The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘What’s the odds?’ he said, picking up his hat and cloak. People may go on gaping at Rembrandt’s pictures when they’ve forgotten mine, but is that going to make any difference to me then when I’m food for the worms? Rembrandt is making a mess of his life and I’m going to dine with some good fellows and the best art-dealers of the day in the best tavern in the town, and it’s that that makes the difference now.’

  He whipped off his painting-coat, swung his cloak round his great shoulders and made a swaggering bow to Louey, flourishing the wide cavalier hat in his hand. He was still floridly handsome, his big upturned moustaches only partly grey. Once when she had been just grown-up, she had let him kiss her (what a scene there had been with her mother over that!) in much the same experimental spirit as she had now tried smoking, though she had not, as in this latter case, repeated the experiment, – and now, suddenly remembering it, she looked at poor Gerard’s coarsely complacent good looks, grown too quickly elderly in the few years since then, with an exasperation, almost disgust, that did not in the least impair her friendliness.

  ‘You look just like Hals‘ “Laughing Cavalier”,’ she said, knowing how it would please him.

  ‘Poor old Frans. Eighty this year if he’s a day. He may be joining us at dinner if the gout and his mistress – his nurse rather – let him. And you, Princess? There’s no hope of your Marquis, you know. He wouldn’t promise me another sitting. Do you stay and work?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with a sigh, ’since I can’t come and dine with you.’ And how she wished she could! She could not bear banquets or Court entertainments, but she longed to see something for herself of the jovial tavern life which was so warming the heart of this newly free and vital country that it was giving its art the most vigorous fresh inspiration it had had for centuries. And all she could see of it was on painted canvas – or at best some sudden glimpse through a low lighted doorway into a little bright scene of soldiers singing and shouting, a group of card-players, or firelight playing on flushed faces.

  ‘I’d give a deal not to be a princess,’ she said.

  ‘And I’d double it,’ he muttered, but she paid no heed to that.

  ‘I could be a Roaring Boy with the best or the worst of you,’ she said, ‘but you’d all know me, so I can’t dress up as a young man and come with you.’

  ‘It’s a pity you can’t. Young Adrian is bringing his lute and there’ll be some pretty playing and some jolly drinking-songs where we can all join in. And he’s got a mighty fine eating-song too, all in honour of grease and gravy and the crisp little crackle of the pig, with a refrain—

  ‘ “More fat! More fat!

  What’s better than that?”’

  He shouted with laughter as he sang it, and she joined in, though laughing so much she could hardly sing. But his laugh stiffened on his lips, he stared before him at the open doorway with an expression of dismay. Louey turned and saw that he was looking into the next room at someone who was coming through the open doors towards them.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘The Lord Montrose!’ he just breathed.

  ‘Just my cursed luck!’ thought Louey. He must have heard their singing and bursts of laughter. Here she was, caught drinking and smoking with her drawing-master like any roystering trollop, and by this austere soldier of all people.

  But he did not seem disgusted (if he were he would never let her see it), only amused. He explained that he had come to see her mother, who was out, and as he was here he had remembered Honthorst’s appeals for another sitting. ‘But you too are just going, Mynheer.’

  ‘It was nothing, my lord, nothing,’ stammered Honthorst unhappily.

  But Burgomaster Six wasn’t nothing. He couldn’t offend such a patron, nor the art-dealers; but he couldn’t offend his patroness the Queen either, nor yet the great foreign lord. But wouldn’t it please him to be left alone with a charming girl? And Gerard was certain it would please his little princess.

  ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘it is most unfortunately true that I have to go to – ah – a meeting of considerable importance. But may I confess a professional secret? You may have heard that we overworked artists sometimes employ our pupils to do parts of our pictures. The Princess Louise is the best of my pupils. I have sometimes sold her pictures under my name as my own work—’

  ‘And did you allow that?’ Montrose asked Louise.

  ‘Yes, for they fetch a better price with his name,’ she replied casually. ‘It helps pay the household bills, though not many of them.’

  He was looking at her with surprise and interest. ‘I knew Your Highness to be accomplished,’ he said. ‘I did not know you to be so true an artist.’

  ‘What do you mean, my lord?’

  ‘That you paint so well, yet care nothing for your reward.’

  ‘But my reward is good hard cash.’

  ‘To pay household bills. Few women would care for that where they can have fame.’

  Honthorst felt that this was going just as he had hoped – at least it should have been as he had hoped. If he were such an old fool as to feel a futile prick of jealousy he would soon forget that among the company to which he was going.

  ‘Your Lordship will know her work better when you see her at work,’ he said. ‘And if you will agree, Princess, I should be grateful if you would work in this background while His Lordship is here, and see if that would pull the face better into tone. The light has changed since I began, the sunshine is stronger. Would Your Highness have that great goodness?’

  He bowed profusely to them both and left as fast as he respectfully could. Louey heard his heavy hurried steps go padding through the next room and the next and down the stairs.

  ‘Oh well—’ she murmured. She could not help it. She took up his palette.

  XIII

  He stood facing the western-looking window, and she, in silhouette against it, turned towards the easel. The sunlight, reflected from the water below the window, rippled up over the white ceiling above her head in a faint, endlessly glimmering pattern; it shimmered round the edges of the shapeless white coat that hung very straight on her slight body; it made a halo of the loose shining hair that floated so lightly round her head. She looked like an untidy angel – he thought he had once heard her so described but could not remember by whom.

  Her head had been bent as she dabbled the paints on the palette, but now she lifted it, looked intently at him and then only at the canvas, which he could not see, one loose-sleeved arm outstretched with the long brush between her fingers. The action, the attention to the work in hand, restored her confidence enough for her to speak, if only to express something of her confusion. There was Gerard pounding away through the garden below, damn him!

  ‘It’s not much use his being so respectful,’ she observed, ‘with these glasses and pipes on the table. Do you smoke, my lord?’

  ‘No; he replied, ‘I never liked it, though my father smoked so much he had almost as many pipe-racks as bookshelves at Kincardine.’

  Clipped, abrupt, businesslike, their words fell between them. What nonsense it was! They couldn’t cover over the fact that he had found her smoking and drinking with her drawing-master.

  ‘Have you ever seen a woman smoke, my lord?’

  ‘Often,’ he replied gravely. ‘Old Lady Ann Cunningham used to ride over to smoke with my father-in-law, Lord Southesk, and spit too, as much as any sailor.’

  She was not sure that she liked this. If he were laughing at her, he could do it openly. ‘Over here,’ she said, ‘it’s only vulgar old washerwomen who smoke at their oyster feasts and village carousals. It is not even dashing, as it is for a young man.’

  ‘Do you want to be a young man?’

  ‘Very much. I could work then for myself and not only under a master’s shadow. I could lead a jolly and disreputable life and not have to think about it. I could go and fight with you in Scotland.’

  She was working in the background, talking the while in so absent and preoccup
ied a tone that he wondered if she knew what she was saying. It was as though she were talking in her sleep. It gave him an extraordinary sense of release, weary as he was after the furious and heated use to which words had been put this morning in the House in the Wood – words as fiercely directed at their aim as weapons.

  Watching her work, watching her think of it, while the words she spoke dropped quietly from some unguarded part of her mind, made his mind also lower its guard, relax from its angry tension into a surprising peace. He had never heard a woman talk as she did, except perhaps one, and she had not been a woman then. For the first time since he had lost her, he found himself speaking of the girl who had broken his youth.

  ‘My younger sister,’ he said slowly, ‘talked as you do. She too wished to be a man, to have adventure.’

  ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘I don’t know. She was seduced by the husband of our eldest sister, and he fled to Italy with her and his foreign servant, Carlippis, who was accused of helping his schemes with magic. He left his wife, his children, his lands at Luss on the shores of Loch Lomond where we used to stay on our holidays, I and – Kat.’

  It was seventeen years since he had used that name, or indeed since he had voluntarily thought of those long summer days at Rossdhu Castle, trolling for salmon with Kat on Loch Lomond or wandering with her over the mountain-slopes, he with a gun or cross-bow in case he might get a roe-buck, – getting drenched through together in the rain, and then, when the sun came out, lying on the heather to dry, staring up the loch towards the purple head of old Ben Lomond, the guardian of the Highlands, and talking of what he would do when he was full-grown.

  It had always been of what he would do, so it struck him now, never what she would do. It was not surprising Kat too had wished to be a young man, or even perhaps to ‘lead a jolly and disreputable life and not have to think about it’, as this girl here so casually avowed. Looking at her, he began to see again, and see more clearly, that wild little creature who had always wanted to do the dangerous, the forbidden thing, even to play with magic, a crime equal to treason or murder.

  Louey had never heard so extraordinary a tale. For a man to commit adultery, or, as it was held by law, incest, with his sister-in-law, was surprising enough in one of the greatest families in Scotland, but it would have been less startling to have murdered his wife than to have run away from her, his home, and his country.

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘He is Sir John Colquhoun. I have just heard within this hour that he has returned to Scotland. He had been under sentence of death for his crime, his estates forfeited, but he has made his peace with the Kirk, taken the Covenant, had all his lands restored to him, and has just remarried. His wife, my sister Lilias, has been dead some years, thank God.’

  ‘And you are an exile, condemned to death by your country, while he goes back to it to enjoy his estates and be accepted by its Church! The Covenant has strange bedfellows. But your sister, Kat—?’

  ‘I could never find her. I followed them to Italy, but she had already left him.’

  But he did not want to think of that bitter search, that bitter discovery. It had struck him how odd it was he should be speaking of Kat, and so naturally, as though to stretch out a hand to her across all these years.

  It must be something in this strange girl that had made him wish to do it. Since their first meeting, her mother had so delighted and dazzled him that all her daughters had sunk back as it were and become merged together as a crowd of girls, good- looking and intelligent, who pleased him by smiling sympathetically rather than gazing in adoration like so many women. There had even been a hint of irony, or so he now fancied, in the smiles of the Princess Louise.

  He began to notice again, as he had done at first, the swift light and shadow, the baffling changes of expression on her curious face. He had never seen so many contradictions in a face. Her mouth was tender and yet sarcastic, her eyes observant and yet absent-minded; when she smiled she looked as subtle as the Sibyl, and when she frowned as she was doing now, intent on her work, her hair ruffled with one wandering hand while the other plied her paint-brush, she looked like an eager child.

  She was working in the cloudy broken light round the head in the portrait, now concentrating on her painting, now on his own face in almost fierce absorption.

  She saw how thoughtfully he was considering her – or was it something quite different? – and how sternly his mouth shut when he was silent; she wished he would speak again. He must still be thinking of that strange and terrible thing he had told her.

  ‘You have never told this before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor spoken of her since – even to your wife?’

  ‘Least of all to my wife. She was very different from her. She feared Kat, I think, that she would come between us, as indeed she did when I left my wife and our eldest son and went in search of her.’

  ‘And was there no one else to whom you could talk of her?’

  ‘I did not wish to. Her memory had dried and hardened in me – till this moment.’

  Louey flung herself back on to her painting. It was no use. His last words were hammering in her brain. Why ‘this moment’? What had happened in ‘this moment’?

  ‘You came in this moment and found me carousing with my drawing-master,’ she said. ‘Why should that make you forgive your sister? But the things that happen inside one have no sense. You are right’ (what had he said that was right?) ‘It is not sound to love adventure if one is a woman. Your wife was much happier without it – she must have been very happy,’ added Louey on so low a note that his quick ears only just caught it, and he could have left it, pretending not to hear, for why should he trouble himself with this girl, sensitive and bright as water, when women could no longer be anything to him?

  ‘She had small happiness with me,’ he said. ‘Her life was a torment of anxiety. It killed her, I think.’

  ‘Ah, doesn’t that show how happy she was? Happy – unhappy – what does one mean by words like that? But one would rather die of what one loves than live without it.’

  What was happening in this moment, where was it leading them? He had come in and Gerard had gone out; he had spoken of his sister, which he had not done for many years, and she had spoken of his wife, and he was looking at her, looking through her, she felt, into the desperate thoughts that now hammered in her brain. ‘I love you,’ they said, ‘I would rather die of that love than live without it.’

  Did he see them, would he speak of them? She longed for him to do so, she prayed he would not. He was speaking again now, what was he saying? She scarcely heard how he began; then with a stab of disappointment she realized that he was speaking of the wars, and of the dead King.

  ‘It is the death of a world,’ he said, ‘of both worlds, of both sides in this struggle, for it is the death of all that was best in our enemies, of all their hopes of liberty and a brave new order in the land. Those hopes were true enough once, as I well know, for I believed in them so passionately in my youth that I took up arms for them – to prevent England imposing her religious government on Scotland. But that revolt to defend liberty became a worse tyranny itself; it denied liberty to all others. Scotland rose to prevent the English Church being forced on her, and has tried ever since to force her Kirk on England. And Cromwell’s army fought for the liberties of Parliament, but Parliament is now the mere rump of that former body, kicked into slavish obedience by the very army that was to secure its freedom. The rebellion to defend the liberty of the subject has crushed all liberty of the subject. Members of Parliament are imprisoned for refusing to break the laws. The “brave new world” that men hoped for is a tyranny of hypocrisy and lies, it is a republic that dares not appeal to the people.’

  He was talking as if to himself, he had forgotten that he was standing for his portrait, he was walking up and down the long light room, past the easel and herself, seeing neither. She had never seen him like this; usually he kept so still and s
aid so little. Her disappointment when he began just now to speak had quickly died, for she knew that he was talking with her (though scarcely to her) as he had not talked even with her mother.

  ‘And I helped start it,’ he said, ‘as did each of us who thought he could pull a single brick out of the interwoven structure of the State, each pursuing his own separate end, even though it be an ideal. But you cannot do that, or in time the whole vast edifice comes crashing down – as it has done now – and crimes are committed in the name of religion and righteousness. This is the worst crime of all, to sicken and turn men away from the right, because of what has been done in its name. It would have been honester and cleanlier to have assassinated the King in the dark of his prison than to execute him in the name of God. Error is infinite. There is no end to it. All one can do is to pay one’s own debt.’

  She cried out at that. ‘You fought for the King against worse odds than any man on his side! And you never got one scrap of the help from his armies that had been promised you. How can you speak of debt? Whatever you owed has been cleared a thousand times.’

  ‘Are such debts ever cleared? King Charles himself was glad to die on the scaffold to clear his.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She felt cold at heart. She wished he had not said that.

  ‘You know now,’ he answered, ‘of King Charles’ last words on the scaffold. He said he had done wrong in having consented to the death of his faithful servant Strafford, and for that was content to die.’

  Louey sat down, laid down her palette, rubbed at the paint on her fingers, found they were chill and numb. Staring at them she said in a voice that sounded very weak, ‘I think you were going to say something else. What was it?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Yes I do now, but it wasn’t to say anything – if I’d said it, I’d have sung it, for I was remembering a scrap of an old song which our country people still sing near the Border—’ And standing beside her he sang in a low voice to a wild, simple tune, I was thinking,’ he said, ‘that King Charles won his fight when he went to die, and that I hope when I go I may do the same.’