What that agony had been to her, left in her father’s house with their children while he went off to lead one campaign after another of wild Highlanders against the ruling powers of their country, and took their eldest son, a boy of fourteen, to his death in that winter mountain fighting, – what that long unrest had done to her, he never fully knew until he saw her as she lay dying, beyond the power of speech, yet still able to greet him with that secret smile of hers.
He had read its secret then: she, who had feared all their married life to hear of his sudden death – or worse, not sudden, but by hanging, drawing and quartering – had, after all, cheated her fears; she had died first, and left him free to pursue his own end.
Nothing now could hurt her any more. He had said that since so often to himself, comforting himself, when it seemed that all that he had done had been in vain. They might have lived long years together at home and in peace, and brought up Johnnie, their eldest son, to be heir of his father’s estates, that were now forfeited to the Estates of Scotland.
But he had fought for his King, and Johnnie had died in that fighting, and Magdalen his wife had died of it, nearly four years ago; and in the following spring King Charles I had given himself up to Argyll and asked Montrose, as he had asked his nephew Rupert, to lay down his arms and leave the country, since only so could he now serve his King.
There was no choice but to obey. Montrose, the King’s Viceroy of Scotland, left his country, as he had come to it on the dawn of his ‘Annus Mirabilis’, in the disguise of a servant; with two or three of his followers he sailed from the harbour of Old Montrose in a small Norwegian sloop and was nearly wrecked when his enemies cut her cable while the ship rode at anchor, so as to drive her upon the rocks.
That would have been an odd, ignominious end to his Year of Marvels, but it would not have mattered, since Magdalen was no longer alive to know of it. He was free by then to meet whatever end should come to him.
‘I’ll set my foot in yonder boat,
Mither, Mither,
I’ll set my foot in yonder boat,
And I’ll fare o’er the sea, oh!’
Years it had been since the tune of that old country song had swung into his head, and now it came back to him as he rode into the courtyard of an exiled queen’s house in an unknown Dutch town.
He had ’set his foot in yonder boat’, and tossed through storms on the North Sea for a week’s voyage before he reached Bergen in Norway, an exile, a condemned criminal, his estates forfeited – to be welcomed, as was Rupert, with offers of power and wealth from foreign princes who were eager to secure his services in the highest command of their armies.
But he refused them, as Rupert had done, and sought only to enlist help from the foreign powers for his helpless King, captive first to Argyll, then to Cromwell.
To gain that help he had wandered all through Europe and now was here, and his King was dead, and all that he had done had made no difference. His King was dead, as his wife and his eldest son were dead; tyranny had triumphed, and his country lay as in a dungeon under Argyll’s rule, bound in a Covenant to the powers of death and hell.
‘The griefs that astonish speak more by their silence,’ he had written of the King’s death. He still felt ‘astonished’, stunned by that blow to all his hopes for his cause and country; he was indifferent to anything that might now happen to him, knowing only that he still had a task to perform, and that whatever was left to him of life was dedicated only to its performance.
So here he was at The Hague, and he had ridden through the gateway of the Wassanaar Hof, a big rambling red-brick house, all gables and ornamentally twisted chimneys and tiled roofs sloping in all directions like a miniature town.
The dead King’s sister, Queen Elizabeth, was not at home, but some of her daughters were, and he had been so lost in that dream caused by the sight of a golf-club striking a ball over the ice that he had no thought of what he should do next, and so agreed to the servant’s request that he should come in and wait for Her Majesty’s return; he dismounted before he realized what he was doing, for it was important to meet the Queen as early as possible, but he was in no mood to meet extraneous princesses before it was necessary.
But it was done now, he was following the servant into a lofty hall, floored with marble in black and white squares, and up a staircase and into a long L-shaped room with a ruddy glow flickering out from a great marble fireplace round the corner; and there he saw two tall young women in deep black, one of them standing by that fireplace, her face and form in shadow against the glow, and the other advancing towards him, making all the polite explanations and inquiries in a low, sad, mechanical voice, as though all the things that should be said by a princess and the daughter of an absent mother and the niece of a murdered king came into her mind by clockwork and out again in this even procession of suitable words.
This must be the Princess Elizabeth, eldest daughter of the Queen, and far the more regularly beautiful of the two in this room.
The other must be a good many years younger; she looked a young girl, or for that matter like a boy, and not at all like a young lady who had been cooped up in this neat Dutch house for three weeks, as she had doubtless been through the first period of mourning; she might have just been riding or running in the wind, her hair blown out all round her head in a glowing halo, a quick flush on her cheeks, and her eyes scanning the new visitor, bright and observant. The hand she had given him to kiss was not the soft white hand of a princess, but strong and hard, with long thin fingers and a black smudge right across them. She had only one shoe on and had evidently forgotten it until she saw her foot showing beneath her skirt and a hole in the toe of the stocking, when it hastily retreated behind the other foot.
Yet these absurd details did not seem to matter; she held her head high and her slight form straight, and the eyes that met his were fearless and eager, unconscious of herself, and of his talk, for it was plain she did not listen to a word while he courteously avoided her sister’s guarded references to their uncle’s death, and told her how strange and pleasant it was to him now to meet hospitality in his own tongue, since this was the eleventh country he had been in since he had left Scotland.
At the word ‘Scotland’ that slight silent figure by the chimney-piece plunged straight into what had evidently been the current of her thoughts.
‘I was reading of you, my lord; this book was in my hand as I looked down and saw you in the courtyard. Do you read it yourself and wonder, “Can this be I?” ’
‘Louey!’ murmured her sister’s low, pained voice.
‘Am I talking nonsense? It sounds like it.’
This then was the Princess Louise, the sixth or seventh member of the family; he had taken her for one still younger, both from her looks and the eager childlike candour of her gaze at him, and now her speech.
‘Am I talking nonsense?’ she had said, and cared nothing if it were so. ‘To read of one’s own deeds,’ she was saying, ‘when the heat of action has passed and you are cold sober, sitting by the fire, it must be like remembering something you had dreamed when you were drunk.’
‘Louey!’ came the bell-like note again from her sister, lower still, but even Louey heard it this time, swerved in mid-course to fling out an arm towards her sister, just touching her elegant hand but driven on in the wind of her own enthusiasm.
‘Yes, I said that because I was reading of that action that they call – all the foreign generals who come here – a greater marvel than any of your victories.’
He was struck by her likeness to Rupert as he had first seen him several years ago before his face had hardened. ‘She dressed up once in an old out-grown suit I’d had as a boy, and they all said they might have mistaken her for me,’ so Rupert had then told him with an odd shy pride, as though it were very considerate of any of his family to resemble him. Her talk showed her too to be as sudden and unconventional as he, but her freedom had more of gaiety and less of defiance in it; the laughter a
nd love of life could not be shut out of her eyes, bright now with his own triumphs.
‘What was the “greater marvel”?’ he asked.
It seemed the first time she had heard that deep voice – was it because he had now spoken to her? She answered him, ‘That time when you stormed Dundee and your “breathless scouts” came dashing in with news of the enemy less than a mile off and six times your strength, and your men all grabbing their spoil, dead drunk—’
‘No, only a bit overladen with drink,’ he corrected, ‘or I could never have got them going.’
‘How did you get them going, and on top of a twenty-mile march too before storming Dundee? The Prince de Conde says he’d give his soul for the secret of your power over your men.’
‘We have heard our brother Rupert too speak of that,’ Eliza chimed in, partly to add her praise, partly to extenuate by sharing her impulsive younger sister’s emotion.
‘Have you heard from him?’ Montrose asked quickly.
‘Not a word,’ said Louey.
‘One never hears from Rupert,’ Eliza sighed in exasperation.
‘Even when you’d beaten them off their loot,’ persisted Louey, ‘how could you get them into a line of march?’
This girl might have been his own son demanding details of his battles. Not a trace here of subtle feminine compliment such as he had met so often in foreign Courts and found wearisome enough to answer.
Women praising soldiers – it was an age-old activity and one that embarrassed him the more since his wife’s death, for since then the ironic smile of her who never could nor would pay a compliment had become the more alive to him. But this intent interest was more a challenge than a compliment, and he met it as man to man.
‘They’d had a few hours’ rest after their all-night march,’ he said, ‘they’d been fully fed after starving, and got stout clothes on their backs instead of rags against the rain, and that had put them in good fettle. Once they were pushed and kicked out of the town we shook them somehow into their line of march as they went, the worst of ‘em in the van with the few horses hurrying them on from the rear, and the musketeers in support.’
‘And then led them nearly thirty miles! But how could you shake off the pursuers?’
‘I know the country – and I knew that Hurry and Baillie knew it. I had, as always, to get back to the hills, while their move was to cut me off from them. So I took the line they expected until midnight, then turned on my tracks and slipped round behind them.’
‘And their scouts never saw it?’
It was a wet night, pitch dark. And they’d hardly expect troops to march first east and north, then south-west, then north again.’
‘In that dripping darkness,’ breathed Louey, ‘what blind confidence they must have had in you, tacking, swerving like an unsteady ship in a gale, yet knowing that mad contrary course to be right because they knew their leader!’
It was extraordinary to find himself living those wild hours over again – and through the mind of this girl, unknown before to him, who showed her admiration with such passionate innocence.
Your Highness speaks as though you had been there yourself, he said with a slow, amused smile.
‘Why not, my lord? Other people’s experiences are often much more real than one’s own.’
Eliza seized the chance to explain and excuse her sister. ‘Because you cultivate imagination at the expense of intellect. That is why she talks so wildly, my lord. She is an artist like Rupert.’
The word ‘artist’ seemed to annoy Louey.
‘Then all those staggering drunkards on the retreat were artists – or something bigger. The only moments worth living are those when you lose yourself.’
‘In drink?’ asked Eliza, annoyed in her turn.
‘Drink can be one way, I suppose; art, love, religion are others – or some overmastering faith and purpose. When Rupert leads a charge or works up a fleet out of nothing as he did here this autumn; when young Jan Steen paints those pictures of old women warming their feet on their charcoal boxes and adding their cracked voices to the singing-party while the children steal tit-bits out of their dish, the men swilling beer and kissing anyone within reach, the dogs gnawing bones – life runs roaring through them and they are so caught up in it that they never hear that strange force that sings so loud in them.’
‘Nor does she hear it,’ thought Eliza, looking in amazement at her sister. What had happened to her? Eager, impulsive, Louey had often been that with visitors, though more often casual and distraite, but never had Eliza seen her like this, ‘caught up’, as she had said herself, like a flame blown in the wind.
Did he see it now he was silent, but with a silence so watchful, aware, amused, that it stimulated Louey more than any polite questions? Eliza felt that he saw a great deal, but what did he make of it? Did he think Louey was shamelessly setting her cap at him? Many men with far less reason had thought it, and Louey had not cared, had laughed richly and wholeheartedly over them, never minding a jot whether she had given them occasion to laugh at her.
This was different. Eliza could not bear it, nor, she knew, could Louey, if this man should think lightly of her.
But as she looked at those eyes that watched her sister, she felt that she need not fear, that explanations or excuses would make no difference to him; he would form his own opinion independent of them, and it would not be ignoble. That slower Scottish voice was now answering even Louey’s talk of pictures with easier intimacy; Eliza warmed to the sense of surprised understanding that was growing between these two strangers so utterly unlike each other.
‘When I first visited the English Court,’ he said, ‘the Duke of Hamilton advised me to make a good impression by admiring the King’s new Mantegnas at Hampton Court, or else the Breughel. “Admire the snow effects” was a sentence that stuck in my mind – and my throat.’
‘And turned you against pictures ever since? Wait till you have seen Rembrandt van Rijn’s at Amsterdam. But is it true that Cromwell is going to sell that glorious collection of my uncle’s at Hampton Court?’
She wished she had not said it, for his face had shut again into the mask it had worn when Eliza had spoken of King Charles’ death. She hurried on about pictures instead, but faltered, caught Eliza’s eye and was listening, but not to what he would say; and now Eliza too was taut, both attentive to a distant sound as light as castanets in the frosty air.
What was happening to them? He spoke, but they were not even listening. Puzzled, amused, he wondered what it was that had scared this glancing creature whose moods sped faster than he could follow – yes, and the elder one too; something was breaking up their thoughts, scattering them uneasily here and there.
They were listening to the sound of horses again in the courtyard; the sledge had returned with their mother, she would be coming upstairs and into this room, and their moment was going from them.
Desperately they tried to hold it, to go on talking as they had done, but it was no use, they were conscious now of what they were saying and how it would sound. Eliza frowned, Louey laughed, and their mother came into the room.
Was that really all that had happened? Poets knew better.
‘And then my mother came into the room,’ said Louey to herself with the queer little half-smile that had settled on her face instead of that former radiance, like a bird sailing down the wind and folding its wings.
Poets in England years ago had known what happened when her mother came into the room.
‘Your meaner beauties of the night
That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your number than your light,
You common people of the skies,
What are you when the moon shall rise?’
So now she ‘rose’, ‘Th’ eclipse and glory of her kind’, upon the famous stranger; and her attendant satellites who had shone like stars now paled before her splendour and shrank back, while their mother’s glorious welcome warmed the dim room.
; IV
Once again she had been Diana that ‘Goddess excellently bright’, enjoying her native element, immortal and immune from human cares, losing all sense of time and purpose, and purpose disappointed, in the impersonal rapture of driving her horses at top speed over the frozen world. And now when this ‘Winter Queen’ entered on the rush of that rare air, the joyous life that filled her body and shone in her eyes and cheeks flowed even into her sense of the tragedy that had befallen her family, since with that tragedy was involved the heroic endeavour of this man who had fought and lost all for her brother.
She swept towards him with her cloak billowing out behind her, both hands outstretched, and the tears rushing unheeded into her splendid eyes.
‘You were his friend,’ she said, ‘you did all that man could do, and yet he died the death of a criminal.’
He could not answer her, but she did not notice that.
‘Assassination,’ she said, ‘that he had long feared possible – but that it should be done in the light of the sun!’
She had taken his hands when he kissed hers, and stood holding them while he looked into the face for which so many thousand men had gone to fight, in a quarrel not their own. Her beauty was radiant, time could not touch it, not care nor sorrow, and she was giving no thought to it.
‘I had not seen him since he was a child,’ she said, ‘and I can remember him in his cradle at Dunfermline Castle where his nurse once saw a black pall soaked in blood lying across the sleeping baby. Poor “Baby Charles”, as our father called him to the end of his life! Even in his infancy he was fey.’
She broke off, she could say no more of him, nor did Montrose. It was as though he had taken a vow of silence on the subject of his murdered master.
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