He could not speak. He was glad not to look at her. He bent his head in obedience and read the familiar words to himself. It was many years since he had done so.
‘I did not put the marker,’ he said.
‘Do you remember that bit?’
‘I knew it once by heart.’
Once he had quoted it to Magdalen when he had been a boy home for the holidays from St Andrews, and she a shy lovely child of fifteen. He remembered the evening he had done that, the songs and dances with his sisters and the friends he had brought from college – over twenty years ago. It must have been Magdalen who had put that sprig of herb between the pages.
Less than ever now could he look at this girl beside him who had waited in such danger to save his life, and whom he had outraged in thought.
He stood staring down at the open book, seeing no more of it, pulling himself together as best he could; but it was not easy, for all his recent thoughts of her had been darkened by the violence of his desire and hatred, and it was hard to realize how different was this witch with the wild hair and subtle eyes from his unjust imagination of her.
‘You must have learned it by heart again now,’ said Louey.
But he still did not move. He said slowly, ‘What can I say to you, who have done this for me?’
‘Nothing, for I’ve done nothing.’
She fell into a chair, feeling utterly weary and disillusioned, the reaction against all her terrors telling her that nothing had been worth them. And she knew now who had put that marker, she had known all along.
‘It’s all worked out without me and I might just as well have never done anything – it’s always the way when one thinks one is being heroic.’
‘It doesn’t make it any less heroic.’
But he still would not look at her. He was still standing by the table, staring down at that book. And under that book were the verses he had written – about her?
All she had gone through had been a fuss about nothing. ‘They wouldn’t have killed me anyway,’ she said.
‘Not if you’d time to explain who you were. But they’d have wanted no witness of their crime and might have struck quickly. In any case, your name would have been blasted for ever.’
‘Oh well, you know now how little value it is to me.’
‘I know now how little value I need attach to that,’ he said, able at last to turn and smile at her. ‘I don’t know why you want me to believe the worst of you, but you lose your pains. I know now what you are.’
‘And I know now what you believe,’ she thought, but found she did not dare to say it, only—‘What is that?’
He looked at the pale face framed in the hood, the long line of her throat within the black folds of her cloak, at the proud unconscious grace of her; he went down on one knee and took her hands in his, and kissed them very gently.
‘Oh rare black swan,’ he said.
It was too much. She began to cry softly, helplessly, the tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘No, no, you are all wrong about me. I am not rare at all.’ (‘A Commonwealth’ he had written – he should judge how common.) ‘I will tell you—’ but he interrupted her with a gesture, shaking his head.
‘You don’t want to hear, then? You think it will be so bad?’ But what did it matter? ‘It doesn’t matter to you what I am.’
‘It will matter to me all my life,’ he said, ‘and after, I think.’ He was standing there by the table as before, but now he was looking down at her and not at the book. ‘I can promise you nothing of my future,’ he said, ’so why should you give me of your past? It was lived before you met or thought of me. It cannot be mine. Nor is my past free to give you.’
‘Ah, but whoever thinks of a man’s past follies?’
‘I was not thinking of them. I was thinking of all those years with my wife, a companionship reaching even further back than our marriage, right into our childhood’s days together, and forward into our children. All that has been taken from you. We meet only here and now.’
‘I know that. Your life has been made up without me. You have no need of me. I can give you nothing.’
‘You have given affection and hostility, both dear to me.’
She was startled into a smile. ‘Take care.’ she said. ‘I have not much to give of the latter.’
‘And now I have got to get you home. How did you come?’
She told him as she stood up, stumbling with fatigue, and about the man she had knocked down with her ring. ‘Rupert once showed me how to use it.’
He cursed, a thing unusual with him. ‘Did he see your face?’
‘No, I’d a mask, and it was pitch dark; all I could see was that he was short and stout, and his voice was English – or Scottish. We can look at them all in the next few days and see who’s got a black eye. It would be too good to be true if it’s Lauderdale. Or perhaps the Reverend Robert Baillie. Or even Ned Hyde!’
She was shaking with a sudden wild spurt of laughter, her cloak slipped from her shoulder, and he saw the deep bruised marks of his fingers where he had gripped her arm in that blind moment of passion. She hastily covered it again, blushing furiously and trying to go on talking fast, but it was no good. He was looking at her without hearing anything she said. He did not speak. He put the cloak round her and held her for a moment in his arms, and she put up her face and he kissed it.
Then he took up the sword from the table and held it under his cloak but did not sheath it, and they walked down the stairs and into the streets where now no light showed at all, and along to the door in the wall of the garden at the end of the Voorhout, and there she slipped through and he heard her bolt it after her.
All the way they had never spoken, for it was safer not; and now he walked back alone and up into his empty room where the clock ticked so loud and the lamp that had been lit so long was burning low at last, and looked down at the table, at the History of the World that he used to carry himself on his saddle-bow when he rode back to school. He took it up to put away, for he was always careful of that book, and saw beneath it the letter that Hurry had begun to write to him, and the caricature of Hurry that Louey had sketched. He picked that up too to look at it, smiling in delight at its cleverness, and at the courage that could do anything so acute and witty at such a moment.
Beside it was the sheet of paper with the rhymes that he had scribbled at odd moments. These then were what she had been reading and had covered with that quick nervous gesture when she showed him the Raleigh. He stood looking down at them, and wished she had not read them.
Then he sat down and wrote:
‘The golden laws of love shall be
Beneath thine image hung.
A single heart – a simple eye –
A true and constant tongue.
Let no man for more loves pretend
Than he has hearts in store.
True love begun will never end -
Love one and love no more.’
XVII
Next morning Montrose went to see the Queen of Bohemia and told her that if he succeeded in his enterprise in Scotland he would have the presumption on his return to ask for the hand of her daughter Louise.
They were walking in her garden where the sun was shining again and the birds shouting for joy after last night’s rain. Elizabeth paused to observe a blackbird that was pulling a particularly juicy fat worm out of the lawn; all her attention seemed to be focused on this fascinating object.
At last she said in a low voice that seemed to come from a long way off, ‘I am so glad it is Louey. She is my favourite too, really, though I had begun to think Sophie might prove even more amusing.’ Then she moved on towards the bench in the summer-house, for she suddenly found that she was tired, a discovery so remarkable that she was convinced she must be ill; or perhaps she had grown old, all in a few minutes, and no doubt it was quite right she should do so. She was fifty- three, though she could never believe it, nor anyone else, and this man beside her, whom she had been thinking of as
near her own age, was not quite thirty-seven and wanted to marry her daughter.
She struggled with a suffocating sense of indignation. She did not know why she should have given that complacent answer without thinking it over first. He had startled her into it and she had spoken to gain time, but why should she be discreet and unlike herself, why should she be afraid of him? And she struggled now to find reasons for that unreasoning indignation, but here her inveterate honesty gave her small chance.
He was too old for Louey, that was it; eleven years were too big a difference, there had only been a few months between herself and her husband. Well, but there were sixteen years between herself and Montrose, and she had never noticed it.
And rank (it was odd she had not thought of that first), he was not of royal birth. But he was chief of as proud a family in Scotland as hers, and her own Scots blood and traditions told her that that was of more worth than any of these petty European princelings.
But what was this she had heard (and here her indignation did indeed swell till she felt it would choke her) of his being so devoted to his wife that he had never even looked at another woman since her death? – except perhaps herself, came the inevitable after-thought, her humour now also taking sides against her, while her sense and knowledge of the world insisted on reminding her that his wife had been dead four years now, and that a man of his age who had been happily married so long was unlikely to live without any woman for the rest of his life.
No, it was all quite natural, and that was what made it so depressing, she supposed. People did not live in fairy-tales any longer, and it was no use wishing they did.
She smiled as they sat down on the seat, and told him she had been expecting this for some time.
‘Liar! Liar! Liar!’ shouted the blackbird, who had swallowed his worm. Why on earth should she say all these ridiculous things like any other mother with marrying daughters, even like that humbug Amelia? And she flatly contradicted herself.
‘I didn’t expect it one bit,’ she said, ‘though I’d thought perhaps you might be in love.’
That was true, for he had been more distrait with her lately, and damnably polite, she had wondered if anything were wrong. She had noticed nothing in Louey – perhaps she did not notice her daughters enough.
‘But why Louey?’ she asked. Yes, why indeed? When Etta would have made him such a much better wife, so neat and sweet and pretty and good, with all the meekness and domestic virtues that she credited to the late Lady of Montrose. From all she had heard, his wife must have been very like Etta – it would have been more faithful of him to have loved Etta. And Louey would not make a good wife at all, he must see that, yet how perverse men were!
He was answering her question with a smile: ‘For all the reasons, no doubt, that make her your favourite, her laughter and her candour and her likeness to you.’
‘Oh, Jamie Graham, you’re a wise man and I’m an old fool.’
‘To give consent? For you have given it, haven’t you?’
‘Would I dare refuse it to a Graham? Your house has got the better of the Stuarts too often for that. You’ll have to ask King Charles’ consent too – but he’ll never refuse that to his Viceroy in Scotland, since your betrothal is not to be till then. But why wait for it till you return?’
‘Because that will make it the worse for her if I do not return. I do not wish her to be tied to me in any way until I have a fairer chance of life to offer her.’
Then why speak to me of it now at all?’
‘Because,’ he said simply, ‘I wish to be tied to her.’
She laughed, and wondered if it had as cracked and harsh a sound in his ears as it had in hers. ‘Go and find her,’ she said, ‘and when you have told her, send her to me here. But perhaps you have already told her.’
‘No, I have not done that.’
‘Send her to me first,’ she said, ‘and then she can return to you. I can’t wait for the lovers’ scene to finish.’
He went; and she watched him go through the sunlit garden and into the dark doorway of the house, straight and vigorous, walking with the long easy springy stride of a man who finds it nothing to walk twenty miles in a day over the heather. She had never known a man like this before; if she had, her life would have been very different. But men like this were not born in every generation. It was Louey, of the next generation, and not yet twenty-six, who had the luck.
Why Louey? Louey was like her, he had said, and not for flattery, for he did not flatter. Unintrospective, she had never thought that Louey was like her. Now she thought of it and wondered with a slight shock if that were why they were apt to be attracted by the same man. That handsome rascal Goring, how they had laughed together with him! Nothing was sacred to him, not even Sir Philip Sidney’s dying words. ‘My greed is greater than thine,’ he had said as he snatched Louey’s glass of wine.
And de l’Epinay, poor de l’Epinay – no laughing matter there. Her youngest son, that reckless, furious boy Philip, had killed de l’Epinay and she had never been able to give him her real forgiveness, though Rupert had forced her to make a show of it. She knew now, three years later, what de l’Epinay had been, a charming scamp, a professional lover, a boaster of his conquests. That made no difference to the fact that for the first time in her life, at fifty, she had been conquered by his appeal to her senses.
But Louey had never been really in love with de l’Epinay: that was what had made it so cruel. She had only amused herself with him and taken him away from herself as much as she could.
It flashed across her mind for the first time that this might have been in part to protect her mother from making too great a fool of herself. Unbearable fancy! It would be better to believe what Amelia had so industriously insinuated, that Louey had been de l’Epinay’s mistress. No, it would not – good God, it would not! And all the less now that she was to go to Montrose.
She sat stiff and cold in the sunlight, and all she said when Louey stood before her was, ‘Were you ever de l’Epinay’s mistress?’
‘No, Mother.’
Elizabeth raised her great melancholy eyes from under their arched lids and saw her daughter’s eyes answer her as clearly as her words. So that was well. Odd that she should have wanted to ask it all this time and never been able to till now.
Then she saw her daughter’s face on its own account and was shocked at its pallor and the heavy rings under the eyes.
‘What has Jamie Graham been saying to you?’
‘Nothing. He told me you wanted me here.’
‘Then is there any reason for your looking like a piece of paper with two ink smudges? You might have been up all night.’
‘I might,’ said Louey recklessly, ‘but I wasn’t. I went to bed late, though.’
‘Bah! I’ve no patience with girls who need eight hours’ sleep always. I often sit up till five and it makes no odds. Run away and apply your paint-box to your cheeks, it’s the best use you can make of it.’
‘But, Mother, why did you send for me? Did you only want to ask that of de l’Epinay?’
‘Only? Is that “only” to you? I’ve waited three years to ask it. Now go back to your lover and answer what he asks you.’
‘My – lover? What has he been saying?’
‘Get him to tell you. He’s still there?’
‘In the studio, where he found me.’
‘Ah yes, painting is far more useful to a girl than music. I ought to have remembered that, when I made Honthorst do his portrait.’
‘Mother?’
‘What the devil is the matter with the girl? Why do you look at me like that?’
‘You sound so’ – (“old” was what Louey had nearly said) – ’so sad.’
Elizabeth boxed her ears.
The bewildered Louey ran to the studio. Montrose was sitting at the table, looking at a drawing which he laid down as she burst into the room.
‘What have you been saying to Mother? I think she’s mad. She sends for me, and th
en all she asks is, was I de l’Epinay’s mistress?’
‘Is that so small an “all”? Of how many should she have asked it?’
‘No – but don’t laugh. What does it all mean?’
‘That I have asked her consent for me to propose for your hand when or if I return from Scotland.’
That paper-white face of hers went a deep pink, the ‘ink smudges’ blazed. ‘And why, in the name of God?’
‘For some, at least, of the usual reasons,’ he said, still amused, but in the same instant realized that she was as unhappy as she was angry.
‘The other reasons, I suppose, being that I was at your house half last night and that you owe me reparation in case it should be discovered – oh yes, and to clear me in Hurry’s squinny eyes! As if it mattered what he thinks!’
‘I have seen Hurry this morning,’ he said sternly. ‘You have no need to defy what he thinks. And you pay me small compliment in bringing him into the question.’
She hung her head ruefully, her face already white again, all courage draining out of her at his tone.
He took her hands and looked down at her tired eyelids; had she slept at all after he had taken her back last night?
‘Don’t you think,’ he said, smiling at her, ‘that I’m more likely to consider my wishes than Hurry’s opinions?’
‘Ah, but it isn’t your wish. You don’t want to be mixed up with a woman at all – or when you do, it’s against your true will and you are angry both with yourself and me. You hated me last night when you came into your room and found me there, and you’d been hating me for days before that. Oh, but now,’ she cried, tearing her hands from his, ‘you have made me more ashamed than if you – than if—’ But with all her outspokenness she could not say it. She turned from him and fell into a chair, pressing her hands over her eyes, but still seeing his face as it had been last night when he had thrown his sword on the table and come towards her.
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