As she had done?
He caught at the hand she was waving in expostulation, crushing it in his grasp. ‘Stop praising that sot!’ he said. ‘Do you want to drive me mad?’
‘Yes,’ she replied instantly on a flash of laughter, though once again she was shaking, it was ridiculous, her teeth were chattering. She saw his face swoop towards her and he kissed her – not as he had done that first time, but savagely, again and again, with all the unrecognized power of emotion that had been pent up in him these last lonely years released in sudden fury.
‘Is that what you want of me?’ he asked her. ‘And that? And that?’ But as she began to struggle he let her go as quickly as he had attacked. She collapsed into a chair, her green cap fallen off, her carefully arranged hair tumbling over her shoulders, and he saw, not without satisfaction, how shaken she was. He could not trust himself to stay; he turned sharply on his heel and left her.
Goring, no, that made it impossible. Anybody else might not have mattered, even de l’Epinay (it did not occur to him that this might be because he had never seen de l’Epinay), but ‘Roaring Goring’, with his bloated beauty, his insolent upturned moustaches, his swagger, his smile, his limp (a perfectly genuine limp from an old wound got in the German wars, but he managed to convert even that into an amusing mannerism and another attraction); Goring, who had won half his battles with the courage and dash of a born cavalry leader but lost the other half when drunk; Goring, who would betray a friend or a woman or his king and make a joke and brag of it, – so Goring was the man no one could resist!
She had said it openly – and doubtless she had not resisted him.
He had been amused and touched by the wild innocence of her enthusiasm when she had first talked with him; but now that he had begun to be in love, his jealousy would not let him recognize any such quality in her. ‘Love and marriage are clean different things,’ that light laughing voice echoed in his head. With that as her own expressed opinion, it was scarcely necessary to remember Goring’s, that ‘princesses are cheaper than prostitutes.’
Well, Goring had settled this matter for him; it was over now, and a very good thing it was, almost before it had begun, for he would be a fool to get himself tied up now with anything that might distract him from his one purpose.
But Goring had not settled the matter; it was not over, and it was not a good thing. Since his wife’s death nearly four years ago, Montrose had shut out all thought of women; but now he paid the price for that restraint, and they would no longer be shut out. For years the image of Magdalen had haunted him, her anxious and watchful eyes, her silence, her smile that had once been ironic but had learned a greater courage, a happiness in spite of fear.
It was no good angel now that haunted his dreams, but a mocking sensual witch with loose flying hair and subtle eyes, the hair and eyes of the Princess Louise, who tormented him with desire, then turned and jeered at him from Goring’s arms. He could drive her with contempt from his waking thoughts, but his sleep, and that uneasy passage between sleeping and waking, became hag-ridden with the longing to tear her from those arms and make her his own, brutally, as he had never yet taken a woman.
These dreams did not distract him from his one purpose, but they began to embitter it. ‘Woman’ became a synonym for disloyalty and treachery and all annoyance: Ned Hyde for all his massive brain was a fussy old woman; the minister’s raucous nagging derived straight from the beldams that they persecuted in thousands as witches; young Charles himself, smooth-spoken, watchful, for all his air of careless ease, striving perpetually to charm all men to his advantage, however untrustworthy he knew them to be, was employing all the methods of a practised whore, and was as little likely to keep faith with him.
Even the formula of Montrose’s hopes and fears for his purpose began to follow that of an angry lover, for they kept jigging into rhymes so persistent that to get rid of them he dashed some of them down on paper. But as fast as he did so, more sprang up, jeering, abusive.
They followed the rhythm of the ballad to his ‘dear and only love’ which he had made and sung long ago to Magdalen, when she had repudiated it in indignation, demanding to know who had ever brought such a word as ‘committees’ into a love-song? For then, as now, his ballad had been as much to his loyalty to his King and hope for ‘purest monarchy’, as to his love.
And the refrain was the threat of the loyal servant as of the faithful lover, that, if tried too far, he would ‘never love thee more’.
So now when he rode over the marshes beyond The Hague, baffled by some tussle with his enemies, or, worse, by some fresh glimpse of Charles’ friendly dealings with them, the thud of his horse’s hoofs on the muddy road hammered out the old tune in his head to the throb of new, angry rhymes.
‘And if by fraud or by consent
Thy heart to ruin come,
I’ll sound no trumpet as my wont,
Nor march by tuck of drum.’
Would he not? It was a lie, he knew, yet it gave him satisfaction to believe it of himself. All his warnings and remonstrance with the King had been rigorously but fiercely controlled, both in his present speech and his former letters (‘If Your Highness shall but vouchsafe a little faith unto your loyal servants, and stand at guard with others’ had been a very mild translation of his thought); but now it broke out in the scorn of a defiance that he could express only to himself, and only in the guise of a lover’s indignation.
Nor was that guise a disguise. For he himself could not tell at what point the dark suave face of the young King faded before the long swift-glancing eyes of the Princess Louise, as his anger against both their false and fickle souls burned up his heart to the tune of an old love-song.
‘Then shall thy heart be set by mine
But in far different case.
For mine was true, so was not thine,
But looked like Janus’ face.
For as the waves with every wind
So sail’st thou every shore,
And leaves my constant heart behind.
—How can I love thee more?’
XV
Louey too told herself, ‘It’s over now – he’ll not look at me nor speak to me again if he can avoid it, and I’ll never dare to as I did before.’ But she could not entirely believe it, not in such fine weather. The market-women spread out their booths in the open with oyster-barrels and fish and vegetables, and oranges brought in ships from China, and flowers the colour of sunshine and of blood; and news came from England of the enormous army Cromwell was gathering together with taxes fifteen times as much as King Charles had ever dared impose, and all to invade Ireland.
What would become of Montrose’s scheme if Cromwell conquered Ireland first? And how could he fail to conquer the scattered forces in that distracted country when he had a huge army trained and organized through seven years of civil war, and behind it the wealth and greed of the London merchants with their vested interests in Ireland?
And still the Scots Commissioners hissed and screamed their threats against Montrose, and their dire prophecies as to what would happen to King Charles if he touched the hand of the accursed thing.
And Charles, after his rashness in the House in the Wood, no longer dared to meet Montrose openly, since he had been warned that the moment he did so the Commissioners would give the signal to the Head of their Government to break off all relations with the Court at The Hague; and this at the present stage of affairs would, Hyde declared, mean the loss not only of the official Scottish support, but that of the Dutch Calvinists also.
The year was slipping on, would soon slip past them, and what would next year bring?
Worst of all, thought Louey, Montrose despised her, believed the worst of her. Let him then, and he should have some reason to do so! As with Rupert, bad opinion made her defiant, in this case almost desperate. She tried to fling herself into work, but what good did that do anyone?
A good deal of good, said her mother, who was in despair at the shortage
of candles since the chandler had refused to supply any more till his bill was paid; ‘and next week we shall all be sitting in the dark!’ she declared. Never was there more reason to be thankful that the days were drawing out, and no doubt one could plead health and go to bed early. But Elizabeth detested going to bed. It was much better that Louey should work.
Louey’s work, however, refused to be profitable. It had turned rebellious, like everything else in her at this moment, and she only wanted to do caricatures or malicious subjects that were impossible to put out for sale on the picture-booths along the canal, by the side of Vermeer’s latest from Delft or a Peter de Hooch. She pulled out a canvas she had begun some months ago of herself and the two elder of her sisters dressing their mother’s hair for a State ball at the Binnenhof, a cruel thing, for it was done at a moment when her mother, who had to sell her horses and in consequence give up hunting, had grown rather stout and much older looking for lack of her accustomed exercise. That was quickly repaired by Lord Craven’s gift of fresh horses, and Elizabeth soon ‘rumbled away in riding” her advancing years, as she used to do any ill effects from her children’s births.
But the sketch of the three slender girls with lovely serious faces, intent only on adorning that elderly lady in all her gorgeous Court finery, as she sat with her eyes complacently fixed upon the mirror, now gave Louey a bitter amusement as a prophecy rather than a recollection. So would they stand all their lives, attendant only on their mother’s charms, long after she had ceased to possess them. She worked at it with feverish amusement, a joke that she shared with no one, not even Honthorst, though the temptation to do so grew hourly greater, for it was turning into a superb painting.
Then came a counter-attraction. Honthorst had a commission to paint Lauderdale, and Louey seized the chance to do so too. It had been no mere joke when she had declared her longing to paint him at her first meeting. That grossly sensual face had at once fired her ironic fancy and made her want to do a grandiose allegorical figure of him, as Mammon perhaps, or the World and the Flesh, with one of her imaginary portraits of Argyll, squinting and sallow as she had heard, whispering into his ear as the Devil.
So while Honthorst worked at his large canvas on the easel, she sat in a corner and made sketches so grotesquely hideous that they had always to be hidden before Lauderdale could see them, and substituted by some charming genial portrait-study worked up in his absence.
This amused her and Honthorst too; they shared a deal of low jokes about it together, but for all that, her master was not too easy in the matter. His Princess was in one of her most reckless moods, flirting with this obscene satyr in a way to turn the head of a far less complacent rake. He didn’t know, as Honthorst did from experience, that she was adding him to her collection of oddities, studying his character just as she did his face for his portrait, absorbed in that extraordinary mixture of his tremendous will and utter unscrupulousness, his acute judgement of men (as long as they were not too much his superior) and skill in handling them, his enormous knowledge of foreign languages, abstruse classical learning, theology and divinity, as well as all forms of debauchery throughout Europe, of comic tales and characters, odd anecdotes, some merely gross but many undeniably witty.
‘If old Ben Jonson had put you into a play all by yourself, my lord, he might still have called it “Every Man in his Humour”,’ Louey exclaimed in genuine appreciation.
‘And the result would have been to put “Every Man out of his Humour”,’ muttered Honthorst, and repeated his quip aloud to Louey as soon as he was alone with her. ‘God save us from these Scots, they seem to have driven you crazy between them – but I wish you’d mind the advice to the cobbler to “Stick to your last.” There’s a gentleman and a great man, and you’ve turned from him to set your cap at this rotten sack of iniquity and his worst enemy.’
‘That last might have something to do with it,’ replied Louey.
‘If you’re hoping to get any of his plans or secrets out of Lauderdale, you’re mistaken. He may talk as expansively as a drunken woman, but he’s as cunning as a fox.’
‘Lay in a bottle of brandy for him next time, dear Gerard, and see if that helps. No, better and cheaper, hint to him that he can bring his own.’
‘Do you think t’other lord would be grateful for any information you could get that way? You’re wrong. And do you never think of the danger you’re running?’
Louey did not, since she had been extremely careful never to be alone in the studio with Lauderdale for one moment, in spite of his efforts to get Honthorst out of the way.
But Honthorst only snorted when she mentioned these precautions; – ‘A fellow like that would stick at nothing. He has his own bravoes, and half of those in the town are in his pocket as well. A job of kidnapping is nothing to them. There’s that cut-throat, Bastard Aank, he’s got more money than he knows what to do with these days, and boasted to his whore one night he got it from a Scots lord who’s none so mean as his countrymen are made out to be.’
‘Did she tell you that? Who is she? You know her then?’ asked Louey all in a breath.
‘I did,’ he said significantly.
‘Then, Gerard, you must get her to tell you more.’
‘She’d no more to tell.’
‘Make her get it out of Aank, then. I know there’s something wrong.’
‘So do I,’ growled her master, still convinced of her danger, which she refused even to consider.
But she had her own fears. Only yesterday Lauderdale had come in for a sitting, after a Dutch banquet at which even his hard Scots head had to own itself inferior to those of his phlegmatic Dutch hosts. In his slightly maudlin and homesick mood she had encouraged him to talk of Scotland, of his own fine woods that surrounded his splendid castle with the great gates that opened near to the little town of Lauder, – ‘and not so little neither, it’s one of the widest in Scotland, splitting in two to hold the old Town Hall in the middle of it like an old tappit hen with her brood of chicks tailing away behind on either side of her – and let you not be making the mistake of thinking a tappit hen is only a pint measure and nothing else, for it’s as good a fowl as ever shed fleas. Ay, they call us “Lousy Lauder”, and where’s the harm in that? since closeness is company and “as snug as a bug in a rug” is the saying for comfort all the world over.’
Which seemed just the right moment to ogle the Princess, who smiled back in delicious encouragement, but only led him imperceptibly on to tell her other homely Scots soubriquets that linked places and their attendant great families together.
‘Have Lord Cassillis and the Kennedy family or their place any nickname such as Lousy Lauder?’ she demanded.
‘Ay, the Kennedys have their tag right enough.
“ ‘Tween Wigtown and the town o’ Ayr,
Portpatrick and the Cruives o’ Cree,
Ye shall not get a lodging there
Except ye court a Kennedy.”’
Louey clapped her hands in delight. ‘That’s grim and inhospitable enough even for the present Cassillis, stalking The Hague in his scowl and steeple hat. More, I say, I must have more.’
He told her that the Leslies got their name from the Less Lee, and that
‘ “Between the Less Lee and the Mair
Leslie slew a knight and left him there.”’
He told her the Gordon’s Gramercie,
‘ “To curse and swear and damn and lee,
and that’s the Gordons’ Gramercie.”’
‘And old Huntly, the head of the Gordons, kept up the family reputation until they cut off his head this spring and he’d none to do it with, the more’s the pity, for I like a good swearer, I like a good liar too, I hate your damned insipid lies.’
‘Have Montrose and the Grahams their password too?’
He admitted rather reluctantly that they were called the Gallant Grahams, but chuckled slyly as he repeated the rhyme:
‘ “Wad the Gallant Grahams hut stand by me,
&
nbsp; The dogs might douk in English bluid
Ere a foot’s breadth I wad flinch or flee!” ’
Louey kept her head down over her drawing so as not to show her pleasure that even some country minstrel long ago should know so well what like were the Grahams, and their leader now here today.
But she had not cared for the sound of that chuckle. ‘I suppose,’ she said in a tone of careless contempt, ‘that is why that soldier of fortune Sir John Hurry swaggers so insolently here, since he’s got the leader of the Grahams to “stand by him”.’
Lauderdale exploded with an oath that startled Honthorst, who understood it, more than herself. But it was she who heard Lauderdale exclaim in the same breath, ‘He’ll not have him here long then!’
She tried to get more from him, but he shut up his full mouth like a puckered seam in the middle of his baggy face, and she dared not rouse his suspicion.
It was enough though to convince her that if Lauderdale were plotting mischief, it was against Montrose.
Now it was Honthorst’s job, so she told him as soon as the Scots lord had unsteadily departed, to find out what he could from his end; and very comically rueful he was about it, being sent back to his old bad haunts just as he had grown respectable, back to a woman of the town that he had abjured, in order to bribe her present client’s secrets out of her, and all for the sake of his lady’s love for another man. ‘Did ever a true knight in romance do as much?’
With superhuman restraint he just refrained from adding, ‘for nothing’. It would not have been true, for in answer she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him as she had once done years ago and never since, – but not as she had done it then, out of mischief and piqued curiosity, but with such deep warmth of affection as made him know that he had his own place in her heart, and for ever.
After that he set to work with the cunning of a Machiavelli and the persistence of Lauderdale himself, and discovered that there was indeed a design for Aank and his gang to set on Montrose and kill him when riding alone, except for a single attendant, when sent for by the King (as he would suppose) to a secret interview with King Charles at a country house outside The Hague.
The Bride Page 23