The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘ “But I ha’e dreamed a dreary dream

  Ayont the Isle o’ Skye.

  I dreamed a dead man won a fight,

  And I think that man was I.”

  So that was where this moment had been leading them. He had come in and Gerard had gone out, and they had spoken of his sister, of his wife, of his king. Those lives and his life had gone on for years before this moment, tying up their several fates into these knots. They had come before she could meet him, and so had all the tangles of this present perturbed age.

  How could one find happiness if it depended on so many chances, public and private, if such an intricate spider-web pattern had to be woven in its perfection to catch it? One could not: that was the answer. So deep was her despair that it could not matter now what she said.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, ‘and you could have loved me. You know it too, I think,’ and then fell silent, gazing not at him but at his portrait, at the eyes that watched her there, as his own eyes were now watching her, she knew, and did not dare to look.

  He had not guessed she loved him, had never thought of it, but now he felt he could not have talked to her as he had just done if he had not known it deep within himself. He stood looking down on that small ruffled uptilted head like a wind-blown flower on the long stem of her neck. Had he ever before noticed the wild grace of that head? Yes he had, and would not let himself do so. Why then was he doing it now?

  For a moment he saw his life as it might yet begin again for him – then he shut it out.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said brutally. ‘I dare not hope for your love. I do not want to hope for it. My life is no longer my own. I have other things to do with it than think of happiness, my own or another’s.’

  Now she would cry, and that would be well, for it would relieve her feelings and spare him his; it would remind him that the work he had to do must never again be mixed up with a woman’s grief.

  But she did not cry, She said almost indifferently, ‘Hope? If I’d had any hope of you I should not have dared speak of it. You cannot give me your love, I know that. But I shall have to give mine, whether you can take it or not. Wherever you go, whatever you do when you go from here to fight for the King, I shall know it, I think, long, long before the news of it can reach us.’

  That might well be martyrdom,’ he said. ‘My wife suffered it, as I now know better than when she lived.’

  ‘She would not have had it otherwise.’

  ‘She had other things. She had our home together and our children, some years before that torturing anxiety. But you would have nothing but the anxiety, nothing but the suffering, if it should come to that. It would be cruel, unjust to you.’

  Then how was it, he asked himself, he had come so near to her? And how was it that whatever he said or thought about women did not seem to apply to her?

  In all the different Courts of Europe who had lately welcomed him as an honoured guest, many women had made love to him openly, flagrantly, attracted by his world-wide reputation as a great soldier, by his grave and polished manners and his indifference to themselves. But they and their methods had been so totally different from this girl that the comparison did not even occur to him.

  This casual, curious, untidy, lovely creature did not, like most women, demand happiness as the reward of love.

  But he could not ignore it for her.

  ‘You are much younger than I,’ he said. ‘You have beauty and great gifts, you will marry some prince and make him happier than he has ever dreamed, if you wish, – and if you do not wish, then God help him!’

  She turned her head and looked at him at last, and saw his eyes, grave and tender, smiling at her. She smiled too.

  They should not have done that. They forgot what they had been saying, they saw only each other’s eyes. She stood up, she was tall, her face nearly on a level with his own; he put his hand over her bright hair, behind that small, back-tossed head, he held her in his arms and they kissed.

  It was done now, what he had meant never to do. Her moment of triumphant happiness was shot through with the guilty knowledge that he would regret it.

  She broke from him, retreated from him. ‘We couldn’t help it,’ she said. ‘It shan’t make any difference.’

  Her voice was troubled, pleading against herself; she slipped through the doorway and was gone. He checked his fierce impulse to follow and snatch her back into his arms. She had given him these few seconds’ respite and he seized them, staying rigidly where he was, staring at the empty doorway through which that slight white figure had fled.

  Certainly this was not like other women he had met. In another moment he could smile in amused gratitude at her chivalry. She might not be a young man as she wished, but she was a gentleman.

  And would that moment’s madness make no difference as she had promised?

  He was not so sure.

  XIV

  For Louey, at any rate, everything was different after that; everything came alive and moved more quickly, too quickly; never had the year rushed on them at so quick a rate. The windmills spun madly in the spring gales, now this way, now that, as if trying always to snatch at the torn strips of cloud scurrying past in the blue sky above. Birds shouted in the lime trees of the Voorhout among the purple twigs that were now all spangled with tiny points of green light; half-grown birds hopped about on the garden paths; grave portly shopkeepers pounding down the streets, counting up figures in their heads, had suddenly to hop too, to avoid tripping over a spinning-top, a hoop bowled furiously between their legs, or a ball bouncing down the street to splash among yells of disaster into the canal.

  For little boys, like the birds, had suddenly appeared in noisy profusion; they hung over the canal edge, their round faces gaping and grinning back at them from the gleaming water, and pushed bits of wood, into which they had stuck a stick and a piece of rag, as far out as they could without toppling over; then, as the wind caught their craft and sent them proudly down-stream, they ran screaming after them, proclaiming that their ships were of the East or the West India Companies and racing against each other.

  The sad sodden fields in the rains that followed the great frost suddenly burgeoned, and the precious bulb-growing patches showed flecks of scarlet, purple and orange among the enormous flat expanse of green; stout men in breeches, with thick red necks and arms sticking out of their flapping shirts, tended and guarded them all day long, while stouter men in cloaks and stockings and big important hats, sitting in fine stuffy halls, bid enormous sums against each other as the price of a single flower: 16,000 florins for one tulip bulb from Haarlem – that showed how mad even the stout Dutch business men could run in the spring.

  All this had happened in other springs, but never so quickly, so flamboyantly, with such a sense of the year rushing on towards some tremendous goal. Everyone was hoping different things, hoping to go somewhere, do something different.

  Lucy Walters was teasing Charles with her demands; Sophie was telling him she meant to go and stay with her brother Carl in Germany; and Charles himself, bothered between the two, talked of agreeing to his mother’s ever more pressing demand that he should go back to her in Paris. Hyde objected urgently, for far stronger than the Covenanters’ own influence was Queen Henrietta Maria’s in their favour.

  But Hyde himself was longing, though still secretly, for that ambassadorial trip he might make with his friend Cottington to Spain, which would remove him from these nagging disputes; and with every fresh gust of harsh wind that marred this northerly spring sunshine, he wished it more and more.

  Eliza had heard that Descartes had caught a severe cold on the chest owing to Queen Christina’s peculiar desire to discuss philosophy with him in an unheated library at five o’clock in the morning; she was in a fever to go to Sweden and nurse him, but could only write letters to him and to Christina, which latter she always tore up.

  The Queen of Bohemia began to talk of her country house at Rhenen, to plan whom she would have to stay t
here to ride and hunt with her and boat on the river and take part in her archery contests. She was a fine shot; she had brought down sixteen buck with her own cross-bow in one morning, ‘but Jamie Graham is a better, to judge by his college record’. It would be perfect to have Jamie Graham at Rhenen; they would have music-parties in the evenings, sitting on the terrace, and she would get him to sing the songs she had heard he had composed himself.

  She had not yet been successful in her attempts at this, though she did induce him to sing to the lute one or two of the rough old country-songs of their native land that she could just remember having heard as a small child, but only from her nurse or the gardeners singing below the castle walls. Other cavaliers here had sung her the works of modern English poets, Lovelace’s tender lovesongs, Suckling’s impudent, amusing verses; some of them even sang the old-fashioned charming lyrics of Queen Elizabeth’s day that had sprung into fashion from the innumerable plays of that time.

  To the Queen and her daughter Louise there was, however, an odd charm in hearing the simple words and tunes of his countryside, sung by this quiet and courtly Scots Marquis.

  ‘ “The deer runs wild on hill and dale,

  The birds fly wild from tree to tree,

  But there is neither bread nor kail

  To fend my men and me.” ’

  His deep voice echoed through the long room where the shadows were gathering in a stormy sunset. To Louey the song echoed down through the years, from the rough Scots peasants who had sung it for centuries, to Montrose as he sang it to her and her mother on this April evening; and others would sing it for centuries after the three of them were dead. It seemed strange to her that people do not last, that their voices are stilled in death, but that the things they make and do and think go on and on.

  The Queen sat before him in her flowing black dress, her proud neck rising from a broad collar of fine lace and the short necklace of big pearls which she always wore. He did not look at her daughter, who sat at a little distance, but her bright image danced before his eyes – unduly bright as it happened, for Louey had suddenly revolted against all this endless black and put on a pale yellow dress she had got just before her uncle’s death.

  It could not matter while she was at home and alone, she had said in disingenuous answer to Eliza’s expostulations, for, as it happened, she had known that Montrose was likely to come that evening. And she wore one of the absurd new little Turkish caps of green velvet, undeniably becoming, since for once she had arranged the hair beneath it with care. She had even considered cutting it in a straight fringe or else in short ringlets (both were fashionable) to cover up her broad high forehead, but had fortunately been prevented by the usual loss of her scissors.

  The music was interrupted by a message for the Queen, who, it seemed, had forgotten that she had promised her ‘best niece’ Mary to go with her to the Dowager Princess Amelia’s reception in the Mauritzhuis. Swearing volubly, the Queen departed, threatening that Jamie Graham should make up for this disappointment to her at Rhenen.

  But ‘Jamie Graham’, now alone with Louey for the first time since she had worked at his portrait, told her he was only waiting for King Charles’ definite signed agreement before he too would be off once more to the Northern capitals of Europe, to collect money and munitions for his enterprise. It was not likely that he would return to The Hague before that enterprise, still less likely that he could spare time to stay with the Queen at Rhenen.

  He stood up to take his leave as he told Louey this. He took her hand in his to kiss it, and told her to put him out of her head, and she looked up at him and laughed.

  ‘What do you wish me to put in it instead?’ she asked in her nonchalant manner. ‘Marriage to some prince, you said, but the only firm offer I ever got from one was too weak to withstand a grandmother.’

  ‘Whose grandmother?’

  ‘His and mine. She was the Dowager Electress Juliana, and he my cousin Prince William of Brandenburg.’

  That quick flush of hers flew over her face as she spoke, and never had she been so furious at her inability to control it, as now under his keen scrutiny. ‘No, you are wrong,’ she said. ‘I did not care for him a scrap, I don’t know why, for he was very good-looking.’

  ‘And mad for love of you.’

  ‘How do you know? Did Rupert tell you?’

  He smiled at her idea of his conversations with Rupert and shook his head. But he had remembered how during the war King Charles I had been so concerned to get together a sufficient dowry to appease the relatives of the handsome young Prince of Brandenburg who waited four years in such desperate anxiety to marry his fascinating cousin.

  ‘What became of your uncle’s dowry for you?’

  ‘Carl took it, I believe. That is usually what becomes of money raised for our family. You need not look so angry. I have told you I did not really care for him.’

  ‘Though you turn crimson at mention of him.’

  ‘No, it was only, – oh, damn your eyes and all they see! – only that – that was when I – why I—’ But she could not tell him that that was when, for no reason she could think of (unless it were because her handsome young lover had gone away from that first visit without any chance to declare his passion to her), she had allowed Gerard Honthorst to give her her first kiss. If it had been anyone more attractive – but not poor coarse old full-blown Gerard!

  So to avoid his eyes (as he could very well see) she pulled at the little shoulder-flaps that fluted out like petals round her voluminous sleeves, and went on hurriedly, ‘No, it was the Dowager Amelia walked off with Brandenburg for her eldest daughter, and my mother made me attend the wedding with my sisters, quite rightly. We couldn’t wear mourning for the Pauper Palatines who had stayed unmarried – and probably always will.’

  But he would not take her at her word. ‘You have had scores of men in love with you,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘My own eyes and senses.’

  But not only that, she was sure of it. There had been talk enough about her at one time and another, scandal, too, some started, all nursed and multiplied by the Dowager Amelia.

  ‘Love and marriage are clean different things,’ she said, still trying to keep that light careless tone that had always come instinctively to her till this moment, when she most needed it. ‘A man does not want to marry a princess without a penny, but with a line of kings for ancestors which would necessitate all her relatives going in to dinner before all his. And I’m just on twenty-six,’ she added inconsequently.

  He had thought her some years younger. ‘But you are still more than ten years younger than myself. I have had the best of my life, but you have yours before you.’

  ‘Ah, but in what direction? In friendships with funny gross artists, in flirtations with scamps such as poor de l’Epinay? My younger brother Philip killed him, you know, for making love to my mother and myself and boasting of it.’

  He knew, but he did not show it, and she wished she had not said it. She leaned back against the table, her hands outstretched on either side of her, playing uneasily with the dark crimson Persian rug that covered it, folding it and twisting it round her fingers. Her dress gleamed and shimmered against the rich background, her upturned face under the peaked cap was tilted towards him like the thin mocking slip of the crescent moon.

  It was the first time he had seen her in anything but dead- black or the loose white painter’s coat, impersonal and sexless as a monastic robe, and the new effect of this brilliant and piquant dress was not what she would have wished. For she had charmed him by her unlikeness to all the other women he had met abroad, and now she annoyed him by looking as they did, sophisticated, provocative – and he could not take his eyes off her.

  His silence made her reckless; something was going wrong and she could not stop it, would not, rather, for she was damned if she’d play for his good opinion!

  ‘Or would you advise George Goring?’ she asked; ‘that joll
y ruffian Rupert hated so in England. I wrote, or rather drew him a letter there which he showed all round the camp, Rupert told me.’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  Goring was still doing it when he had met him at Oxford nearly a year later, and still pretending he had only just got it.

  She saw that he had seen the letter, but did not seem to care what he thought of her, or expect him to think at all of her. She expected nothing, and he must expect nothing of her, he told himself, while unwillingly, unbelievably, there came into his mind a sudden jealous memory of Goring’s winking innuendoes, unheeded at the time.

  But Goring could boast of a woman he had never met. It was impossible that Goring, the most brilliant but the most scurrilous wit in King Charles’ Court, should have had his way with this elusive wisp of humanity rather than womanhood – or so she had seemed until today. But today somehow she was different.

  And would she not have been different with Goring?

  His eyes fastened on her with a look so searching that her heart seemed to turn over inside her.

  ‘I remember that letter,’ he repeated, and his voice was now hard. ‘It was exquisitely decorated, riotously witty, those caricatures and illustrations to private jokes between you – a string of pearls to send to that debauched swine!’

  She was trembling, but her fear of his anger had roused her own. ‘My mother thought him the most amusing visitor we ever had, she laughed for hours at her“private jokes” with him, and why shouldn’t I have mine? Don’t tell me the case is quite different because I’ve not had a husband and thirteen children – I’ve heard it too often, and I don’t believe in it as a necessary preliminary to amusement.’

  He burst out laughing, as so often happened with Louey; all might have been well even now, had she not been still hot on justifying Goring. ‘Why, even the Parliament were so charmed by him that they had to let him go free instead of executing him. Ned Hyde told me it was simply because they all found him irresistible.’