‘Oh, but—!’ she cried, and stopped. There was no need to say it. All three of them knew the danger of that.
‘And Ned Hyde?’
‘Will go to Spain with Cottington.’
‘Is that necessary?’
‘It is to him, it seems. He is well satisfied, and so should we all be, for King Charles has now finally rejected the Covenanters’ terms. He has broken with them altogether. He has given me my commission, and sworn in writing that he will do nothing in any matter relating to Scotland without first consulting me. So there is nothing left for me to do now but start on my travels again.’
‘And when to Scotland?’
‘As soon as I have revisited Sweden and Germany, where King Charles has nominated me as his ambassador, to raise money loans and war material. And the sooner, the more likely to succeed.’
‘So you will leave here—?’
‘This evening,’ he said, ‘for Breda.’
It was Elizabeth who exclaimed, ‘But you cannot ride all night!’
‘There is a full moon, clear sky, and a road – better conditions than I’ve had on most night marches!’
Louey was silent, wondering what was troubling her most.
That he must leave tonight? No, that did not matter. Whenever he left, it would be as though he had spent only a moment here. Already he was half away, thinking of what he must next do, and next and next, now that at last his work was to begin.
That Charles was going to Paris? – Hyde to Spain? Yes, that was it. These were worse news than that Montrose would now leave Holland. But were they? Wasn’t she being nervous, foolish, losing her courage really only because Montrose was leaving – just as she had vowed she would not do?
Charles had rejected Argyll and openly declared for Montrose, appointed him his ambassador, had sworn in writing that he would do nothing in Scottish matters without him – and Hyde, who knew him best, was ’satisfied’.
‘Satisfied because he is going to Spain, the selfish pig!’ she broke out. ‘Hyde’s been wanting that for weeks past, I know!’
Her mother laughed. ‘Poor faithful Ned! He’s less selfish by a long way than most of them.’
‘There’s no room for anyone to be selfish in this game.’
‘You can’t alter human nature,’ said Elizabeth.
She left them abruptly. It would be tiresome to see him looking at Louey, but it was more tiresome to see him avoid looking at her.
They walked down the terraces towards the river. He seemed suddenly to have finished all there was to tell.
‘I’ve never seen you wear the breeches before,’ he said; ‘is it a warning for our married life?’
‘Or for your next campaign? Shall I join you in Scotland? Why should I not? Wasn’t there a woman led a troop under your command in your earlier campaigns?’
‘A Dalziel. That family are all wild as wolves.’
‘And am I too tame?’
‘I’m not. I was not in love with her, that is the difference.’
Princesses had fought in the Fronde wars in France, King Charles’ own first cousin, La Grande Mademoiselle, was even now showing herself off as a warrior. Why should it be impossible for her?
But looking at his face, she knew it was, and would not waste more time on it. But there was no time, however much she saved it, to say one-millionth part of all she had wanted to say when next they met again; nor would the words come into her head; they had fled, all of them, and all her thoughts.
She knew only that she was walking here beside him down to the river, and that he was no longer reaching out towards his enterprise, as he had been when with her and her mother, but was with her now utterly.
‘What will you do when I am gone?’ he asked.
‘Paint, and pray. I think I shall pray best while I am painting.’
He thought how love to Magdalen had meant possession and all the sweet earthly cares of home and children, the quiet continuity of life; but that it was Louey’s art, and power of faith in things outside her own experience, that had set him free to love her. Whatever happened to him, her true life should be beyond the power of human wreckage.
‘Pray for what will last,’ he said, ‘then your prayers will be answered. What we get out of life is nothing, what we give to it is all.’
‘Shall I not pray for your victory and your life?’
‘Yes, if it be God’s will. But we can neither read nor force that will. “Oh Lord, do it, or it will be the worse for you!” I’ve heard Warriston pray so.’
She looked up to see the laugh in his face while he said that, and saw it pass like a shadow as his gaze grew clear and grave again, holding her own.
But in rebellion she cried out, ‘How could I ever believe in God if He let you be defeated?’
‘One cannot always tell defeat at the time. God sees further than we do. A cause has been won by its defeats.’
‘Oh, but is this cause worth it? Young Charles is not – and Scotland turned sour and hideous under Argyll. Why should you give all – all – perhaps your life?’ She gasped, for she had been trying not to say it, but now it came and she could not help it, and she cried, ‘If you give your life, it will be for nothing.’
He said, ‘Did the three Wise Men ever trouble as to what had become of their gifts, when the Babe to whom they gave them had died upon the Cross?’
She hid her face from him till it should be calmer, turned aside and looked down at the river that flowed on and on through the trees towards the sea. She knew that his words would echo on and on through her mind to the end of her life.
The reflected light from the river glimmered up over her face, giving it the clear and mobile look of water. He stood by her, watching it; then he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her towards him. ‘Do you wish you had never met me?’ he asked.
‘No, no, no!’
‘Yet I’m leaving you to the worst of it. To go out and fight, perhaps to die for what we love, that would be easy; to live for it, on through the years, keeping it fresh and living, that is a harder thing. If I have to die for what we both love, then remember that I leave it to you to cherish and pray for.’
She knew that he meant more than her uncle’s and her cousin’s cause.
He sat with them there that evening at dinner; they had two or three paid musicians playing from time to time in the little painted gallery, an unusual luxury, and doubtless paid for, like most other luxuries in their odd establishment, by the little man with the pleasant ugly face who sat at the further end of the table, ‘True Towser’, the first Earl of Craven.
He had been here most evenings since they came; and everything else was the same as on other evenings, the shining glass and porcelain, the great bowl of glossy fruit, the wide-awake faces of the flowers; everything was the same, but everything was different, for Montrose was sitting there on their mother’s right hand. Louey could see his face across the table, its strong lines softened by the light of the long heart-shaped flames of the tall candles in the centre, and those clear steady eyes that looked towards her mother as she talked, but rested in the pauses on herself.
Behind him the door windows stood open on to the terrace, and she could see the bats spinning their mazy dance through the twilit air, looping the shadows together, minute harbingers of the darkness that had already swallowed up the great shapes of the further trees by the river, and was now advancing slowly round the house.
White moths fluttered in from that dimming scene; they spun above the white flowers on the table and round the candles; notes of music fell soft and sparkling through the warm air, and through it all came the sound of her mother’s voice, varied, vivid, in brilliant gay talk, the voice of all the charming women in the world, rippling on and on through men’s lives to make them forget the darkness of pain and death by bloody wars and cruel fortune, forget that kings have died horribly and their servants must fight for them, to make them believe that life is a glorious thing that lasts for ever.
&n
bsp; Behind that voice Louey listened to the murmur of the river flowing out there through their garden down to the sea, into the North Sea – and on the other side of it, sailing north, to the land called Scotland, cold and mountainous, where hundreds and thousands of men lay in wait to kill the man who sat here at table with them, and whose eyes were resting on herself.
Sometimes she tried to tug her thoughts into shape, to attend, not to the light talk now glancing round her and into which she found it quite easy every now and then to fling some laughing comment or scrap of mocking description, but to what he had told them this afternoon of Dorislaus’ death and its effect on all their plans. Perhaps it was a good thing it had happened – you could never tell results, and it had certainly hurried matters and brought them to a climax.
They were all setting off now on their different paths, and as Montrose himself had said, the sooner the better. Cromwell was planning this enormous expeditionary force to Ireland, and that had seemed disastrous, but it would give Montrose his best possible chance in Scotland. With Scotland behind him as it had been before, he might sweep down into England before Cromwell could get back from Ireland – yes, it might all be the best thing that could have happened.
Why was it so important for her to discover what was the best thing that could have happened? She could not tell what that was now; no one could, not even the man who sat there beside her mother, the light of the candles shining on his eyes and that grave smile. How could he look so quiet, so secure? – yes, that was the word. Wasn’t he tossing these questions over and over in his mind as she was?
But looking at him she knew that he was not, that he had made his decisions and did not feel their possible event was for him to decide. ‘Do your duty, gentlemen; leave the management to me, the event to God.’ That was what he had told his terrified officers when their small remnant of an army had been surprised at Dundee. Looking at him, she too could take those marching orders to herself.
But that was because he was there – and he would not be there for ever, not even for half an hour more; another quarter of an hour and he would have gone out into that darkness outside, and tomorrow they would sit here without him, and the next day and the next, – for how long – ‘how long, oh Lord, how long?’ These summer nights glittering with relentless starlight when she would wake to find herself so awake, so alive, how many would have to string themselves together before she could know – know for certain – that she would see him again?
‘Know for certain’ – that one might never know, however peaceful and secure life lay around them. This moment must pass, and all the other moments in their lives, and their lives too, however long they lived, they too would be things of the past, and that gallant head be laid low in the grave, however peacefully death might come to it. How then could he be secure?
And suddenly she knew that she could only find security by attaching it to where it belonged. Her love was secure because it belonged to eternity, not time; all her agony of spirit came from confusing their issues, from trying to attach her happiness to the material results of chance, like the small spider that this morning attached the end of its web to her knee as she sat drawing in the garden, and never saw that its whole elaborate structure would be destroyed the moment she moved.
Happiness must be independent of luck or success or the conditions of this troubled world, of wars and revolutions, or it would wave like a torn cobweb in the wind. ‘Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.’
Now for the first time she saw that ‘heaven’ was not hereafter, but round us and within us, a condition not of the body but the soul, not of time but eternity.
In that instant, as compellingly as if she had seen a vision of Him, she knew that God was there with them, all around them and in them: in little Craven’s tender smile for her mother, in her mother’s gay courage now flaunting for others with no consciousness of herself, in Eliza’s sad thoughts of Descartes, yes, and in Etta’s fantastic dishes of salads and sweets prettier than she had ever made them, to adorn this evening for her sister and the man to whom she must say goodbye, – ‘and in him,’ she thought finally, her eyes, that had roved startled round the table in the shock of this discovery, coming to rest again upon his face.
And he, watching her as he had been doing all through this evening, saw the strange light come into her face, a sudden peace that moved him more than had all her attempts to conquer the fear in her eyes.
He asked her when they came to say goodbye what it had been, ahd she said in that light voice of hers, ‘I think that for an instant I saw God, and not even only in your face! Give me a charm that I may do so again.’
They were out on the terrace in the thin blue darkness of the summer night, for all the company had left the dining-room and the lights there had been put out.
He said, ‘I will tell you a hymn so old that it has the ring in it of a heathen charm, as all my good Presbyterian Scots held it to be, for it was sung by my wild Irishry whom they called savages. It is Saint Patrick’s own charm, the Irish say, – they called it his Breast-Plate.’
‘And you a good Presbyterian to be telling me that! What is it?’
He took her hands and put them together, those long supple fingers, in the attitude of prayer, and held them so between his own, against his heart, his face dark above them, his eyes dark hollows, yet she could feel them upon her as his deep voice came close to her out of the night, in the insurgent rhythm of those mighty words:
‘ “I bind unto myself this day
The strong Name of the Trinity.
I bind unto myself this day
The power of Heaven,
The light of the Sun,
The whiteness of Snow,
The force of Fire.
‘The power of the Resurrection with the Ascension,
The power of the Coming to the sentence of Judgement,
I have set around me all these powers
Against the incantations of false prophets,
Against all knowledge which blinds the soul of man.”’
As if to answer and accompany that incantation from more than a thousand years ago, the church tower that overhung the garden wall broke into a peal of bells; their triumphant notes sprang out and galloped away through the night like the clarions of an army with banners.
Louey laughed wildly, clinging to him in that turmoil of magnificent sound. ‘Saint Kunera is answering you,’ she said, ‘and she was a princess of Orkney as long ago as Saint Patrick in Ireland.’
‘It is to Orkney that I am going.’
‘You take her blessing with you, then, with Saint Patrick’s charm—’
‘Which is in the name of Christ,’ he answered.
‘ “Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ in the fort,
Christ in the chariot seat,
Christ in the poop,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks to me.” ’
As he and his men rode away, she heard those words still thundering against her heart, long after the thud of his horses’ hooves had been swallowed up by the engulfing night.
Book Three
The High Lands
I
Not till the following spring was Montrose back again in Scotland. He was no longer staying at the honoured and flattered guest of one reigning monarch after another, with the Kings of Denmark and Poland, the restlessly brilliant young Queen of Sweden, the princely Electors of Germany. Since he had left Holland a few months ago, all of these had been his hosts and vied with each other in promising help to his Sovereign, the Emperor even calling a meeting at Frankfort for the purpose. A recruiting sergeant on a superior, even imperial scale, that was what Montrose called himself, using his scarlet baton of Field-Marshal of the Empire for the purpose, and in the imperi
ally sumptuous surroundings which he disliked; but, ‘once a recruiting sergeant always a recruiting sergeant, and it’s what I’ve always had to waste more than half my time on,’ he now said on the jovially grumbling note that showed him to be at last at ease again in the old soldierly surroundings that he had missed so long.
‘Waste?’ interpolated Jack Hurry, cocking an ironic eyebrow like a jagged tuft of straw.
The two had met again in Caithness. Hurry had done his job well. Sent on with an advance guard to make the first landing, he had marched south and secured the Ord of Caithness, where Montrose joined him after landing near John o’ Groats and making a preliminary dash on Thurso to summon the lairds of the countryside to take the oath of allegiance. The island of Orkney had been the base of the little expeditionary force, once they could make it from the ice-bound harbours of Denmark. Some of their ships could not make it, and had been dashed to pieces on the rocks of the islands, losing all the troops and ammunition on board.
And in that strange little town of Kirkwall in Orkney, where the clear spring daylight never seemed to fade, but painted all the outlines of the harbour and the grey stone houses, the breaking waves and the low hills, with a pale luminous edge until far into the night, there in that remote Northern air that was yet as strangely mild and soft as of one of the Islands of the Blest, two of the best leaders of the expedition died of pneumonia contracted on the frightful voyage to that temperate climate through the intemperate winter seas. These were the Earls of Kinnoull and of Morton.
Morton’s wife was governess to the little Princess Henriette, youngest child of the late King. Now she would have to leave the little girl, ‘Minette’ (her brother Charles always called her that because she was small and dainty as a kitten), with her mother, the Queen Henrietta Maria, in Paris, and return to her own children and estates in Scotland.
Like the faintest echo of some plaintively courtly tune played all those hundreds of miles away, Montrose could imagine the minor storm against him that this would arouse in Henrietta Maria’s breast, her certainty that whatever was done by him or happened to him was somehow contrived by his own perverse inclination to plague herself. He could smile at it here on the north-east coast of Scotland, yet could he afford to smile even at a crumpled rose-leaf in the bed of a far-off queen? For the Queen’s opinions and prejudices profoundly influenced her son Charles. Who would be left to influence her in Montrose’s favour now Lady Morton, his passionate partisan, had gone?
The Bride Page 27