The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  She shivered, pulled the window to, turned back into the room and sat at the dressing-table. She hated to have her hair arranged, that tiresome niggling business, having it tied here and pinned there, but it was delightful to brush it like this with long rhythmic strokes when it was loose and free, stretching to the length of her arm on the brush and then springing away from it, fizzing and crackling with sparks in the frosty night like a cat’s fur rubbed the wrong way.

  All the small inanimate objects on the dressing-table, encircled in the pool of candle-light, had a strange bright awareness, as though now, and now only, when all else slept in the darkness, they knew their own significance. The cameo brooch with the head of Apollo carved in coral looked up at her from the pin-cushion. The old silver mirror lay like clear water on the table. She picked it up and sat staring at the dim reflection of her face; it showed only a pale oval set in the misty cloud of her hair. The faces of other women had gazed into this glass as she was gazing now, the face of her mother, of her mother’s mother, gaudy Queen Anne, and of her husband King James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots.

  This mirror had been Louey’s since she was a child, when her mother had given it for a birthday present as no other was handy. It had always been the ‘birthday mirror’, but now she was thinking how her mother had spoken this afternoon of Queen Mary.

  It was into this mirror Queen Mary had looked for the last time before she walked to her execution, and now her great- granddaughter held it in her hand. What had that face looked like as it took leave of itself? What had the woman felt behind the dim reflection of living flesh? Had she believed ‘now hast thou but one bare hour to live’, laid down this mirror and walked out, knowing that life was over?

  Louey could not think it. For Mary, dying long ago, as for herself so sharply tingling with life in this freezing night of earliest spring, life was always beginning anew – even in the hour of her death it had done so. She had left proof of it in her death in the song of praise and thanksgiving written in those last hours, the Latin rhymes pealing out like a carillon of bells in their abundance of spirit. She had left proof of it in her life, in the tireless rides at the head of her troops, dressed as a man, sharing their hardships in the wild Scots weather.

  What a companion she would have been to a man of her spirit! But there were no men of that spirit in Scotland – then. If there had been, she might not have had to lay her gallant head upon the block. If Montrose had lived then—

  And with that Louey came back to the deep under-current of her thoughts that had run steady and unbroken by any interruption these two hours, carried on through one vivid picture after another, conjured up by those magic lines of print that she had been reading. Not the dead Queen Mary who ’so wished to be a man’, nor her mother in whom burned the same spirit, but herself had marched and galloped with Montrose all through those fantastic campaigns of his in Scotland four years ago.

  And now that the last page was turned, the book shut, and she, as if to escape from the rapt intensity of her pleasure, had wandered here and there in her room, turning her attention this way and that, only now did it come back into her mind that there was still the consummation to be reached, the fruit of that book and her imagination, to be tested now by experience.

  She took the candle in her hand and went through the door at the end of the room that led to her studio, opened a drawer and pulled out a red-chalk drawing that she had sketched days ago, before Montrose had ridden into the courtyard and come into their house, before she had ever seen him.

  Underneath it was written, ‘Imaginary Portrait of the Marquis of Montrose.’

  What could have possessed her to draw it thus? ‘Possessed’ was the literal word, for some force outside herself must surely have taken charge of her eyes and hand when she did this. When did she do it? She could not remember, nor what impulse had suddenly led her to imagine thus the face of the man that Rupert had so wished to meet again.

  Her imaginary portraits were famous in a small way; she was apt to catch an extraordinarily close likeness to people she had never known by sight, merely through what she had heard of their sayings and doings; for whatever she heard made a picture in her mind, and that picture was generally right in expression if not in feature. Often they turned out wickedly clever caricatures, sometimes they showed a strange and sensitive fancy. Her portrait of her eldest brother Henry, who had been drowned in a public packet-boat off Amsterdam when she was still too much of a baby to remember him, was a curiously appealing study; those who had known the dead boy said that his very soul looked out through the tender and wistful eyes of her portrait.

  No, it was not the actual likeness of her sketch of Montrose that now took her breath away, though that was indeed far nearer than in any she had ever done which she could compare with the original. The keen eyes under rough peaked eyebrows, the long, rather irregular and bumpy nose with its high bridge, the unusually broad forehead and wide mouth that went up a little at the corners, these were the very same in their proportions as in the living face she had seen for the first time this afternoon.

  Yet the most striking thing in the comparison between the two was the one great difference between them. The face she had watched that afternoon had been waiting, hopeful, knowing he had not yet reached what he waited for and hoped. The face she had drawn showed the joy of absolute fulfilment in one who has achieved the utmost that his present life could hold.

  Someone had come into the room just as she had finished drawing it, so she now remembered; it was Etta, and she had looked over her shoulder at it and asked who it was, and Louey had told her to guess, hoping Etta would say a great soldier or something that would show she had succeeded in what she had attempted.

  But Etta’s answer had been utterly unexpected; she had said, ‘It is the face of a bridegroom.’

  Louey had laughed it off at the moment, half annoyed. Etta’s mind ran so on wedding bells and tender happy-ending romances that she would discover them even in the cannon’s mouth. This man was the boldest adventurer of any of this age, excepting their knight-errant brother, Rupert, and Rupert himself looked to him as to a greater spirit than his own, – ‘and yet all you say of him is that he looks like a bridegroom. Would you say the same if I did Rupert’s portrait?’

  ‘No,’ Etta had replied, quite unshaken, ‘I would not. I have never seen Rupert look so, and I don’t think he ever could.’

  Louey had forgotten all about it, forgotten also this sketch and what it looked like, as was her way with anything that she had done. But now, seeing it afresh, she saw that Etta had been right. Why had she all unconsciously drawn Montrose like this? Was it because of her own secret wish?

  Nearly three years ago Rupert had come home from the Civil War in England, and had sat beside her at a family dinner given to all the brothers and sisters and their young Stuart cousins who were then at The Hague, and had talked to her of Montrose in such a way that she had said, ‘I believe he is the only man with whom I could ever really fall in love.’ She did not know then that his wife was dead, and when Rupert had told her this, she had said lightly that now indeed had he destroyed her hopes, for there was no rivalry so strong as that of the dead.

  Had their careless talk lain unthought of at the back of her mind all this time, and come out now in this swift sketch, drawn while she was brooding on the deeds of which she had since heard so much? She felt the blood mount to her head, she put up her hand to her cheek and found it burning. She could listen and join unabashed in the coarse and jovial talk of the Dutch painters with a freedom that had gained her so warm a reputation for bonhomie that it had endangered her reputation as a princess; but she was now blushing as hotly as a schoolgirl alone in the darkness at her own secret thoughts, so secret that her hand had discovered them here on the paper before her heart had known them.

  In sudden panic she took the drawing to hold it over the flame of the candle, but the face that looked back so serenely at her arrested her. ‘He could ne
ver look so for me,’ she told herself, and then, as she looked longer, ‘nor for any woman’; and then her very thoughts fell silent as she gazed on what she had drawn, and wondered what she saw.

  VIII

  Among the Royalist exiles at The Hague was that charming young woman, Kate d’Aubigny, who had been a dancingly happy bride for a few weeks, and then a war widow since almost the beginning of the war. Her handsome gallant young husband, George Lord d’Aubigny, younger brother to the Duke of Richmond, had been killed nearly seven years ago while following Rupert in his terrific charge at Edgehill.

  Since then, public affairs and platonic friendships had been her two chief distractions; she had corresponded copiously in political plots with Prince Rupert, who had no eyes to spare for her charms since he was deep in love with her sister-in-law, the lovely Duchess of Richmond; when all England was at war, she had smuggled important documents into London, hidden in her curls.

  Lately she had been remarried, to young Lord Newburgh, but nobody seemed to remember it, not even herself; everybody still called her Kate d’Aubigny when they did not call her ‘Clever Kate’, ‘Pretty Kate’. With her new husband, a boy who had not been old enough for the war but had come straight from school in France to wait on the late King in prison, she had attempted and all but effected the King’s escape from Hampton Court; it was said indeed that she had married young Newburgh largely for the sake of this opportunity.

  Now that she had come to The Hague she was an intimate friend of such contrary types as the aggressively legal Sir Edward Hyde and the elegant and debonair Lord Lanark, who had just inherited the ducal coronet of Hamilton since his elder brother’s execution by Cromwell. That execution had been an ironic fulfilment of the prophecy that had always clouded the first Duke’s loyalty, for he had been told he would succeed to King Charles’ crown – and within a month of King Charles’ death he did so, but it proved to be a martyr’s crown and not a royal one.

  Now his younger brother Lanark was the second Duke of Hamilton, and showed signs of the same tendency as his brother to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, for he had joined Lauderdale last summer in breaking away from Argyll’s extreme Covenanters, yet still declared that they continued to uphold the Covenant.

  ‘But if the new Duke of Hamilton is, as you say he is, a reasonable man,’ Hyde argued with Kate d’Aubigny, frowning at the pretty bird-like creature with his bushy brows and thinking it almost a pity that such attractive looks should be balanced with so much good sense (the times were bringing women to the fore in a way that was good for their brains but not for their characters, or anyway not for men’s characters) – ‘if, as you say, a reasonable man,’ he repeated portentously, thinking that the new Hamilton or any other man would doubtless show himself just as reasonable with Kate as she wanted him to be, ‘then he is bound to see how impossible this position is of the “Moderate Covenanters” as they call themselves.’

  ‘So he would,’ she cried, ‘if only it weren’t for his precious cousin and ally, Lauderdale. And it is that gross pig who is making all the mischief against Montrose, I am convinced of it,’ she continued in her eager glancing fashion, picking up things on her table and laying them down again, for nothing, no, nothing that she saw and handled could cease to remind her of George d’Aubigny, not this enamelled box of his for wax and letter wafers, nor the tiny jewelled figure of Saint George and the Dragon he had worn, nor least of all the carved walnut-shell for a thimble-case that he had got her at a country fair.

  This last she opened and shut and turned all round in her thin fingers and then closed them tightly over it, never looking at it, but at Hyde, brightly and intently as if she saw him for the first time, while she said, ‘Yes, I see what we must do. You shall meet Lanark – I beg his pardon, Hamilton – at my house as if by chance, with other people here, and then you can talk naturally, not in a set interview, and make friends. If only everybody would always do that, it would save a deal of trouble.’

  She sighed, opened her hand and looked at the nut-shell for the first time, laid it on the table, brushed her fingers together, laughed and got up, saying, ‘Lauderdale hates Montrose because he is so unlike him that he knows it is hopeless his ever wishing to be like him. But Hamilton does wish it; he has told me how he admires Montrose and wishes his poor brother had not fallen out with him.’

  ‘As far as I remember,’ said Hyde a little stiffly, ‘it was the first Duke of Hamilton who made mischief between Montrose and the late King from the very beginning, and did as much as any man to put Scotland under the tyranny of Argyll and the Kirk.’

  ‘He’s paid for it now with his life,’ said Kate sadly.

  Hyde, knitting his brows, reflected with exasperation that even the most intelligent women were illogical. The first Duke of Hamilton had played into Argyll’s and Cromwell’s hands, but had paid, not for that, but for the fact that he had turned against them last summer and headed a Royalist rising which had been squashed by Cromwell.

  But Kate showed sense over this meeting and he was glad to fall in with it and see the new Duke apart from his jovially bullying mentor and jailer, Lauderdale.

  Her pretty feminine room, so modernly furnished with the comforts that one could get more easily in Holland than anywhere else – rugs from Persia, curtains and cushion-covers of Chinese silk, two charming still-life paintings of flowers by a Dutch artist, and even flowers themselves, grown from bulbs in a shining porcelain bowl, so that though it was still winter outside, yet here in the warm scented firelight it was already spring – this her temporary lodging was instantly her home, the perfect setting for her, herself bright and brittle as some piece of glass.

  It was also the favourite rendezvous of Cavaliers and Covenanters, Dutch and English royalties, foreign ambassadors and the senators of the States of Holland. And there in the most natural way in the world Hyde happened to come in when the new Duke of Hamilton was there among half a dozen others, and Kate d’Aubigny led them both up to the window to pay their devoirs to her growing flowers – ‘and the bowl, holding all that heavy earth, came all the way from China – is it conceivable that anything so fragile should be so strong? And look, there is a picture on it of one of their heathen temples; and why is it only the Dutch can trade with China and we of Britain are so backward?’

  She had darted away to a new arrival before they could answer, and Hyde and Hamilton were left with their backs to the company, their eyes on a painted bowl, and their tongues wagging on the enormous advance of Holland as a seafaring and commercial Power. From there it was a short step to England, to Scotland, and their hopes of restoring the young King to both these countries.

  They talked amicably and moderately, as people do who talk politics in a drawing-room; each was surprised to find how reasonable was the other; each wished to continue the conversation and was annoyed when it had to break up under pressure of the amenities and they had to take part in the general talk again. ‘But it led nowhere,’ thought Hyde, as they decided that they must join the others, ‘these friendly chats never do. He’ll say I’m a good sort of fellow and I’ll say as much by him, and we’ll continue to oppose each other’s plans as before.’

  But as they walked back into the centre of the room he was astonished to hear Hamilton murmur in an elaborately casual but very low tone, ‘Do you rise early? You might come and see me tomorrow morning, if you come before—’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘Before a lazy fellow is out of bed,’ Hamilton finished in his accustomed voice, smiling, for they had now reached the others. But Hyde was sure it had not been what he was going to say.

  He went to Hamilton’s rooms before eight o’clock next morning, stumping in his soft shoes down the wet street (for the thaw had come at last) and was at once taken straight to the Duke’s bedroom. Hamilton was sitting up in his curtained bed with a furred robe thrown over his shoulders, his long dark curls framing a face as melancholy and anxious as a spaniel’s. He told the servant w
ho showed Hyde in to tell anyone who wanted to see him that he was asleep.

  That was encouraging, Hyde thought, but as soon as the door had closed behind the servant he shied away from his visitor, increasing his resemblance to a nervous dog, and when Hyde spoke of Montrose, the great things he had done for the King’s cause and hoped to do so again. Hamilton started impatiently, drew his cloak more closely round him and said, ‘It’s no good, it’s no good; one swallow doesn’t make a summer, nor one great man a nation. I tell you Scotland is the Covenant now, and the Covenant Scotland, and whoever speaks against the one speaks against the other. I tell you,’ he repeated, leaning forward on his elbow on the pillows and agitatedly beating them up in support with his other hand, ‘there is nothing that can lessen the power of the Covenant now in Scotland, only time and patience. Montrose has shown himself its enemy; he is therefore regarded, will always be regarded, as Scotland’s enemy.’

  ‘Have all your countrymen then so deep a sense of religion?’ asked Hyde dryly.

  The younger man fell back on his pillows as if to give up the struggle. Nothing could make this crass Englishman understand what was happening in Scotland now. His eyes were half-shut, seeing, not the rational, highly intellectual face of his stout visitor, nor the comfortable healthily warmed and airy room round him, but stone castles that were never warm, narrow windows that never opened, grey streets that were never washed nor swept.

  And in those streets men walked with averted eyes on Christmas Day and the days that used to be called holy, lest they should be seen to greet a neighbour and so be charged with the crime of Popery in giving him the compliments of the season; in those freezing and stuffy rooms families huddled round the fire, afraid to dance to make them warm, or sing to make them merry, lest it should be reported to the spies that the Elders of the Kirk appointed in every parish, in closer because more intimate family inquisition than had ever been known in the days of the Old Church.