’s buffoon. Indeed, it was no scene to
bring out my merits. My health suffered from a variety of reasons; I
was more at home to the last on a horse’s back than a ship’s deck; and,
to be ingenuous, the fear of the sea was constantly in my mind,
battling with the fear of my companions. I need not cry myself up for
courage; I have done well on many fields under the eyes of famous
generals, and earned my late advancement by an act of the most
distinguished valour before many witnesses. But when we must proceed on
one of our abordages, the heart of Francis Burke was in his boots; the
little eggshell skiff in which we must set forth, the horrible heaving
of the vast billows, the height of the ship that we must scale, the
thought of how many might be there in garrison upon their legitimate
defence, the scowling heavens which (in that climate) so often looked
darkly down upon our exploits, and the mere crying of the wind in my
ears, were all considerations most unpalatable to my valour. Besides
which, as I was always a creature of the nicest sensibility, the scenes
that must follow on our success tempted me as little as the chances of
defeat. Twice we found women on board; and though I have seen towns
sacked, and of late days in France some very horrid public tumults,
there was something in the smallness of the numbers engaged, and the
bleak dangerous sea-surroundings, that made these acts of piracy far
the most revolting. I confess ingenuously I could never proceed unless
I was three parts drunk; it was the same even with the crew; Teach
himself was fit for no enterprise till he was full of rum; and it was
one of the most difficult parts of Ballantrae’s performance, to serve
us with liquor in the proper quantities. Even this he did to
admiration; being upon the whole the most capable man I ever met with,
and the one of the most natural genius. He did not even scrape favour
with the crew, as I did, by continual buffoonery made upon a very
anxious heart; but preserved on most occasions a great deal of gravity
and distance; so that he was like a parent among a family of young
children, or a schoolmaster with his boys. What made his part the
harder to perform, the men were most inveterate grumblers; Ballantrae’s
discipline, little as it was, was yet irksome to their love of licence;
and what was worse, being kept sober they had time to think. Some of
them accordingly would fall to repenting their abominable crimes; one
in particular, who was a good Catholic, and with whom I would sometimes
steal apart for prayer; above all in bad weather, fogs, lashing rain
and the like, when we would be the less observed; and I am sure no two
criminals in the cart have ever performed their devotions with more
anxious sincerity. But the rest, having no such grounds of hope, fell
to another pastime, that of computation. All day long they would be
telling up their shares or grooming over the result. I have said we
were pretty fortunate. But an observation fails to be made: that in
this world, in no business that I have tried, do the profits rise to a
man’s expectations. We found many ships and took many; yet few of them
contained much money, their goods were usually nothing to our
purpose—what did we want with a cargo of ploughs, or even of
tobacco?—and it is quite a painful reflection how many whole crews we
have made to walk the plank for no more than a stock of biscuit or an
anker or two of spirit.

In the meanwhile our ship was growing very foul, and it was high time
we should make for our _port de carrénage_, which was in the estuary of
a river among swamps. It was openly understood that we should then
break up and go and squander our proportions of the spoil; and this
made every man greedy of a little more, so that our decision was
delayed from day to day. What finally decided matters, was a trifling
accident, such as an ignorant person might suppose incidental to our
way of life. But here I must explain: on only one of all the ships we
boarded, the first on which we found women, did we meet with any
genuine resistance. On that occasion we had two men killed and several
injured, and if it had not been for the gallantry of Ballantrae we had
surely been beat back at last. Everywhere else the defence (where there
was any at all) was what the worst troops in Europe would have laughed
at; so that the most dangerous part of our employment was to clamber up
the side of the ship; and I have even known the poor souls on board to
cast us a line, so eager were they to volunteer instead of walking the
plank. This constant immunity had made our fellows very soft, so that I
understood how Teach had made so deep a mark upon their minds; for
indeed the company of that lunatic was the chief danger in our way of
life. The accident to which I have referred was this:—We had sighted a
little full-rigged ship very close under our board in a haze; she
sailed near as well as we did—I should be nearer truth if I said, near
as ill; and we cleared the bow-chaser to see if we could bring a spar
or two about their ears. The swell was exceeding great; the motion of
the ship beyond description; it was little wonder if our gunners should
fire thrice and be still quite broad of what they aimed at. But in the
meanwhile the chase had cleared a stern gun, the thickness of the air
concealing them; and being better marksmen, their first shot struck us
in the bows, knocked our two gunners into mince-meat, so that we were
all sprinkled with the blood, and plunged through the deck into the
forecastle, where we slept. Ballantrae would have held on; indeed,
there was nothing in this _contretemps_ to affect the mind of any
soldier; but he had a quick perception of the men’s wishes, and it was
plain this lucky shot had given them a sickener of their trade. In a
moment they were all of one mind: the chase was drawing away from us,
it was needless to hold on, the _Sarah_ was too foul to overhaul a
bottle, it was mere foolery to keep the sea with her; and on these
pretended grounds her head was incontinently put about and the course
laid for the river. It was strange to see what merriment fell on that
ship’s company, and how they stamped about the deck jesting, and each
computing what increase had come to his share by the death of the two
gunners.

We were nine days making our port, so light were the airs we had to
sail on, so foul the ship’s bottom; but early on the tenth, before
dawn, and in a light lifting haze, we passed the head. A little after,
the haze lifted, and fell again, showing us a cruiser very close. This
was a sore blow, happening so near our refuge. There was a great debate
of whether she had seen us, and if so whether it was likely they had
recognised the _Sarah_. We were very careful, by destroying every
member of those crews we overhauled, to leave no evidence as to our own
persons; but the appearance of the _Sarah_ herself we could not keep so
private; and above all of late, since she had been foul, and we had
pursued many ships without success, it was plain that her description
had been often published. I supposed this alert would have made us
separate upon the instant. But here again that original genius of
Ballantrae’s had a surprise in store for me. He and Teach (and it was
the most remarkable step of his success) had gone hand in hand since
the first day of his appointment. I often questioned him upon the fact,
and never got an answer but once, when he told me he and Teach had an
understanding “which would very much surprise the crew if they should
hear of it, and would surprise himself a good deal if it was carried
out.” Well, here again he and Teach were of a mind; and by their joint
procurement the anchor was no sooner down than the whole crew went off
upon a scene of drunkenness indescribable. By afternoon we were a mere
shipful of lunatical persons, throwing of things overboard, howling of
different songs at the same time, quarrelling and falling together, and
then forgetting our quarrels to embrace. Ballantrae had bidden me drink
nothing, and feign drunkenness, as I valued my life; and I have never
passed a day so wearisomely, lying the best part of the time upon the
forecastle and watching the swamps and thickets by which our little
basin was entirely surrounded for the eye. A little after dusk
Ballantrae stumbled up to my side, feigned to fall, with a drunken
laugh, and before he got his feet again, whispered me to “reel down
into the cabin and seem to fall asleep upon a locker, for there would
be need of me soon.” I did as I was told, and coming into the cabin,
where it was quite dark, let myself fall on the first locker. There was
a man there already; by the way he stirred and threw me off, I could
not think he was much in liquor; and yet when I had found another
place, he seemed to continue to sleep on. My heart now beat very hard,
for I saw some desperate matter was in act. Presently down came
Ballantrae, lit the lamp, looked about the cabin, nodded as if pleased,
and on deck again without a word. I peered out from between my fingers,
and saw there were three of us slumbering, or feigning to slumber, on
the lockers: myself, one Dutton and one Grady, both resolute men. On
deck the rest were got to a pitch of revelry quite beyond the bounds of
what is human; so that no reasonable name can describe the sounds they
were now making. I have heard many a drunken bout in my time, many on
board that very _Sarah_, but never anything the least like this, which
made me early suppose the liquor had been tampered with. It was a long
while before these yells and howls died out into a sort of miserable
moaning, and then to silence; and it seemed a long while after that
before Ballantrae came down again, this time with Teach upon his heels.
The latter cursed at the sight of us three upon the lockers.

“Tut,” says Ballantrae, “you might fire a pistol at their ears. You
know what stuff they have been swallowing.”

There was a hatch in the cabin floor, and under that the richest part
of the booty was stored against the day of division. It fastened with a
ring and three padlocks, the keys (for greater security) being divided;
one to Teach, one to Ballantrae, and one to the mate, a man called
Hammond. Yet I was amazed to see they were now all in the one hand; and
yet more amazed (still looking through my fingers) to observe
Ballantrae and Teach bring up several packets, four of them in all,
very carefully made up and with a loop for carriage.

“And now,” says Teach, “let us be going.”

“One word,” says Ballantrae. “I have discovered there is another man
besides yourself who knows a private path across the swamp; and it
seems it is shorter than yours.”

Teach cried out, in that case, they were undone.

“I do not know for that,” says Ballantrae. “For there are several other
circumstances with which I must acquaint you. First of all, there is no
bullet in your pistols, which (if you remember) I was kind enough to
load for both of us this morning. Secondly, as there is someone else
who knows a passage, you must think it highly improbable I should
saddle myself with a lunatic like you. Thirdly, these gentlemen (who
need no longer pretend to be asleep) are those of my party, and will
now proceed to gag and bind you to the mast; and when your men awaken
(if they ever do awake after the drugs we have mingled in their
liquor), I am sure they will be so obliging as to deliver you, and you
will have no difficulty, I daresay, to explain the business of the
keys.”

Not a word said Teach, but looked at us like a frightened baby as we
gagged and bound him.

“Now you see, you moon-calf,” says Ballantrae, “why we made four
packets. Heretofore you have been called Captain Teach, but I think you
are now rather Captain Learn.”

That was our last word on board the _Sarah_. We four, with our four
packets, lowered ourselves softly into a skiff, and left that ship
behind us as silent as the grave, only for the moaning of some of the
drunkards. There was a fog about breast-high on the waters; so that
Dutton, who knew the passage, must stand on his feet to direct our
rowing; and this, as it forced us to row gently, was the means of our
deliverance. We were yet but a little way from the ship, when it began
to come grey, and the birds to fly abroad upon the water. All of a
sudden Dutton clapped down upon his hams, and whispered us to be silent
for our lives, and hearken. Sure enough, we heard a little faint creak
of oars upon one hand, and then again, and further off, a creak of oars
upon the other. It was clear we had been sighted yesterday in the
morning; here were the cruiser’s boats to cut us out; here were we
defenceless in their very midst. Sure, never were poor souls more
perilously placed; and as we lay there on our oars, praying God the
mist might hold, the sweat poured from my brow. Presently we heard one
of the boats where we might have thrown a biscuit in her. “Softly,
men,” we heard an officer whisper; and I marvelled they could not hear
the drumming of my heart.

“Never mind the path,” says Ballantrae; “we must get shelter anyhow;
let us pull straight ahead for the sides of the basin.”

This we did with the most anxious precaution, rowing, as best we could,
upon our hands, and steering at a venture in the fog, which was (for
all that) our only safety. But Heaven guided us; we touched ground at a
thicket; scrambled ashore with our treasure; and having no other way of
concealment, and the mist beginning already to lighten, hove down the
skiff and let her sink. We were still but new under cover when the sun
rose; and at the same time, from the midst of the basin, a great
shouting of seamen sprang up, and we knew the _Sarah_ was being
boarded. I heard afterwards the officer that took her got great honour;
and it’s true the approach was creditably managed, but I think he had
an easy capture when he came to board. [3]

I was still blessing the saints for my escape, when I became aware we
were in trouble of another kind. We were here landed at random in a
vast and dangerous swamp; and how to come at the path was a concern of
doubt, fatigue, and peril. Dutton, indeed, was of opinion we should
wait until the ship was gone, and fish up the skiff; for any delay
would be more wise than to go blindly ahead in that morass. One went
back accordingly to the basin-side and (peering through the thicket)
saw the fog already quite drunk up, and English colours flying on the
_Sarah_, but no movement made to get her under way. Our situation was
now very doubtful. The swamp was an unhealthful place to linger in; we
had been so greedy to bring treasures that we had brought but little
food; it was highly desirable, besides, that we should get clear of the
neighbourhood and into the settlements before the news of the capture
went abroad; and against all these considerations, there was only the
peril of the passage on the other side. I think it not wonderful we
decided on the active part.

It was already blistering hot when we set forth to pass the marsh, or
rather to strike the path, by compass. Dutton took the compass, and one
or other of us three carried his proportion of the treasure. I promise
you he kept a sharp eye to his rear, for it was like the man’s soul
that he must trust us with. The thicket was as close as a bush; the
ground very treacherous, so that we often sank in the most terrifying
manner, and must go round about; the heat, besides, was stifling, the
air singularly heavy, and the stinging insects abounded in such myriads
that each of us walked under his own cloud. It has often been commented
on, how much better gentlemen of birth endure fatigue than persons of
the rabble; so that walking officers who must tramp in the dirt beside
their men, shame them by their constancy. This was well to be observed
in the present instance; for here were Ballantrae and I, two gentlemen
of the highest breeding, on the one hand; and on the other, Grady, a
common mariner, and a man nearly a giant in physical strength. The case
of Dutton is not in point, for I confess he did as well as any of us.
[4] But as for Grady, he began early to lament his case, tailed in the
rear, refused to carry Dutton’s packet when it came his turn, clamoured
continually for rum (of which we had too little), and at last even
threatened us from behind with a cocked pistol, unless we should allow
him rest. Ballantrae would have fought it out, I believe; but I
prevailed with him the other way; and we made a stop and ate a meal. It
seemed to benefit Grady little; he was in the rear again at once,
growling and bemoaning his lot; and at last, by some carelessness, not
having followed properly in our tracks, stumbled into a deep part of
the slough where it was mostly water, gave some very dreadful screams,
and before we could come to his aid had sunk along with his booty. His
fate, and above all these screams of his, appalled us to the soul; yet
it was on the whole a fortunate circumstance and the means of our
deliverance, for it moved Dutton to mount into a tree, whence he was
able to perceive and to show me, who had climbed after him, a high
piece of the wood, which was a landmark for the path. He went forward
the more carelessly, I must suppose; for presently we saw him sink a
little down, draw up his feet and sink again, and so twice. Then he
turned his face to us, pretty white.

“Lend a hand,” said he, “I am in a bad place.”

“I don’t know about that,” says Ballantrae, standing still.

Dutton broke out into the most violent oaths, sinking a little lower as
he did, so that the mud was nearly to his waist, and plucking a pistol
from his belt, “Help me,” he cries, “or die and be damned to you!”

“Nay,” says Ballantrae, “I did but jest. I am coming.” And he set down
his own packet and Dutton’s, which he was then carrying. “Do not
venture near till we see if you are needed,” said he to me, and went
forward alone to where the man was bogged. He was quiet now, though he
still held the pistol; and the marks of terror in his countenance were
very moving to behold.

“For the Lord’s sake,” says he, “look sharp.”

Ballantrae was now got close up. “Keep still,” says he, and seemed to
consider; and then, “Reach out both your hands!”

Dutton laid down his pistol, and so watery was the top surface that it
went clear out of sight; with an oath he stooped to snatch it; and as
he did so, Ballantrae leaned forth and stabbed him between the
shoulders. Up went his hands over his head—I know not whether with the
pain or to ward himself; and the next moment he doubled forward in the
mud.

Ballantrae was already over the ankles; but he plucked himself out, and
came back to me, where I stood with my knees smiting one another. “The
devil take you, Francis!” says he. “I believe you are a half-hearted
fellow, after all. I have only done justice on a pirate. And here we
are quite clear of the _Sarah_! Who shall now say that we have dipped
our hands in any irregularities?”

I assured him he did me injustice; but my sense of humanity was so much
affected by the horridness of the fact that I could scarce find breath
to answer with.

“Come,” said he, “you must be more resolved. The need for this fellow
ceased when he had shown you where the path ran; and you cannot deny I
would have been daft to let slip so fair an opportunity.”

I could not deny but he was right in principle; nor yet could I refrain
from shedding tears, of which I think no man of valour need have been
ashamed; and it was not until I had a share of the rum that I was able
to proceed. I repeat, I am far from ashamed of my generous emotion;
mercy is honourable in the warrior; and yet I cannot altogether censure
Ballantrae, whose step was really fortunate, as we struck the path
without further misadventure, and the same night, about sundown, came
to the edge of the morass.

We were too weary to seek far; on some dry sands, still warm with the
day’s sun, and close under a wood of pines, we lay down and were
instantly plunged in sleep.

We awaked the next morning very early, and began with a sullen spirit a
conversation that came near to end in blows. We were now cast on shore
in the southern provinces, thousands of miles from any French
settlement; a dreadful journey and a thousand perils lay in front of
us; and sure, if there was ever need for amity, it was in such an hour.
I must suppose that Ballantrae had suffered in his sense of what is
truly polite; indeed, and there is nothing strange in the idea, after
the sea-wolves we had consorted with so long; and as for myself, he
fubbed me off unhandsomely, and any gentleman would have resented his
behaviour.

I told him in what light I saw his conduct; he walked a little off, I
following to upbraid him; and at last he stopped me with his hand.

“Frank,” says he, “you know what we swore; and yet there is no oath
invented would induce me to swallow such expressions, if I did not
regard you with sincere affection. It is impossible you should doubt me
there: I have given proofs. Dutton I had to take, because he knew the
pass, and Grady because Dutton would not move without him; but what
call was there to carry you along? You are a perpetual danger to me
with your cursed Irish tongue. By rights you should now be in irons in
the cruiser. And you quarrel with me like a baby for some trinkets!”

I considered this one of the most unhandsome speeches ever made; and
indeed to this day I can scarce reconcile it to my notion of a
gentleman that was my friend. I retorted upon him with his Scotch
accent, of which he had not so much as some, but enough to be very
barbarous and disgusting, as I told him plainly; and the affair would
have gone to a great length, but for an alarming intervention.

We had got some way off upon the sand. The place where we had slept,
with the packets lying undone and the money scattered openly, was now
between us and the pines; and it was out of these the stranger must
have come. There he was at least, a great hulking fellow of the
country, with a broad axe on his shoulder, looking open-mouthed, now at
the treasure, which was just at his feet, and now at our disputation,
in which we had gone far enough to have weapons in our hands. We had no
sooner observed him than he found his legs and made off again among the
pines.

This was no scene to put our minds at rest: a couple of armed men in
sea-clothes found quarrelling over a treasure, not many miles from
where a pirate had been captured—here was enough to bring the whole
country about our ears. The quarrel was not even made up; it was
blotted from our minds; and we got our packets together in the
twinkling of an eye, and made off, running with the best will in the
world. But the trouble was, we did not know in what direction, and must
continually return upon our steps. Ballantrae had indeed collected what
he could from Dutton; but it’s hard to travel upon hearsay; and the
estuary, which spreads into a vast irregular harbour, turned us off
upon every side with a new stretch of water.

We were near beside ourselves, and already quite spent with running,
when, coming to the top of a dune, we saw we were again cut off by
another ramification of the bay. This was a creek, however, very
different from those that had arrested us before; being set in rocks,
and so precipitously deep that a small vessel was able to lie
alongside, made fast with a hawser; and her crew had laid a plank to
the shore. Here they had lighted a fire, and were sitting at their
meal. As for the vessel herself, she was one of those they build in the
Bermudas.

The love of gold and the great hatred that everybody has to pirates
were motives of the most influential, and would certainly raise the
country in our pursuit. Besides, it was now plain we were on some sort
of straggling peninsula, like the fingers of a hand; and the wrist, or
passage to the mainland, which we should have taken at the first, was
by this time not improbably secured. These considerations put us on a
bolder counsel. For as long as we dared, looking every moment to hear
sounds of the chase, we lay among some bushes on the top of the dune;
and having by this means secured a little breath and recomposed our
appearance, we strolled down at last, with a great affectation of
carelessness, to the party by the fire.

It was a trader and his negroes, belonging to Albany, in the province
of New York, and now on the way home from the Indies with a cargo; his
name I cannot recall. We were amazed to learn he had put in here from
terror of the _Sarah_; for we had no thought our exploits had been so
notorious. As soon as the Albanian heard she had been taken the day
before, he jumped to his feet, gave us a cup of spirits for our good
news, and sent big negroes to get sail on the Bermudan. On our side, we
profited by the dram to become more confidential, and at last offered
ourselves as passengers. He looked askance at our tarry clothes and
pistols, and replied civilly enough that he had scarce accommodation
for himself; nor could either our prayers or our offers of money, in
which we advanced pretty far, avail to shake him.

“I see, you think ill of us,” says Ballantrae, “but I will show you how
well we think of you by telling you the truth. We are Jacobite
fugitives, and there is a price upon our heads.”

At this, the Albanian was plainly moved a little. He asked us many
questions as to the Scotch war, which Ballantrae very patiently
answered. And then, with a wink, in a vulgar manner, “I guess you and
your Prince Charlie got more than you cared about,” said he.

“Bedad, and that we did,” said I. “And, my dear man, I wish you would
set a new example and give us just that much.”

This I said in the Irish way, about which there is allowed to be
something very engaging. It’s a remarkable thing, and a testimony to
the love with which our nation is regarded, that this address scarce
ever fails in a handsome fellow. I cannot tell how often I have seen a
private soldier escape the horse, or a beggar wheedle out a good alms
by a touch of the brogue. And, indeed, as soon as the Albanian had
laughed at me I was pretty much at rest. Even then, however, he made
many conditions, and—for one thing—took away our arms, before he
suffered us aboard; which was the signal to cast off; so that in a
moment after, we were gliding down the bay with a good breeze, and
blessing the name of God for our deliverance. Almost in the mouth of
the estuary, we passed the cruiser, and a little after the poor _Sarah_
with her prize crew; and these were both sights to make us tremble. The
Bermudan seemed a very safe place to be in, and our bold stroke to have
been fortunately played, when we were thus reminded of the case of our
companions. For all that, we had only exchanged traps, jumped out of
the frying-pan into the fire, ran from the yard-arm to the block, and
escaped the open hostility of the man-of-war to lie at the mercy of the
doubtful faith of our Albanian merchant.

From many circumstances, it chanced we were safer than we could have
dared to hope. The town of Albany was at that time much concerned in
contraband trade across the desert with the Indians and the French.
This, as it was highly illegal, relaxed their loyalty, and as it
brought them in relation with the politest people on the earth, divided
even their sympathies. In short, they were like all the smugglers in
the world, spies and agents ready-made for either party. Our Albanian,
besides, was a very honest man indeed, and very greedy; and, to crown
our luck, he conceived a great delight in our society. Before we had
reached the town of New York we had come to a full agreement, that he
should carry us as far as Albany upon his ship, and thence put us on a
way to pass the boundaries and join the French. For all this we were to
pay at a high rate; but beggars cannot be choosers, nor outlaws
bargainers.

We sailed, then, up the Hudson River, which, I protest, is a very fine
stream, and put up at the “King’s Arms” in Albany. The town was full of
the militia of the province, breathing slaughter against the French.
Governor Clinton was there himself, a very busy man, and, by what I
could learn, very near distracted by the factiousness of his Assembly.
The Indians on both sides were on the war-path; we saw parties of them
bringing in prisoners and (what was much worse) scalps, both male and
female, for which they were paid at a fixed rate; and I assure you the
sight was not encouraging. Altogether, we could scarce have come at a
period more unsuitable for our designs; our position in the chief inn
was dreadfully conspicuous; our Albanian fubbed us off with a thousand
delays, and seemed upon the point of a retreat from his engagements;
nothing but peril appeared to environ the poor fugitives, and for some
time we drowned our concern in a very irregular course of living.

This, too, proved to be fortunate; and it’s one of the remarks that
fall to be made upon our escape, how providentially our steps were
conducted to the very end. What a humiliation to the dignity of man! My
philosophy, the extraordinary genius of Ballantrae, our valour, in
which I grant that we were equal—all these might have proved
insufficient without the Divine blessing on our efforts. And how true
it is, as the Church tells us, that the Truths of Religion are, after
all, quite applicable even to daily affairs! At least, it was in the
course of our revelry that we made the acquaintance of a spirited youth
by the name of Chew. He was one of the most daring of the Indian
traders, very well acquainted with the secret paths of the wilderness,
needy, dissolute, and, by a last good fortune, in some disgrace with
his family. Him we persuaded to come to our relief; he privately
provided what was needful for our flight, and one day we slipped out of
Albany, without a word to our former friend, and embarked, a little
above, in a canoe.

To the toils and perils of this journey, it would require a pen more
elegant than mine to do full justice. The reader must conceive for
himself the dreadful wilderness which we had now to thread; its
thickets, swamps, precipitous rocks, impetuous rivers, and amazing
waterfalls. Among these barbarous scenes we must toil all day, now
paddling, now carrying our canoe upon our shoulders; and at night we
slept about a fire, surrounded by the howling of wolves and other
savage animals. It was our design to mount the headwaters of the
Hudson, to the neighbourhood of Crown Point, where the French had a
strong place in the woods, upon Lake Champlain. But to have done this
directly were too perilous; and it was accordingly gone upon by such a
labyrinth of rivers, lakes, and portages as makes my head giddy to
remember. These paths were in ordinary times entirely desert; but the
country was now up, the tribes on the war-path, the woods full of
Indian scouts. Again and again we came upon these parties when we least
expected them; and one day, in particular, I shall never forget, how,
as dawn was coming in, we were suddenly surrounded by five or six of
these painted devils, uttering a very dreary sort of cry, and
brandishing their hatchets. It passed off harmlessly, indeed, as did
the rest of our encounters; for Chew was well known and highly valued
among the different tribes. Indeed, he was a very gallant, respectable
young man; but even with the advantage of his companionship, you must
not think these meetings were without sensible peril. To prove
friendship on our part, it was needful to draw upon our stock of
rum—indeed, under whatever disguise, that is the true business of the
Indian trader, to keep a travelling public-house in the forest; and
when once the braves had got their bottle of _scaura_ (as they call
this beastly liquor), it behoved us to set forth and paddle for our
scalps. Once they were a little drunk, goodbye to any sense or decency;
they had but the one thought, to get more _scaura_. They might easily
take it in their heads to give us chase, and had we been overtaken, I
had never written these memoirs.

We were come to the most critical portion of our course, where we might
equally expect to fall into the hands of French or English, when a
terrible calamity befell us. Chew was taken suddenly sick with symptoms
like those of poison, and in the course of a few hours expired in the
bottom of the canoe. We thus lost at once our guide, our interpreter,
our boatman, and our passport, for he was all these in one; and found
ourselves reduced, at a blow, to the most desperate and irremediable
distress. Chew, who took a great pride in his knowledge, had indeed
often lectured us on the geography; and Ballantrae, I believe, would
listen. But for my part I have always found such information highly
tedious; and beyond the fact that we were now in the country of the
Adirondack Indians, and not so distant from our destination, could we
but have found the way, I was entirely ignorant. The wisdom of my
course was soon the more apparent; for with all his pains, Ballantrae
was no further advanced than myself. He knew we must continue to go up
one stream; then, by way of a portage, down another; and then up a
third. But you are to consider, in a mountain country, how many streams
come rolling in from every hand. And how is a gentleman, who is a
perfect stranger in that part of the world, to tell any one of them
from any other? Nor was this our only trouble. We were great novices,
besides, in handling a canoe; the portages were almost beyond our
strength, so that I have seen us sit down in despair for half an hour
at a time without one word; and the appearance of a single Indian,
since we had now no means of speaking to them, would have been in all
probability the means of our destruction. There is altogether some
excuse if Ballantrae showed something of a grooming disposition; his
habit of imputing blame to others, quite as capable as himself, was
less tolerable, and his language it was not always easy to accept.
Indeed, he had contracted on board the pirate ship a manner of address
which was in a high degree unusual between gentlemen; and now, when you
might say he was in a fever, it increased upon him hugely.

The third day of these wanderings, as we were carrying the canoe upon a
rocky portage, she fell, and was entirely bilged. The portage was
between two lakes, both pretty extensive; the track, such as it was,
opened at both ends upon the water, and on both hands was enclosed by
the unbroken woods; and the sides of the lakes were quite impassable
with bog: so that we beheld ourselves not only condemned to go without
our boat and the greater part of our provisions, but to plunge at once
into impenetrable thickets and to desert what little guidance we still
had—the course of the river. Each stuck his pistols in his belt,
shouldered an axe, made a pack of his treasure and as much food as he
could stagger under; and deserting the rest of our possessions, even to
our swords, which would have much embarrassed us among the woods, we
set forth on this deplorable adventure. The labours of Hercules, so
finely described by Homer, were a trifle to what we now underwent. Some
parts of the forest were perfectly dense down to the ground, so that we
must cut our way like mites in a cheese. In some the bottom was full of
deep swamp, and the whole wood entirely rotten. I have leaped on a
great fallen log and sunk to the knees in touchwood; I have sought to
stay myself, in falling, against what looked to be a solid trunk, and
the whole thing has whiffed away at my touch like a sheet of paper.
Stumbling, falling, bogging to the knees, hewing our way, our eyes
almost put out with twigs and branches, our clothes plucked from our
bodies, we laboured all day, and it is doubtful if we made two miles.
What was worse, as we could rarely get a view of the country, and were
perpetually justled from our path by obstacles, it was impossible even
to have a guess in what direction we were moving.

A little before sundown, in an open place with a stream, and set about
with barbarous mountains, Ballantrae threw down his pack. “I will go no
further,” said he, and bade me light the fire, damning my blood in
terms not proper for a chairman.

I told him to try to forget he had ever been a pirate, and to remember
he had been a gentleman.

“Are you mad?” he cried. “Don’t cross me here!” And then, shaking his
fist at the hills, “To think,” cries he, “that I must leave my bones in
this miserable wilderness! Would God I had died upon the scaffold like
a gentleman!” This he said ranting like an actor; and then sat biting
his fingers and staring on the ground, a most unchristian object.

I took a certain horror of the man, for I thought a soldier and a
gentleman should confront his end with more philosophy. I made him no
reply, therefore, in words; and presently the evening fell so chill
that I was glad, for my own sake, to kindle a fire. And yet God knows,
in such an open spot, and the country alive with savages, the act was
little short of lunacy. Ballantrae seemed never to observe me; but at
last, as I was about parching a little corn, he looked up.

“Have you ever a brother?” said be.

“By the blessing of Heaven,” said I, “not less than five.”

“I have the one,” said he, with a strange voice; and then presently,
“He shall pay me for all this,” he added. And when I asked him what was
his brother’s part in our distress, “What!” he cried, “he sits in my
place, he bears my name, he courts my wife; and I am here alone with a
damned Irishman in this tooth-chattering desert! Oh, I have been a
common gull!” he cried.

The explosion was in all ways so foreign to my friend’s nature that I
was daunted out of all my just susceptibility. Sure, an offensive
expression, however vivacious, appears a wonderfully small affair in
circumstances so extreme! But here there is a strange thing to be
noted. He had only once before referred to the lady with whom he was
contracted. That was when we came in view of the town of New York, when
he had told me, if all had their rights, he was now in sight of his own
property, for Miss Graeme enjoyed a large estate in the province. And
this was certainly a natural occasion; but now here she was named a
second time; and what is surely fit to be observed, in this very month,
which was November, ’47, and _I believe upon that very day as we sat
among these barbarous mountains_, his brother and Miss Graeme were
married. I am the least superstitious of men; but the hand of
Providence is here displayed too openly not to be remarked. [5]

The next day, and the next, were passed in similar labours; Ballantrae
often deciding on our course by the spinning of a coin; and once, when
I expostulated on this childishness, he had an odd remark that I have
never forgotten. “I know no better way,” said he, “to express my scorn
of human reason.” I think it was the third day that we found the body
of a Christian, scalped and most abominably mangled, and lying in a
pudder of his blood; the birds of the desert screaming over him, as
thick as flies. I cannot describe how dreadfully this sight affected
us; but it robbed me of all strength and all hope for this world. The
same day, and only a little after, we were scrambling over a part of
the forest that had been burned, when Ballantrae, who was a little
ahead, ducked suddenly behind a fallen trunk. I joined him in this
shelter, whence we could look abroad without being seen ourselves; and
in the bottom of the next vale, beheld a large war party of the savages
going by across our line. There might be the value of a weak battalion
present; all naked to the waist, blacked with grease and soot, and
painted with white lead and vermilion, according to their beastly
habits. They went one behind another like a string of geese, and at a
quickish trot; so that they took but a little while to rattle by, and
disappear again among the woods. Yet I suppose we endured a greater
agony of hesitation and suspense in these few minutes than goes usually
to a man’s whole life. Whether they were French or English Indians,
whether they desired scalps or prisoners, whether we should declare
ourselves upon the chance, or lie quiet and continue the heart-breaking
business of our journey: sure, I think these were questions to have
puzzled the brains of Aristotle himself. Ballantrae turned to me with a
face all wrinkled up and his teeth showing in his mouth, like what I
have read of people starving; he said no word, but his whole appearance
was a kind of dreadful question.

“They may be of the English side,” I whispered; “and think! the best we
could then hope, is to begin this over again.”

“I know—I know,” he said. “Yet it must come to a plunge at last.” And
he suddenly plucked out his coin, shook it in his closed hands, looked
at it, and then lay down with his face in the dust.

_Addition by Mr. Mackellar_.—I drop the Chevalier’s narration at this
point because the couple quarrelled and separated the same day; and the
Chevalier’s account of the quarrel seems to me (I must confess) quite
incompatible with the nature of either of the men. Henceforth they
wandered alone, undergoing extraordinary sufferings; until first one
and then the other was picked up by a party from Fort St. Frederick.
Only two things are to be noted. And first (as most important for my
purpose) that the Master, in the course of his miseries buried his
treasure, at a point never since discovered, but of which he took a
drawing in his own blood on the lining of his hat. And second, that on
his coming thus penniless to the Fort, he was welcomed like a brother
by the Chevalier, who thence paid his way to France. The simplicity of
Mr. Burke’s character leads him at this point to praise the Master
exceedingly; to an eye more worldly wise, it would seem it was the
Chevalier alone that was to be commended. I have the more pleasure in
pointing to this really very noble trait of my esteemed correspondent,
as I fear I may have wounded him immediately before. I have refrained
from comments on any of his extraordinary and (in my eyes) immoral
opinions, for I know him to be jealous of respect. But his version of
the quarrel is really more than I can reproduce; for I knew the Master
myself, and a man more insusceptible of fear is not conceivable. I
regret this oversight of the Chevalier’s, and all the more because the
tenor of his narrative (set aside a few flourishes) strikes me as
highly ingenuous.




CHAPTER IV.
PERSECUTIONS ENDURED BY MR. HENRY.


You can guess on what part of his adventures the Colonel principally
dwelled. Indeed, if we had heard it all, it is to be thought the
current of this business had been wholly altered; but the pirate ship
was very gently touched upon. Nor did I hear the Colonel to an end even
of that which he was willing to disclose; for Mr. Henry, having for
some while been plunged in a brown study, rose at last from his seat
and (reminding the Colonel there were matters that he must attend to)
bade me follow him immediately to the office.

Once there, he sought no longer to dissemble his concern, walking to
and fro in the room with a contorted face, and passing his hand
repeatedly upon his brow.

“We have some business,” he began at last; and there broke off,
declared we must have wine, and sent for a magnum of the best. This was
extremely foreign to his habitudes; and what was still more so, when
the wine had come, he gulped down one glass upon another like a man
careless of appearances. But the drink steadied him.

“You will scarce be surprised, Mackellar,” says he, “when I tell you
that my brother—whose safety we are all rejoiced to learn—stands in
some need of money.”

I told him I had misdoubted as much; but the time was not very
fortunate, as the stock was low.

“Not mine,” said he. “There is the money for the mortgage.”

I reminded him it was Mrs. Henry’s.

“I will be answerable to my wife,” he cried violently.

“And then,” said I, “there is the mortgage.”

“I know,” said he; “it is on that I would consult you.”

I showed him how unfortunate a time it was to divert this money from
its destination; and how, by so doing, we must lose the profit of our
past economies, and plunge back the estate into the mire. I even took
the liberty to plead with him; and when he still opposed me with a
shake of the head and a bitter dogged smile, my zeal quite carried me
beyond my place. “This is midsummer madness,” cried I; “and I for one
will be no party to it.”

“You speak as though I did it for my pleasure,” says he. “But I have a
child now; and, besides, I love order; and to say the honest truth,
Mackellar, I had begun to take a pride in the estates.” He gloomed for
a moment. “But what would you have?” he went on. “Nothing is mine,
nothing. This day’s news has knocked the bottom out of my life. I have
only the name and the shadow of things—only the shadow; there is no
substance in my rights.”

“They will prove substantial enough before a court,” said I.

He looked at me with a burning eye, and seemed to repress the word upon
his lips; and I repented what I had said, for I saw that while he spoke
of the estate he had still a side-thought to his marriage. And then, of
a sudden, he twitched the letter from his pocket, where it lay all
crumpled, smoothed it violently on the table, and read these words to
me with a trembling tongue: “‘My dear Jacob’—This is how he begins!”
cries he—“‘My dear Jacob, I once called you so, you may remember; and
you have now done the business, and flung my heels as high as Criffel.’
What do you think of that, Mackellar,” says he, “from an only brother?
I declare to God I liked him very well; I was always staunch to him;
and this is how he writes! But I will not sit down under the
imputation”—walking to and fro—“I am as good as he; I am a better man
than he, I call on God to prove it! I cannot give him all the monstrous
sum he asks; he knows the estate to be incompetent; but I will give him
what I have, and it is more than he expects. I have borne all this too
long. See what he writes further on; read it for yourself: ‘I know you
are a niggardly dog.’ A niggardly dog! I niggardly? Is that true,
Mackellar? You think it is?” I really thought he would have struck me
at that. “Oh, you all think so! Well, you shall see, and he shall see,
and God shall see. If I ruin the estate and go barefoot, I shall stuff
this bloodsucker. Let him ask all—all, and he shall have it! It is all
his by rights. Ah!” he cried, “and I foresaw all this, and worse, when
he would not let me go.” He poured out another glass of wine, and was
about to carry it to his lips, when I made so bold as to lay a finger
on his arm. He stopped a moment. “You are right,” said he, and flung
glass and all in the fireplace. “Come, let us count the money.”

I durst no longer oppose him; indeed, I was very much affected by the
sight of so much disorder in a man usually so controlled; and we sat
down together, counted the money, and made it up in packets for the
greater ease of Colonel Burke, who was to be the bearer. This done, Mr.
Henry returned to the hall, where he and my old lord sat all night
through with their guest.

A little before dawn I was called and set out with the Colonel. He
would scarce have liked a less responsible convoy, for he was a man who
valued himself; nor could we afford him one more dignified, for Mr.
Henry must not appear with the freetraders. It was a very bitter
morning of wind, and as we went down through the long shrubbery the
Colonel held himself muffled in his cloak.

“Sir,” said I, “this is a great sum of money that your friend requires.
I must suppose his necessities to be very great.”

“We must suppose so,” says he, I thought drily; but perhaps it was the
cloak about his mouth.

“I am only a servant of the family,” said I. “You may deal openly with
me. I think we are likely to get little good by him?”

“My dear man,” said the Colonel, “Ballantrae is a gentleman of the most
eminent natural abilities, and a man that I admire, and that I revere,
to the very ground he treads on.” And then he seemed to me to pause
like one in a difficulty.

“But for all that,” said I, “we are likely to get little good by him?”

“Sure, and you can have it your own way, my dear man,” says the
Colonel.

By this time we had come to the side of the creek, where the boat
awaited him. “Well,” said be, “I am sure I am very much your debtor for
all your civility, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is; and just as a last word,
and since you show so much intelligent interest, I will mention a small
circumstance that may be of use to the family. For I believe my friend
omitted to mention that he has the largest pension on the Scots Fund of
any refugee in Paris; and it’s the more disgraceful, sir,” cries the
Colonel, warming, “because there’s not one dirty penny for myself.”

He cocked his hat at me, as if I had been to blame for this partiality;
then changed again into his usual swaggering civility, shook me by the
hand, and set off down to the boat, with the money under his arms, and
whistling as he went the pathetic air of _Shule Aroon_. It was the
first time I had heard that tune; I was to hear it again, words and
all, as you shall learn, but I remember how that little stave of it ran
in my head after the freetraders had bade him “Wheesht, in the deil’s
name,” and the grating of the oars had taken its place, and I stood and
watched the dawn creeping on the sea, and the boat drawing away, and
the lugger lying with her foresail backed awaiting it.

 The gap made in our money was a sore embarrassment, and, among other
 consequences, it had this: that I must ride to Edinburgh, and there
 raise a new loan on very questionable terms to keep the old afloat;
 and was thus, for close upon three weeks, absent from the house of
 Durrisdeer.

What passed in the interval I had none to tell me, but I found Mrs.
Henry, upon my return, much changed in her demeanour. The old talks
with my lord for the most part pretermitted; a certain deprecation
visible towards her husband, to whom I thought she addressed herself
more often; and, for one thing, she was now greatly wrapped up in Miss
Katharine. You would think the change was agreeable to Mr. Henry; no
such matter! To the contrary, every circumstance of alteration was a
stab to him; he read in each the avowal of her truant fancies. That
constancy to the Master of which she was proud while she supposed him
dead, she had to blush for now she knew he was alive, and these blushes
were the hated spring of her new conduct. I am to conceal no truth; and
I will here say plainly, I think this was the period in which Mr. Henry
showed the worst. He contained himself, indeed, in public; but there
was a deep-seated irritation visible underneath. With me, from whom he
had less concealment, he was often grossly unjust, and even for his
wife he would sometimes have a sharp retort: perhaps when she had
ruffled him with some unwonted kindness; perhaps upon no tangible
occasion, the mere habitual tenor of the man’s annoyance bursting
spontaneously forth. When he would thus forget himself (a thing so
strangely out of keeping with the terms of their relation), there went
a shook through the whole company, and the pair would look upon each
other in a kind of pained amazement.

All the time, too, while he was injuring himself by this defect of
temper, he was hurting his position by a silence, of which I scarce
know whether to say it was the child of generosity or pride. The
freetraders came again and again, bringing messengers from the Master,
and none departed empty-handed. I never durst reason with Mr. Henry; he
gave what was asked of him in a kind of noble rage. Perhaps because he
knew he was by nature inclining to the parsimonious, he took a
backforemost pleasure in the recklessness with which he supplied his
brother’s exigence. Perhaps the falsity of the position would have
spurred a humbler man into the same excess. But the estate (if I may
say so) groaned under it; our daily expenses were shorn lower and
lower; the stables were emptied, all but four roadsters; servants were
discharged, which raised a dreadful murmuring in the country, and
heated up the old disfavour upon Mr. Henry; and at last the yearly
visit to Edinburgh must be discontinued.

This was in 1756. You are to suppose that for seven years this
bloodsucker had been drawing the life’s blood from Durrisdeer, and that
all this time my patron had held his peace. It was an effect of
devilish malice in the Master that he addressed Mr. Henry alone upon
the matter of his demands, and there was never a word to my lord. The
family had looked on, wondering at our economies. They had lamented, I
have no doubt, that my patron had become so great a miser—a fault
always despicable, but in the young abhorrent, and Mr. Henry was not
yet thirty years of age. Still, he had managed the business of
Durrisdeer almost from a boy; and they bore with these changes in a
silence as proud and bitter as his own, until the coping-stone of the
Edinburgh visit.

At this time I believe my patron and his wife were rarely together,
save at meals. Immediately on the back of Colonel Burke’s announcement
Mrs. Henry made palpable advances; you might say she had laid a sort of
timid court to her husband, different, indeed, from her former manner
of unconcern and distance. I never had the heart to blame Mr. Henry
because he recoiled from these advances; nor yet to censure the wife,
when she was cut to the quick by their rejection. But the result was an
entire estrangement, so that (as I say) they rarely spoke, except at
meals. Even the matter of the Edinburgh visit was first broached at
table, and it chanced that Mrs. Henry was that day ailing and
querulous. She had no sooner understood her husband’s meaning than the
red flew in her face.

“At last,” she cried, “this is too much! Heaven knows what pleasure I
have in my life, that I should be denied my only consolation. These
shameful proclivities must be trod down; we are already a mark and an
eyesore in the neighbourhood. I will not endure this fresh insanity.”

“I cannot afford it,” says Mr. Henry.

“Afford?” she cried. “For shame! But I have money of my own.”

“That is all mine, madam, by marriage,” he snarled, and instantly left
the room.

My old lord threw up his hands to Heaven, and he and his daughter,
withdrawing to the chimney, gave me a broad hint to be gone. I found
Mr. Henry in his usual retreat, the steward’s room, perched on the end
of the table, and plunging his penknife in it with a very ugly
countenance.

“Mr. Henry,” said I, “you do yourself too much injustice, and it is
time this should cease.”

“Oh!” cries he, “nobody minds here. They think it only natural. I have
shameful proclivities. I am a niggardly dog,” and he drove his knife up
to the hilt. “But I will show that fellow,” he cried with an oath, “I
will show him which is the more generous.”

“This is no generosity,” said I; “this is only pride.”

“Do you think I want morality?” he asked.

I thought he wanted help, and I should give it him, willy-nilly; and no
sooner was Mrs. Henry gone to her room than I presented myself at her
door and sought admittance.

She openly showed her wonder. “What do you want with me, Mr.
Mackellar?” said she.

“The Lord knows, madam,” says I, “I have never troubled you before with
any freedoms; but this thing lies too hard upon my conscience, and it
will out. Is it possible that two people can be so blind as you and my
lord? and have lived all these years with a noble gentleman like Mr.
Henry, and understand so little of his nature?”

“What does this mean?” she cried.

“Do you not know where his money goes to? his—and yours—and the money
for the very wine he does not drink at table?” I went on. “To Paris—to
that man! Eight thousand pounds has he had of us in seven years, and my
patron fool enough to keep it secret!”

“Eight thousand pounds!” she repeated. “It in impossible; the estate is
not sufficient.”

“God knows how we have sweated farthings to produce it,” said I. “But
eight thousand and sixty is the sum, beside odd shillings. And if you
can think my patron miserly after that, this shall be my last
interference.”

“You need say no more, Mr. Mackellar,” said she. “You have done most
properly in what you too modestly call your interference. I am much to
blame; you must think me indeed a very unobservant wife” (looking upon
me with a strange smile), “but I shall put this right at once. The
Master was always of a very thoughtless nature; but his heart is
excellent; he is the soul of generosity. I shall write to him myself.
You cannot think how you have pained me by this communication.”

“Indeed, madam, I had hoped to have pleased you,” said I, for I raged
to see her still thinking of the Master.

“And pleased,” said she, “and pleased me of course.”

That same day (I will not say but what I watched) I had the
satisfaction to see Mr. Henry come from his wife’s room in a state most
unlike himself; for his face was all bloated with weeping, and yet he
seemed to me to walk upon the air. By this, I was sure his wife had
made him full amends for once. “Ah,” thought I to myself, “I have done
a brave stroke this day.”

On the morrow, as I was seated at my books, Mr. Henry came in softly
behind me, took me by the shoulders, and shook me in a manner of
playfulness. “I find you are a faithless fellow after all,” says he,
which was his only reference to my part; but the tone he spoke in was
more to me than any eloquence of protestation. Nor was this all I had
effected; for when the next messenger came (as he did not long
afterwards) from the Master, he got nothing away with him but a letter.
For some while back it had been I myself who had conducted these
affairs; Mr. Henry not setting pen to paper, and I only in the dryest
and most formal terms. But this letter I did not even see; it would
scarce be pleasant reading, for Mr. Henry felt he had his wife behind
him for once, and I observed, on the day it was despatched, he had a
very gratified expression.

Things went better now in the family, though it could scarce be
pretended they went well. There was now at least no misconception;
there was kindness upon all sides; and I believe my patron and his wife
might again have drawn together if he could but have pocketed his
pride, and she forgot (what was the ground of all) her brooding on
another man. It is wonderful how a private thought leaks out; it is
wonderful to me now how we should all have followed the current of her
sentiments; and though she bore herself quietly, and had a very even
disposition, yet we should have known whenever her fancy ran to Paris.
And would not any one have thought that my disclosure must have rooted
up that idol? I think there is the devil in women: all these years
passed, never a sight of the man, little enough kindness to remember
(by all accounts) even while she had him, the notion of his death
intervening, his heartless rapacity laid bare to her; that all should
not do, and she must still keep the best place in her heart for this
accursed fellow, is a thing to make a plain man rage. I had never much
natural sympathy for the passion of love; but this unreason in my
patron’s wife disgusted me outright with the whole matter. I remember
checking a maid because she sang some bairnly kickshaw while my mind
was thus engaged; and my asperity brought about my ears the enmity of
all the petticoats about the house; of which I reeked very little, but
it amused Mr. Henry, who rallied me much upon our joint unpopularity.
It is strange enough (for my own mother was certainly one of the salt
of the earth, and my Aunt Dickson, who paid my fees at the University,
a very notable woman), but I have never had much toleration for the
female sex, possibly not much understanding; and being far from a bold
man, I have ever shunned their company. Not only do I see no cause to
regret this diffidence in myself, but have invariably remarked the most
unhappy consequences follow those who were less wise. So much I thought
proper to set down, lest I show myself unjust to Mrs. Henry. And,
besides, the remark arose naturally, on a re-perusal of the letter
which was the next step in these affairs, and reached me, to my sincere
astonishment, by a private hand, some week or so after the departure of
the last messenger.


_Letter from Colonel_ Burke (_afterwards Chevalier_) _to_ Mr.
Mackellar.
Troyes in Champagne,
_July_ 12, 1756


My Dear Sir,—You will doubtless be surprised to receive a communication
from one so little known to you; but on the occasion I had the good
fortune to rencounter you at Durrisdeer, I remarked you for a young man
of a solid gravity of character: a qualification which I profess I
admire and revere next to natural genius or the bold chivalrous spirit
of the soldier. I was, besides, interested in the noble family which
you have the honour to serve, or (to speak more by the book) to be the
humble and respected friend of; and a conversation I had the pleasure
to have with you very early in the morning has remained much upon my
mind.

Being the other day in Paris, on a visit from this famous city, where I
am in garrison, I took occasion to inquire your name (which I profess I
had forgot) at my friend, the Master of B.; and a fair opportunity
occurring, I write to inform you of what’s new.

The Master of B. (when we had last some talk of him together) was in
receipt, as I think I then told you, of a highly advantageous pension
on the Scots Fund. He next received a company, and was soon after
advanced to a regiment of his own. My dear sir, I do not offer to
explain this circumstance; any more than why I myself, who have rid at
the right hand of Princes, should be fubbed off with a pair of colours
and sent to rot in a hole at the bottom of the province. Accustomed as
I am to Courts, I cannot but feel it is no atmosphere for a plain
soldier; and I could never hope to advance by similar means, even could
I stoop to the endeavour. But our friend has a particular aptitude to
succeed by the means of ladies; and if all be true that I have heard,
he enjoyed a remarkable protection. It is like this turned against him;
for when I had the honour to shake him by the hand, he was but newly
released from the Bastille, where he had been cast on a sealed letter;
and, though now released, has both lost his regiment and his pension.
My dear sir, the loyalty of a plain Irishman will ultimately succeed in
the place of craft; as I am sure a gentleman of your probity will
agree.

Now, sir, the Master is a man whose genius I admire beyond expression,
and, besides, he is my friend; but I thought a little word of this
revolution in his fortunes would not come amiss, for, in my opinion,
the man’s desperate. He spoke, when I saw him, of a trip to India
(whither I am myself in some hope of accompanying my illustrious
countryman, Mr. Lally); but for this he would require (as I understood)
more money than was readily at his command. You may have heard a
military proverb: that it is a good thing to make a bridge of gold to a
flying enemy? I trust you will take my meaning and I subscribe myself,
with proper respects to my Lord Durrisdeer, to his son, and to the
beauteous Mrs. Durie,

My dear Sir,
Your obedient humble servant,
Francis Burke.


This missive I carried at once to Mr. Henry; and I think there was but
the one thought between the two of us: that it had come a week too
late. I made haste to send an answer to Colonel Burke, in which I
begged him, if he should see the Master, to assure him his next
messenger would be attended to. But with all my haste I was not in time
to avert what was impending; the arrow had been drawn, it must now fly.
I could almost doubt the power of Providence (and certainly His will)
to stay the issue of events; and it is a strange thought, how many of
us had been storing up the elements of this catastrophe, for how long a
time, and with how blind an ignorance of what we did.

 From the coming of the Colonel’s letter, I had a spyglass in my room,
 began to drop questions to the tenant folk, and as there was no great
 secrecy observed, and the freetrade (in our part) went by force as
 much as stealth, I had soon got together a knowledge of the signals in
 use, and knew pretty well to an hour when any messenger might be
 expected. I say, I questioned the tenants; for with the traders
 themselves, desperate blades that went habitually armed, I could never
 bring myself to meddle willingly. Indeed, by what proved in the sequel
 an unhappy chance, I was an object of scorn to some of these
 braggadocios; who had not only gratified me with a nickname, but
 catching me one night upon a by-path, and being all (as they would
 have said) somewhat merry, had caused me to dance for their diversion.
 The method employed was that of cruelly chipping at my toes with naked
 cutlasses, shouting at the same time “Square-Toes”; and though they
 did me no bodily mischief, I was none the less deplorably affected,
 and was indeed for several days confined to my bed: a scandal on the
 state of Scotland on which no comment is required.

It happened on the afternoon of November 7th, in this same unfortunate
year, that I espied, during my walk, the smoke of a beacon fire upon
the Muckleross. It was drawing near time for my return; but the
uneasiness upon my spirits was that day so great that I must burst
through the thickets to the edge of what they call the Craig Head. The
sun was already down, but there was still a broad light in the west,
which showed me some of the smugglers treading out their signal fire
upon the Ross, and in the bay the lugger lying with her sails brailed
up. She was plainly but new come to anchor, and yet the skiff was
already lowered and pulling for the landing-place at the end of the
long shrubbery. And this I knew could signify but one thing, the coming
of a messenger for Durrisdeer.

I laid aside the remainder of my terrors, clambered down the brae—a
place I had never ventured through before, and was hid among the
shore-side thickets in time to see the boat touch. Captain Crail
himself was steering, a thing not usual; by his side there sat a
passenger; and the men gave way with difficulty, being hampered with
near upon half a dozen portmanteaus, great and small. But the business
of landing was briskly carried through; and presently the baggage was
all tumbled on shore, the boat on its return voyage to the lugger, and
the passenger standing alone upon the point of rock, a tall slender
figure of a gentleman, habited in black, with a sword by his side and a
walking-cane upon his wrist. As he so stood, he waved the cane to
Captain Crail by way of salutation, with something both of grace and
mockery that wrote the gesture deeply on my mind.

No sooner was the boat away with my sworn enemies than I took a sort of
half courage, came forth to the margin of the thicket, and there halted
again, my mind being greatly pulled about between natural diffidence
and a dark foreboding of the truth. Indeed, I might have stood there
swithering all night, had not the stranger turned, spied me through the
mists, which were beginning to fall, and waved and cried on me to draw
near. I did so with a heart like lead.

“Here, my good man,” said he, in the English accent, “there are some
things for Durrisdeer.”

I was now near enough to see him, a very handsome figure and
countenance, swarthy, lean, long, with a quick, alert, black look, as
of one who was a fighter, and accustomed to command; upon one cheek he
had a mole, not unbecoming; a large diamond sparkled on his hand; his
clothes, although of the one hue, were of a French and foppish design;
his ruffles, which he wore longer than common, of exquisite lace; and I
wondered the more to see him in such a guise when he was but newly
landed from a dirty smuggling lugger. At the same time he had a better
look at me, toised me a second time sharply, and then smiled.

“I wager, my friend,” says he, “that I know both your name and your
nickname. I divined these very clothes upon your hand of writing, Mr.
Mackellar.”

At these words I fell to shaking.

“Oh,” says he, “you need not be afraid of me. I bear no malice for your
tedious letters; and it is my purpose to employ you a good deal. You
may call me Mr. Bally: it is the name I have assumed; or rather (since
I am addressing so great a precision) it is so I have curtailed my own.
Come now, pick up that and that”—indicating two of the portmanteaus.
“That will be as much as you are fit to bear, and the rest can very
well wait. Come, lose no more time, if you please.”

His tone was so cutting that I managed to do as he bid by a sort of
instinct, my mind being all the time quite lost. No sooner had I picked
up the portmanteaus than he turned his back and marched off through the
long shrubbery, where it began already to be dusk, for the wood is
thick and evergreen. I followed behind, loaded almost to the dust,
though I profess I was not conscious of the burthen; being swallowed up
in the monstrosity of this return, and my mind flying like a weaver’s
shuttle.

On a sudden I set the portmanteaus to the ground and halted. He turned
and looked back at me.

“Well?” said he.

“You are the Master of Ballantrae?”

“You will do me the justice to observe,” says he, “I have made no
secret with the astute Mackellar.”

“And in the name of God,” cries I, “what brings you here? Go back,
while it is yet time.”

“I thank you,” said he. “Your master has chosen this way, and not I;
but since he has made the choice, he (and you also) must abide by the
result. And now pick up these things of mine, which you have set down
in a very boggy place, and attend to that which I have made your
business.”

But I had no thought now of obedience; I came straight up to him. “If
nothing will move you to go back,” said I; “though, sure, under all the
circumstances, any Christian or even any gentleman would scruple to go
forward . . . ”

“These are gratifying expressions,” he threw in.

“If nothing will move you to go back,” I continued, “there are still
some decencies to be observed. Wait here with your baggage, and I will
go forward and prepare your family. Your father is an old man; and . .
. ” I stumbled . . . “there are decencies to be observed.”

“Truly,” said he, “this Mackellar improves upon acquaintance. But look
you here, my man, and understand it once for all—you waste your breath
upon me, and I go my own way with inevitable motion.”

“Ah!” says I. “Is that so? We shall see then!”

And I turned and took to my heels for Durrisdeer. He clutched at me and
cried out angrily, and then I believe I heard him laugh, and then I am
certain he pursued me for a step or two, and (I suppose) desisted. One
thing at least is sure, that I came but a few minutes later to the door
of the great house, nearly strangled for the lack of breath, but quite
alone. Straight up the stair I ran, and burst into the hall, and
stopped before the family without the power of speech; but I must have
carried my story in my looks, for they rose out of their places and
stared on me like changelings.

“He has come,” I panted out at last.

“He?” said Mr. Henry.

“Himself,” said I.

“My son?” cried my lord. “Imprudent, imprudent boy! Oh, could he not
stay where he was safe!”

Never a word says Mrs. Henry; nor did I look at her, I scarce knew why.

“Well,” said Mr. Henry, with a very deep breath, “and where is he?”

“I left him in the long shrubbery,” said I.

“Take me to him,” said he.

So we went out together, he and I, without another word from any one;
and in the midst of the gravelled plot encountered the Master strolling
up, whistling as he came, and beating the air with his cane. There was
still light enough overhead to recognise, though not to read, a
countenance.

“Ah! Jacob,” says the Master. “So here is Esau back.”

“James,” says Mr. Henry, “for God’s sake, call me by my name. I will
not pretend that I am glad to see you; but I would fain make you as
welcome as I can in the house of our fathers.”

“Or in _my_ house? or _yours_?” says the Master. “Which were you about
to say? But this is an old sore, and we need not rub it. If you would
not share with me in Paris, I hope you will yet scarce deny your elder
brother a corner of the fire at Durrisdeer?”

“That is very idle speech,” replied Mr. Henry. “And you understand the
power of your position excellently well.”

“Why, I believe I do,” said the other with a little laugh. And this,
though they had never touched hands, was (as we may say) the end of the
brothers’ meeting; for at this the Master turned to me and bade me
fetch his baggage.

I, on my side, turned to Mr. Henry for a confirmation; perhaps with
some defiance.

“As long as the Master is here, Mr. Mackellar, you will very much
oblige me by regarding his wishes as you would my own,” says Mr. Henry.
“We are constantly troubling you: will you be so good as send one of
the servants?”—with an accent on the word.

If this speech were anything at all, it was surely a well-deserved
reproof upon the stranger; and yet, so devilish was his impudence, he
twisted it the other way.

“And shall we be common enough to say ‘Sneck up’?” inquires he softly,
looking upon me sideways.

Had a kingdom depended on the act, I could not have trusted myself in
words; even to call a servant was beyond me; I had rather serve the man
myself than speak; and I turned away in silence and went into the long
shrubbery, with a heart full of anger and despair. It was dark under
the trees, and I walked before me and forgot what business I was come
upon, till I near broke my shin on the portmanteaus. Then it was that I
remarked a strange particular; for whereas I had before carried both
and scarce observed it, it was now as much as I could do to manage one.
And this, as it forced me to make two journeys, kept me the longer from
the hall.

When I got there, the business of welcome was over long ago; the
company was already at supper; and by an oversight that cut me to the
quick, my place had been forgotten. I had seen one side of the Master’s
return; now I was to see the other. It was he who first remarked my
coming in and standing back (as I did) in some annoyance. He jumped
from his seat.

“And if I have not got the good Mackellar’s place!” cries he. “John,
lay another for Mr. Bally; I protest he will disturb no one, and your
table is big enough for all.”

I could scarce credit my ears, nor yet my senses, when he took me by
the shoulders and thrust me, laughing, into my own place—such an
affectionate playfulness was in his voice. And while John laid the
fresh place for him (a thing on which he still insisted), he went and
leaned on his father’s chair and looked down upon him, and the old man
turned about and looked upwards on his son, with such a pleasant mutual
tenderness that I could have carried my hand to my head in mere
amazement.

Yet all was of a piece. Never a harsh word fell from him, never a sneer
showed upon his lip. He had laid aside even his cutting English accent,
and spoke with the kindly Scots’ tongue, that set a value on
affectionate words; and though his manners had a graceful elegance
mighty foreign to our ways in Durrisdeer, it was still a homely
courtliness, that did not shame but flattered us. All that, he did
throughout the meal, indeed, drinking wine with me with a notable
respect, turning about for a pleasant word with John, fondling his
father’s hand, breaking into little merry tales of his adventures,
calling up the past with happy reference—all he did was so becoming,
and himself so handsome, that I could scarce wonder if my lord and Mrs.
Henry sat about the board with radiant faces, or if John waited behind
with dropping tears.

As soon as supper was over, Mrs. Henry rose to withdraw.

“This was never your way, Alison,” said he.

“It is my way now,” she replied: which was notoriously false, “and I
will give you a good-night, James, and a welcome—from the dead,” said
she, and her voice dropped and trembled.

Poor Mr. Henry, who had made rather a heavy figure through the meal,
was more concerned than ever; pleased to see his wife withdraw, and yet
half displeased, as he thought upon the cause of it; and the next
moment altogether dashed by the fervour of her speech.

On my part, I thought I was now one too many; and was stealing after
Mrs. Henry, when the Master saw me.

“Now, Mr. Mackellar,” says he, “I take this near on an unfriendliness.
I cannot have you go: this is to make a stranger of the prodigal son;
and let me remind you where—in his own father’s house! Come, sit ye
down, and drink another glass with Mr. Bally.”

“Ay, ay, Mr. Mackellar,” says my lord, “we must not make a stranger
either of him or you. I have been telling my son,” he added, his voice
brightening as usual on the word, “how much we valued all your friendly
service.”

So I sat there, silent, till my usual hour; and might have been almost
deceived in the man’s nature but for one passage, in which his perfidy
appeared too plain. Here was the passage; of which, after what he knows
of the brothers’ meeting, the reader shall consider for himself. Mr.
Henry sitting somewhat dully, in spite of his best endeavours to carry
things before my lord, up jumps the Master, passes about the board, and
claps his brother on the shoulder.

“Come, come, _Hairry lad_,” says he, with a broad accent such as they
must have used together when they were boys, “you must not be downcast
because your brother has come home. All’s yours, that’s sure enough,
and little I grudge it you. Neither must you grudge me my place beside
my father’s fire.”

“And that is too true, Henry,” says my old lord with a little frown, a
thing rare with him. “You have been the elder brother of the parable in
the good sense; you must be careful of the other.”

“I am easily put in the wrong,” said Mr. Henry.

“Who puts you in the wrong?” cried my lord, I thought very tartly for
so mild a man. “You have earned my gratitude and your brother’s many
thousand times: you may count on its endurance; and let that suffice.”

“Ay, Harry, that you may,” said the Master; and I thought Mr. Henry
looked at him with a kind of wildness in his eye.

On all the miserable business that now followed, I have four questions
that I asked myself often at the time and ask myself still:—Was the man
moved by a particular sentiment against Mr. Henry? or by what he
thought to be his interest? or by a mere delight in cruelty such as
cats display and theologians tell us of the devil? or by what he would
have called love? My common opinion halts among the three first; but
perhaps there lay at the spring of his behaviour an element of all. As
thus:—Animosity to Mr. Henry would explain his hateful usage of him
when they were alone; the interests he came to serve would explain his
very different attitude before my lord; that and some spice of a design
of gallantry, his care to stand well with Mrs. Henry; and the pleasure
of malice for itself, the pains he was continually at to mingle and
oppose these lines of conduct.

Partly because I was a very open friend to my patron, partly because in
my letters to Paris I had often given myself some freedom of
remonstrance, I was included in his diabolical amusement. When I was
alone with him, he pursued me with sneers; before the family he used me
with the extreme of friendly condescension. This was not only painful
in itself; not only did it put me continually in the wrong; but there
was in it an element of insult indescribable. That he should thus leave
me out in his dissimulation, as though even my testimony were too
despicable to be considered, galled me to the blood. But what it was to
me is not worth notice. I make but memorandum of it here; and chiefly
for this reason, that it had one good result, and gave me the quicker
sense of Mr. Henry’s martyrdom.

It was on him the burthen fell. How was he to respond to the public
advances of one who never lost a chance of gibing him in private? How
was he to smile back on the deceiver and the insulter? He was condemned
to seem ungracious. He was condemned to silence. Had he been less
proud, had he spoken, who would have credited the truth? The acted
calumny had done its work; my lord and Mrs. Henry were the daily
witnesses of what went on; they could have sworn in court that the
Master was a model of long-suffering good-nature, and Mr. Henry a
pattern of jealousy and thanklessness. And ugly enough as these must
have appeared in any one, they seemed tenfold uglier in Mr. Henry; for
who could forget that the Master lay in peril of his life, and that he
had already lost his mistress, his title, and his fortune?

“Henry, will you ride with me?” asks the Master one day.

And Mr. Henry, who had been goaded by the man all morning, raps out: “I
will not.”

“I sometimes wish you would be kinder, Henry,” says the other,
wistfully.

I give this for a specimen; but such scenes befell continually. Small
wonder if Mr. Henry was blamed; small wonder if I fretted myself into
something near upon a bilious fever; nay, and at the mere recollection
feel a bitterness in my blood.

Sure, never in this world was a more diabolical contrivance: so
perfidious, so simple, so impossible to combat. And yet I think again,
and I think always, Mrs. Henry might have read between the lines; she
might have had more knowledge of her husband’s nature; after all these
years of marriage she might have commanded or captured his confidence.
And my old lord, too—that very watchful gentleman—where was all his
observation? But, for one thing, the deceit was practised by a master
hand, and might have gulled an angel. For another (in the case of Mrs.
Henry), I have observed there are no persons so far away as those who
are both married and estranged, so that they seem out of ear-shot or to
have no common tongue. For a third (in the case of both of these
spectators), they were blinded by old ingrained predilection. And for a
fourth, the risk the Master was supposed to stand in (supposed, I
say—you will soon hear why) made it seem the more ungenerous to
criticise; and, keeping them in a perpetual tender solicitude about his
life, blinded them the more effectually to his faults.

It was during this time that I perceived most clearly the effect of
manner, and was led to lament most deeply the plainness of my own. Mr.
Henry had the essence of a gentleman; when he was moved, when there was
any call of circumstance, he could play his part with dignity and
spirit; but in the day’s commerce (it is idle to deny it) he fell short
of the ornamental. The Master (on the other hand) had never a movement
but it commanded him. So it befell that when the one appeared gracious
and the other ungracious, every trick of their bodies seemed to call
out confirmation. Not that alone: but the more deeply Mr. Henry
floundered in his brother’s toils, the more clownish he grew; and the
more the Master enjoyed his spiteful entertainment, the more
engagingly, the more smilingly, he went! So that the plot, by its own
scope and progress, furthered and confirmed itself.

It was one of the man’s arts to use the peril in which (as I say) he
was supposed to stand. He spoke of it to those who loved him with a
gentle pleasantry, which made it the more touching. To Mr. Henry he
used it as a cruel weapon of offence. I remember his laying his finger
on the clean lozenge of the painted window one day when we three were
alone together in the hall. “Here went your lucky guinea, Jacob,” said
he. And when Mr. Henry only looked upon him darkly, “Oh!” he added,
“you need not look such impotent malice, my good fly. You can be rid of
your spider when you please. How long, O Lord? When are you to be
wrought to the point of a denunciation, scrupulous brother? It is one
of my interests in this dreary hole. I ever loved experiment.” Still
Mr. Henry only stared upon him with a grooming brow, and a changed
colour; and at last the Master broke out in a laugh and clapped him on
the shoulder, calling him a sulky dog. At this my patron leaped back
with a gesture I thought very dangerous; and I must suppose the Master
thought so too, for he looked the least in the world discountenance,
and I do not remember him again to have laid hands on Mr. Henry.

But though he had his peril always on his lips in the one way or the
other, I thought his conduct strangely incautious, and began to fancy
the Government—who had set a price upon his head—was gone sound asleep.
I will not deny I was tempted with the wish to denounce him; but two
thoughts withheld me: one, that if he were thus to end his life upon an
honourable scaffold, the man would be canonised for good in the minds
of his father and my patron’s wife; the other, that if I was anyway
mingled in the matter, Mr. Henry himself would scarce escape some
glancings of suspicion. And in the meanwhile our enemy went in and out
more than I could have thought possible, the fact that he was home
again was buzzed about all the country-side, and yet he was never
stirred. Of all these so-many and so-different persons who were
acquainted with his presence, none had the least greed—as I used to say
in my annoyance—or the least loyalty; and the man rode here and
there—fully more welcome, considering the lees of old unpopularity,
than Mr. Henry—and considering the freetraders, far safer than myself.

Not but what he had a trouble of his own; and this, as it brought about
the gravest consequences, I must now relate. The reader will scarce
have forgotten Jessie Broun; her way of life was much among the
smuggling party; Captain Crail himself was of her intimates; and she
had early word of Mr. Bally’s presence at the house. In my opinion, she
had long ceased to care two straws for the Master’s person; but it was
become her habit to connect herself continually with the Master’s name;
that was the ground of all her play-acting; and so now, when he was
back, she thought she owed it to herself to grow a haunter of the
neighbourhood of Durrisdeer. The Master could scarce go abroad but she
was there in wait for him; a scandalous figure of a woman, not often
sober; hailing him wildly as “her bonny laddie,” quoting pedlar’s
poetry, and, as I receive the story, even seeking to weep upon his
neck. I own I rubbed my hands over this persecution; but the Master,
who laid so much upon others, was himself the least patient of men.
There were strange scenes enacted in the policies. Some say he took his
cane to her, and Jessie fell back upon her former weapons—stones. It is
certain at least that he made a motion to Captain Crail to have the
woman trepanned, and that the Captain refused the proposition with
uncommon vehemence. And the end of the matter was victory for Jessie.
Money was got together; an interview took place, in which my proud
gentleman must consent to be kissed and wept upon; and the woman was
set up in a public of her own, somewhere on Solway side (but I forget
where), and, by the only news I ever had of it, extremely
ill-frequented.

This is to look forward. After Jessie had been but a little while upon
his heels, the Master comes to me one day in the steward’s office, and
with more civility than usual, “Mackellar,” says he, “there is a damned
crazy wench comes about here. I cannot well move in the matter myself,
which brings me to you. Be so good as to see to it: the men must have a
strict injunction to drive the wench away.”

“Sir,” said I, trembling a little, “you can do your own dirty errands
for yourself.”

He said not a word to that, and left the room.

Presently came Mr. Henry. “Here is news!” cried he. “It seems all is
not enough, and you must add to my wretchedness. It seems you have
insulted Mr. Bally.”

“Under your kind favour, Mr. Henry,” said I, “it was he that insulted
me, and, as I think, grossly. But I may have been careless of your
position when I spoke; and if you think so when you know all, my dear
patron, you have but to say the word. For you I would obey in any point
whatever, even to sin, God pardon me!” And thereupon I told him what
had passed.

Mr. Henry smiled to himself; a grimmer smile I never witnessed. “You
did exactly well,” said he. “He shall drink his Jessie Broun to the
dregs.” And then, spying the Master outside, he opened the window, and
crying to him by the name of Mr. Bally, asked him to step up and have a
word.

“James,” said he, when our persecutor had come in and closed the door
behind him, looking at me with a smile, as if he thought I was to be
humbled, “you brought me a complaint against Mr. Mackellar, into which
I have inquired. I need not tell you I would always take his word
against yours; for we are alone, and I am going to use something of
your own freedom. Mr. Mackellar is a gentleman I value; and you must
contrive, so long as you are under this roof, to bring yourself into no
more collisions with one whom I will support at any possible cost to me
or mine. As for the errand upon which you came to him, you must deliver
yourself from the consequences of your own cruelty, and, none of my
servants shall be at all employed in such a case.”

“My father’s servants, I believe,” says the Master.

“Go to him with this tale,” said Mr. Henry.

The Master grew very white. He pointed at me with his finger. “I want
that man discharged,” he said.

“He shall not be,” said Mr. Henry.

“You shall pay pretty dear for this,” says the Master.

“I have paid so dear already for a wicked brother,” said Mr. Henry,
“that I am bankrupt even of fears. You have no place left where you can
strike me.”

“I will show you about that,” says the Master, and went softly away.

“What will he do next, Mackellar?” cries Mr. Henry.

“Let me go away,” said I. “My dear patron, let me go away; I am but the
beginning of fresh sorrows.”

“Would you leave me quite alone?” said he.

 We were not long in suspense as to the nature of the new assault. Up
 to that hour the Master had played a very close game with Mrs. Henry;
 avoiding pointedly to be alone with her, which I took at the time for
 an effect of decency, but now think to be a most insidious art;
 meeting her, you may say, at meal-time only; and behaving, when he did
 so, like an affectionate brother. Up to that hour, you may say he had
 scarce directly interfered between Mr. Henry and his wife; except in
 so far as he had manoeuvred the one quite forth from the good graces
 of the other. Now all that was to be changed; but whether really in
 revenge, or because he was wearying of Durrisdeer and looked about for
 some diversion, who but the devil shall decide?

From that hour, at least, began the siege of Mrs. Henry; a thing so
deftly carried on that I scarce know if she was aware of it herself,
and that her husband must look on in silence. The first parallel was
opened (as was made to appear) by accident. The talk fell, as it did
often, on the exiles in France; so it glided to the matter of their
songs.

“There is one,” says the Master, “if you are curious in these matters,
that has always seemed to me very moving. The poetry is harsh; and yet,
perhaps because of my situation, it has always found the way to my
heart. It is supposed to be sung, I should tell you, by an exile’s
sweetheart; and represents perhaps, not so much the truth of what she
is thinking, as the truth of what he hopes of her, poor soul! in these
far lands.” And here the Master sighed, “I protest it is a pathetic
sight when a score of rough Irish, all common sentinels, get to this
song; and you may see, by their falling tears, how it strikes home to
them. It goes thus, father,” says he, very adroitly taking my lord for
his listener, “and if I cannot get to the end of it, you must think it
is a common case with us exiles.” And thereupon he struck up the same
air as I had heard the Colonel whistle; but now to words, rustic
indeed, yet most pathetically setting forth a poor girl’s aspirations
for an exiled lover; of which one verse indeed (or something like it)
still sticks by me:—

O, I will dye my petticoat red,
With my dear boy I’ll beg my bread,
Though all my friends should wish me dead,
        For Willie among the rushes, O!


He sang it well, even as a song; but he did better yet a performer. I
have heard famous actors, when there was not a dry eye in the Edinburgh
theatre; a great wonder to behold; but no more wonderful than how the
Master played upon that little ballad, and on those who heard him, like
an instrument, and seemed now upon the point of failing, and now to
conquer his distress, so that words and music seemed to pour out of his
own heart and his own past, and to be aimed directly at Mrs. Henry. And
his art went further yet; for all was so delicately touched, it seemed
impossible to suspect him of the least design; and so far from making a
parade of emotion, you would have sworn he was striving to be calm.
When it came to an end, we all sat silent for a time; he had chosen the
dusk of the afternoon, so that none could see his neighbour’s face; but
it seemed as if we held our breathing; only my old lord cleared his
throat. The first to move was the singer, who got to his feet suddenly
and softly, and went and walked softly to and fro in the low end of the
hall, Mr. Henry’s customary place. We were to suppose that he there
struggled down the last of his emotion; for he presently returned and
launched into a disquisition on the nature of the Irish (always so much
miscalled, and whom he defended) in his natural voice; so that, before
the lights were brought, we were in the usual course of talk. But even
then, methought Mrs. Henry’s face was a shade pale; and, for another
thing, she withdrew almost at once.

The next sign was a friendship this insidious devil struck up with
innocent Miss Katharine; so that they were always together, hand in
hand, or she climbing on his knee, like a pair of children. Like all
his diabolical acts, this cut in several ways. It was the last stroke
to Mr. Henry, to see his own babe debauched against him; it made him
harsh with the poor innocent, which brought him still a peg lower in
his wife’s esteem; and (to conclude) it was a bond of union between the
lady and the Master. Under this influence, their old reserve melted by
daily stages. Presently there came walks in the long shrubbery, talks
in the Belvedere, and I know not what tender familiarity. I am sure
Mrs. Henry was like many a good woman; she had a whole conscience but
perhaps by the means of a little winking. For even to so dull an
observer as myself, it was plain her kindness was of a more moving
nature than the sisterly. The tones of her voice appeared more
numerous; she had a light and softness in her eye; she was more gentle
with all of us, even with Mr. Henry, even with myself; methought she
breathed of some quiet melancholy happiness.

To look on at this, what a torment it was for Mr. Henry! And yet it
brought our ultimate deliverance, as I am soon to tell.

 The purport of the Master’s stay was no more noble (gild it as they
 might) than to wring money out. He had some design of a fortune in the
 French Indies, as the Chevalier wrote me; and it was the sum required
 for this that he came seeking. For the rest of the family it spelled
 ruin; but my lord, in his incredible partiality, pushed ever for the
 granting. The family was now so narrowed down (indeed, there were no
 more of them than just the father and the two sons) that it was
 possible to break the entail and alienate a piece of land. And to
 this, at first by hints, and then by open pressure, Mr. Henry was
 brought to consent. He never would have done so, I am very well
 assured, but for the weight of the distress under which he laboured.
 But for his passionate eagerness to see his brother gone, he would not
 thus have broken with his own sentiment and the traditions of his
 house. And even so, he sold them his consent at a dear rate, speaking
 for once openly, and holding the business up in its own shameful
 colours.

“You will observe,” he said, “this is an injustice to my son, if ever I
have one.”

“But that you are not likely to have,” said my lord.

“God knows!” says Mr. Henry. “And considering the cruel falseness of
the position in which I stand to my brother, and that you, my lord, are
my father, and have the right to command me, I set my hand to this
paper. But one thing I will say first: I have been ungenerously pushed,
and when next, my lord, you are tempted to compare your sons, I call on
you to remember what I have done and what he has done. Acts are the
fair test.”

My lord was the most uneasy man I ever saw; even in his old face the
blood came up. “I think this is not a very wisely chosen moment, Henry,
for complaints,” said he. “This takes away from the merit of your
generosity.”

“Do not deceive yourself, my lord,” said Mr. Henry. “This injustice is
not done from generosity to him, but in obedience to yourself.”

“Before strangers . . . ” begins my lord, still more unhappily
affected.

“There is no one but Mackellar here,” said Mr. Henry; “he is my friend.
And, my lord, as you make him no stranger to your frequent blame, it
were hard if I must keep him one to a thing so rare as my defence.”

Almost I believe my lord would have rescinded his decision; but the
Master was on the watch.

“Ah! Henry, Henry,” says he, “you are the best of us still. Rugged and
true! Ah! man, I wish I was as good.”

And at that instance of his favourite’s generosity my lord desisted
from his hesitation, and the deed was signed.

As soon as it could he brought about, the land of Ochterhall was sold
for much below its value, and the money paid over to our leech and sent
by some private carriage into France. Or so he said; though I have
suspected since it did not go so far. And now here was all the man’s
business brought to a successful head, and his pockets once more
bulging with our gold; and yet the point for which we had consented to
this sacrifice was still denied us, and the visitor still lingered on
at Durrisdeer. Whether in malice, or because the time was not yet come
for his adventure to the Indies, or because he had hopes of his design
on Mrs. Henry, or from the orders of the Government, who shall say? but
linger he did, and that for weeks.

You will observe I say: from the orders of Government; for about this
time the man’s disreputable secret trickled out.

The first hint I had was from a tenant, who commented on the Master’s
stay, and yet more on his security; for this tenant was a Jacobitish
sympathiser, and had lost a son at Culloden, which gave him the more
critical eye. “There is one thing,” said he, “that I cannot but think
strange; and that is how he got to Cockermouth.”

“To Cockermouth?” said I, with a sudden memory of my first wonder on
beholding the man disembark so point-de-vice after so long a voyage.

“Why, yes,” says the tenant, “it was there he was picked up by Captain
Crail. You thought he had come from France by sea? And so we all did.”

I turned this news a little in my head, and then carried it to Mr.
Henry. “Here is an odd circumstance,” said I, and told him.

“What matters how he came, Mackellar, so long as he is here?” groans
Mr. Henry.

“No, sir,” said I, “but think again! Does not this smack a little of
some Government connivance? You know how much we have wondered already
at the man’s security.”

“Stop,” said Mr. Henry. “Let me think of this.” And as he thought,
there came that grim smile upon his face that was a little like the
Master’s. “Give me paper,” said he. And he sat without another word and
wrote to a gentleman of his acquaintance—I will name no unnecessary
names, but he was one in a high place. This letter I despatched by the
only hand I could depend upon in such a case—Macconochie’s; and the old
man rode hard, for he was back with the reply before even my eagerness
had ventured to expect him. Again, as he read it, Mr. Henry had the
same grim smile.

“This is the best you have done for me yet, Mackellar,” says he. “With
this in my hand I will give him a shog. Watch for us at dinner.”

At dinner accordingly Mr. Henry proposed some very public appearance
for the Master; and my lord, as he had hoped, objected to the danger of
the course.

“Oh!” says Mr. Henry, very easily, “you need no longer keep this up
with me. I am as much in the secret as yourself.”

“In the secret?” says my lord. “What do you mean, Henry? I give you my
word, I am in no secret from which you are excluded.”

The Master had changed countenance, and I saw he was struck in a joint
of his harness.

“How?” says Mr. Henry, turning to him with a huge appearance of
surprise. “I see you serve your masters very faithfully; but I had
thought you would have been humane enough to set your father’s mind at
rest.”

“What are you talking of? I refuse to have my business publicly
discussed. I order this to cease,” cries the Master very foolishly and
passionately, and indeed more like a child than a man.

“So much discretion was not looked for at your hands, I can assure
you,” continued Mr. Henry. “For see what my correspondent
writes”—unfolding the paper—“‘It is, of course, in the interests both
of the Government and the gentleman whom we may perhaps best continue
to call Mr. Bally, to keep this understanding secret; but it was never
meant his own family should continue to endure the suspense you paint
so feelingly; and I am pleased mine should be the hand to set these
fears at rest. Mr. Bally is as safe in Great Britain as yourself.’”

“Is this possible?” cries my lord, looking at his son, with a great
deal of wonder and still more of suspicion in his face.

“My dear father,” says the Master, already much recovered. “I am
overjoyed that this may be disclosed. My own instructions, direct from
London, bore a very contrary sense, and I was charged to keep the
indulgence secret from every one, yourself not excepted, and indeed
yourself expressly named—as I can show in black and white unless I have
destroyed the letter. They must have changed their mind very swiftly,
for the whole matter is still quite fresh; or rather, Henry’s
correspondent must have misconceived that part, as he seems to have
misconceived the rest. To tell you the truth, sir,” he continued,
getting visibly more easy, “I had supposed this unexplained favour to a
rebel was the effect of some application from yourself; and the
injunction to secrecy among my family the result of a desire on your
part to conceal your kindness. Hence I was the more careful to obey
orders. It remains now to guess by what other channel indulgence can
have flowed on so notorious an offender as myself; for I do not think
your son need defend himself from what seems hinted at in Henry’s
letter. I have never yet heard of a Durrisdeer who was a turncoat or a
spy,” says he, proudly.

And so it seemed he had swum out of this danger unharmed; but this was
to reckon without a blunder he had made, and without the pertinacity of
Mr. Henry, who was now to show he had something of his brother’s
spirit.

“You say the matter is still fresh,” says Mr. Henry.

“It is recent,” says the Master, with a fair show of stoutness and yet
not without a quaver.

“Is it so recent as that?” asks Mr. Henry, like a man a little puzzled,
and spreading his letter forth again.

In all the letter there was no word as to the date; but how was the
Master to know that?

“It seemed to come late enough for me,” says he, with a laugh. And at
the sound of that laugh, which rang false, like a cracked bell, my lord
looked at him again across the table, and I saw his old lips draw
together close.

“No,” said Mr. Henry, still glancing on his letter, “but I remember
your expression. You said it was very fresh.”

And here we had a proof of our victory, and the strongest instance yet
of my lord’s incredible indulgence; for what must he do but interfere
to save his favourite from exposure!

“I think, Henry,” says he, with a kind of pitiful eagerness, “I think
we need dispute no more. We are all rejoiced at last to find your
brother safe; we are all at one on that; and, as grateful subjects, we
can do no less than drink to the king’s health and bounty.”

Thus was the Master extricated; but at least he had been put to his
defence, he had come lamely out, and the attraction of his personal
danger was now publicly plucked away from him. My lord, in his heart of
hearts, now knew his favourite to be a Government spy; and Mrs. Henry
(however she explained the tale) was notably cold in her behaviour to
the discredited hero of romance. Thus in the best fabric of duplicity,
there is some weak point, if you can strike it, which will loosen all;
and if, by this fortunate stroke, we had not shaken the idol, who can
say how it might have gone with us at the catastrophe?

And yet at the time we seemed to have accomplished nothing. Before a
day or two he had wiped off the ill-results of his discomfiture, and,
to all appearance, stood as high as ever. As for my Lord Durrisdeer, he
was sunk in parental partiality; it was not so much love, which should
be an active quality, as an apathy and torpor of his other powers; and
forgiveness (so to mis-apply a noble word) flowed from him in sheer
weakness, like the tears of senility. Mrs. Henry’s was a different
case; and Heaven alone knows what he found to say to her, or how he
persuaded her from her contempt. It is one of the worst things of
sentiment, that the voice grows to be more important than the words,
and the speaker than that which is spoken. But some excuse the Master
must have found, or perhaps he had even struck upon some art to wrest
this exposure to his own advantage; for after a time of coldness, it
seemed as if things went worse than ever between him and Mrs. Henry.
They were then constantly together. I would not be thought to cut one
shadow of blame, beyond what is due to a half-wilful blindness, on that
unfortunate lady; but I do think, in these last days, she was playing
very near the fire; and whether I be wrong or not in that, one thing is
sure and quite sufficient: Mr. Henry thought so. The poor gentleman sat
for days in my room, so great a picture of distress that I could never
venture to address him; yet it is to be thought he found some comfort
even in my presence and the knowledge of my sympathy. There were times,
too, when we talked, and a strange manner of talk it was; there was
never a person named, nor an individual circumstance referred to; yet
we had the same matter in our minds, and we were each aware of it. It
is a strange art that can thus be practised; to talk for hours of a
thing, and never name nor yet so much as hint at it. And I remember I
wondered if it was by some such natural skill that the Master made love
to Mrs. Henry all day long (as he manifestly did), yet never startled
her into reserve.

To show how far affairs had gone with Mr. Henry, I will give some words
of his, uttered (as I have cause not to forget) upon the 26th of
February, 1757. It was unseasonable weather, a cast back into Winter:
windless, bitter cold, the world all white with rime, the sky low and
gray: the sea black and silent like a quarry-hole. Mr. Henry sat close
by the fire, and debated (as was now common with him) whether “a man”
should “do things,” whether “interference was wise,” and the like
general propositions, which each of us particularly applied. I was by
the window, looking out, when there passed below me the Master, Mrs.
Henry, and Miss Katharine, that now constant trio. The child was
running to and fro, delighted with the frost; the Master spoke close in
the lady’s ear with what seemed (even from so far) a devilish grace of
insinuation; and she on her part looked on the ground like a person
lost in listening. I broke out of my reserve.

“If I were you, Mr. Henry,” said I, “I would deal openly with my lord.”

“Mackellar, Mackellar,” said he, “you do not see the weakness of my
ground. I can carry no such base thoughts to any one—to my father least
of all; that would be to fall into the bottom of his scorn. The
weakness of my ground,” he continued, “lies in myself, that I am not
one who engages love. I have their gratitude, they all tell me that; I
have a rich estate of it! But I am not present in their minds; they are
moved neither to think with me nor to think for me. There is my loss!”
He got to his feet, and trod down the fire. “But some method must be
found, Mackellar,” said he, looking at me suddenly over his shoulder;
“some way must be found. I am a man of a great deal of patience—far too
much—far too much. I begin to despise myself. And yet, sure, never was
a man involved in such a toil!” He fell back to his brooding.

“Cheer up,” said I. “It will burst of itself.”

“I am far past anger now,” says he, which had so little coherency with
my own observation that I let both fall.




CHAPTER V.
ACCOUNT OF ALL THAT PASSED ON THE NIGHT ON FEBRUARY 27TH, 1757.


On the evening of the interview referred to, the Master went abroad; he
was abroad a great deal of the next day also, that fatal 27th; but
where he went, or what he did, we never concerned ourselves to ask
until next day. If we had done so, and by any chance found out, it
might have changed all. But as all we did was done in ignorance, and
should be so judged, I shall so narrate these passages as they appeared
to us in the moment of their birth, and reserve all that I since
discovered for the time of its discovery. For I have now come to one of
the dark parts of my narrative, and must engage the reader’s indulgence
for my patron.

All the 27th that rigorous weather endured: a stifling cold; the folk
passing about like smoking chimneys; the wide hearth in the hall piled
high with fuel; some of the spring birds that had already blundered
north into our neighbourhood, besieging the windows of the house or
trotting on the frozen turf like things distracted. About noon there
came a blink of sunshine, showing a very pretty, wintry, frosty
landscape of white hills and woods, with Crail’s lugger waiting for a
wind under the Craig Head, and the smoke mounting straight into the air
from every farm and cottage. With the coming of night, the haze closed
in overhead; it fell dark and still and starless, and exceeding cold: a
night the most unseasonable, fit for strange events.

Mrs. Henry withdrew, as was now her custom, very early. We had set
ourselves of late to pass the evening with a game of cards; another
mark that our visitor was wearying mightily of the life at Durrisdeer;
and we had not been long at this when my old lord slipped from his
place beside the fire, and was off without a word to seek the warmth of
bed. The three thus left together had neither love nor courtesy to
share; not one of us would have sat up one instant to oblige another;
yet from the influence of custom, and as the cards had just been dealt,
we continued the form of playing out the round. I should say we were
late sitters; and though my lord had departed earlier than was his
custom, twelve was already gone some time upon the clock, and the
servants long ago in bed. Another thing I should say, that although I
never saw the Master anyway affected with liquor, he had been drinking
freely, and was perhaps (although he showed it not) a trifle heated.

Anyway, he now practised one of his transitions; and so soon as the
door closed behind my lord, and without the smallest change of voice,
shifted from ordinary civil talk into a stream of insult.

“My dear Henry, it is yours to play,” he had been saying, and now
continued: “It is a very strange thing how, even in so small a matter
as a game of cards, you display your rusticity. You play, Jacob, like a
bonnet laird, or a sailor in a tavern. The same dulness, the same petty
greed, _cette lenteur d’hebété qui me fait rager_; it is strange I
should have such a brother. Even Square-toes has a certain vivacity
when his stake is imperilled; but the dreariness of a game with you I
positively lack language to depict.”

Mr. Henry continued to look at his cards, as though very maturely
considering some play; but his mind was elsewhere.

“Dear God, will this never be done?” cries the Master. “_Quel
lourdeau_! But why do I trouble you with French expressions, which are
lost on such an ignoramus? A _lourdeau_, my dear brother, is as we
might say a bumpkin, a clown, a clodpole: a fellow without grace,
lightness, quickness; any gift of pleasing, any natural brilliancy:
such a one as you shall see, when you desire, by looking in the mirror.
I tell you these things for your good, I assure you; and besides,
Square-toes” (looking at me and stifling a yawn), “it is one of my
diversions in this very dreary spot to toast you and your master at the
fire like chestnuts. I have great pleasure in your case, for I observe
the nickname (rustic as it is) has always the power to make you writhe.
But sometimes I have more trouble with this dear fellow here, who seems
to have gone to sleep upon his cards. Do you not see the applicability
of the epithet I have just explained, dear Henry? Let me show you. For
instance, with all those solid qualities which I delight to recognise
in you, I never knew a woman who did not prefer me—nor, I think,” he
continued, with the most silken deliberation, “I think—who did not
continue to prefer me.”

Mr. Henry laid down his cards. He rose to his feet very softly, and
seemed all the while like a person in deep thought. “You coward!” he
said gently, as if to himself. And then, with neither hurry nor any
particular violence, he struck the Master in the mouth.

The Master sprang to his feet like one transfigured; I had never seen
the man so beautiful. “A blow!” he cried. “I would not take a blow from
God Almighty!”

“Lower your voice,” said Mr. Henry. “Do you wish my father to interfere
for you again?”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” I cried, and sought to come between them.

The Master caught me by the shoulder, held me at arm’s length, and
still addressing his brother: “Do you know what this means?” said he.

“It was the most deliberate act of my life,” says Mr. Henry.

“I must have blood, I must have blood for this,” says the Master.

“Please God it shall be yours,” said Mr. Henry; and he went to the wall
and took down a pair of swords that hung there with others, naked.
These he presented to the Master by the points. “Mackellar shall see us
play fair,” said Mr. Henry. “I think it very needful.”

“You need insult me no more,” said the Master, taking one of the swords
at random. “I have hated you all my life.”

“My father is but newly gone to bed,” said Mr. Henry. “We must go
somewhere forth of the house.”

“There is an excellent place in the long shrubbery,” said the Master.

“Gentlemen,” said I, “shame upon you both! Sons of the same mother,
would you turn against the life she gave you?”

“Even so, Mackellar,” said Mr. Henry, with the same perfect quietude of
manner he had shown throughout.

“It is what I will prevent,” said I.

And now here is a blot upon my life. At these words of mine the Master
turned his blade against my bosom; I saw the light run along the steel;
and I threw up my arms and fell to my knees before him on the floor.
“No, no,” I cried, like a baby.

“We shall have no more trouble with him,” said the Master. “It is a
good thing to have a coward in the house.”

“We must have light,” said Mr. Henry, as though there had been no
interruption.

“This trembler can bring a pair of candles,” said the Master.

To my shame be it said, I was still so blinded with the flashing of
that bare sword that I volunteered to bring a lantern.

“We do not need a l-l-lantern,” says the Master, mocking me. “There is
no breath of air. Come, get to your feet, take a pair of lights, and go
before. I am close behind with this—” making. the blade glitter as he
spoke.

I took up the candlesticks and went before them, steps that I would
give my hand to recall; but a coward is a slave at the best; and even
as I went, my teeth smote each other in my mouth. It was as he had
said: there was no breath stirring; a windless stricture of frost had
bound the air; and as we went forth in the shine of the candles, the
blackness was like a roof over our heads. Never a word was said; there
was never a sound but the creaking of our steps along the frozen path.
The cold of the night fell about me like a bucket of water; I shook as
I went with more than terror; but my companions, bare-headed like
myself, and fresh from the warm ball, appeared not even conscious of
the change.

“Here is the place,” said the Master. “Set down the candles.”

I did as he bid me, and presently the flames went up, as steady as in a
chamber, in the midst of the frosted trees, and I beheld these two
brothers take their places.

“The light is something in my eyes,” said the Master.

“I will give you every advantage,” replied Mr. Henry, shifting his
ground, “for I think you are about to die.” He spoke

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