The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  Now they splashed and shouted, ‘Be strong. Be lucky. Get money for Assynt, Assynt, Assynt, that’s all that’s needed, money for Assynt.’

  He heard them saying this yet again as he lay waiting for his wife’s reply, and when it came he felt he had known what it would be.

  ‘It is a great risk, all the more now that Montrose’s first venture has proved unlucky.’

  ‘It was not his first, it was his second, and destroyed before it began. His first venture was lucky over and over again, in six great battles, to say nothing of all his lesser engagements.’

  But at that she suddenly turned loving and pitiful and sobbed, ‘How can I let you go? What if you were killed? I should not even have a child to remember you by?’

  And though he cursed inwardly, he was proud to find she did still love him, and even if she had been disappointed in him, she at least did not want any other man.

  ‘You do love me then?’ he asked; and she clung to him until he felt that he was drowning.

  VI

  ‘That is settled then. You cannot go with me, and I will start off now by myself.’

  ‘You cannot start yet, my lord. You are wounded, you still have fever, it would not be safe.’

  ‘And do you think it safe to stay?’

  Again there came that uneasy flush. The young fellow was as sensitive as a girl. Montrose wondered if he had seemed to cast a doubt on his power to protect him. ‘I know you are in a strong position here,’ he said, ‘and that your men are as much to be trusted as yourself. In the Highlands a whole countryside can keep a secret. But I cannot wait. Every hour counts. And it is unfair to your wife.’

  ‘My wife! What wife?’ Macleod exclaimed uncontrollably, and then in haste as if to explain his bitterness, ‘You need not trouble about Christie. She’ll get what she wants, always. She has prevented my going with you – what wife is that for a man?’

  Montrose looked keenly at him. He should learn either to be master in his own house, or to put up with the position better. It was not surprising that after such an outburst the young man should avoid his eyes. Perhaps it was from that moment that he seemed to avoid his guest altogether, and certainly talked far less freely to him.

  Yet he would not hear of Montrose leaving them just yet while in this condition; if he would but wait a day or two, he said, he should have a guide across the mountains, for a drover of his was going north and Montrose could go with him disguised as a farmer from the south – the drover himself need not know who he was, and would incur no responsibility.

  ‘I had a message from him about his journey only yesterday. You probably heard him riding into the courtyard?’

  ‘I heard a horse’s hooves, yes.’

  ‘And saw the rider?’

  No, Montrose had not seen the messenger, but why should it matter, he asked. But the young man had got into one of his incoherent fits; he talked of his wife’s clan to which the messenger belonged, and enlarged on the messenger’s history, in which family pride, contempt of his own poverty, and a rather pointless dirty story became so inextricably mixed that Montrose’s wearied brain had soon to give up the attempt to follow it.

  But again and again he insisted on the certainty of the drover starting north in a day or two, and Montrose, exhausted both in mind and his still painfully wounded body, was glad enough of the delay. Indeed he knew well that he could make no journey now on foot, and that it would be as impossible for him to find the way alone across the mountain wilderness that lay to the north as when he had wandered out of his reckoning up Strath Oykell to these far western mountains.

  Canisp, Quinag, Suilven, those were the strange harsh names of some of these giants; they were not really higher than Ben Nevis, which he had seen when he had led his Highlanders across its lower slopes to their victory at Inverlochy, but they seemed so by reason of their sudden and violent enormity, as of mountains belonging not to this world. Even in the calm and sunny spell that had succeeded the mist and rain and that fierce sunset, they looked unnaturally forbidding, mounting guard round this sheltered strip of valley that enclosed the loch, the spit of low green pasture-land and its castle.

  That mountain-ridge that ran along the opposite side of the loch fastened itself on his restlessly weary and hectic imagination; wherever he looked he could not avoid the sight of it; even when he turned his back on it he knew it was there behind him, closing in on him, shutting him up in this bottle-neck of land, like a prison wall built when there were giants on the earth.

  Yes, this place was like a prison, though he had been treated kindly in it. That wretched boy with his cold red hands shambling past him was a prisoner; and his sensible comely wife, whose ruthless jaw-bone now showed so plainly beneath her fresh rosy skin, was his jailer.

  She was always taking her husband’s arm and leading him away to talk with her, walking arm-in-arm up and down, up and down beside the long curved jaws of the little bay, their fair heads bent in earnest contemplation of their feet, Macleod continually checking his loose sprawl to keep an even pace with her short determined steps. No couple could seem more united in equal companionship, and yet – ‘My wife? What wife? I have no wife!’ Had the lad really said that, or was it someone long ago in a play? Whichever it was, whatever the reason or no reason, the sight of them walking thus together made Montrose uneasy.

  Yet if Neil Macleod seemed less friendly to him than at first, his wife Christian was certainly more so. She talked more at meals and more to her guest, she talked now a great deal in fact, telling him one thing after another about their encumbered estates and their false and wicked relatives who had withheld this their own place from them until this very last year, telling him too of their rapacious neighbours the Mackenzies, and other septs of their own clan the Macleods, all of whom had done them heavy injuries in times past and were now a constant menace.

  ‘And there is no money,’ she said, ‘if only we had more money!’

  As she talked, her husband sat silent, crumbling his bread into pellets and pushing them this way and that on the table, eating little and drinking a good deal, lowering up at her under his bushy fair brows like a suspicious bullock. Montrose answered her from time to time with some difficulty both in collecting his words and attending to hers, which clanked against his dulled senses like chains. The wavering light of the tallow dips fell on the smooth coils and blobs of heavy fair hair that surrounded her head, making it massive like a helmet, outlined against the great stone hood of the fireplace behind her. He could just make out the crest of their family carved in the stone, the ‘Sun in its Splendour’, with its graven lines radiating out from it in a halo behind that powerful feminine head. ‘Luceo non uro’ ran the motto above the crest.

  It was not easy to rest in this house, even when alone. He escaped from it when he could. The little waves in the loch lapped incessantly against the foreshore, reminding him of the sound of the waves on the white shingle below Rossdhu where he had spent his schoolboy holidays, - reminding him of the ruffled water in the canals those windy spring days in Holland a whole year ago now, when he had stood beside Louey and seen the light from that water rippling up from it, clear and sensitive as her laughter, over her tender, brilliant face.

  And they had stood beside the river that high summer day when he rode to Rhenen to say goodbye to her, and the sound of the church bells of Saint Kunera echoed up from it as if chiming far below the deep running water.

  ‘You take Saint Kunera’s blessing with you then, and Saint Patrick’s charm.’ That was what she said. Was she praying for him now, on this evening of early May, there at Rhenen, walking by the river in this green dusk, while before him the loch of Assynt turned to a shimmer of grey, and the shadows of the great hills crept across the loch and gathered round the castle? A dream had fallen on him; her face was the only real and living thing in a world of shadows and lapping, whispering water.

  He tried to shake it off him, to test his strength by walking along the shore, where those lo
ng low ridges of bleached limestone rock now gleamed in the dusk like the whitened bones of beasts long since dead. His legs felt as if they would give under him at every step, and his head as if it were swimming above him at some distance from the rest of his body; no doubt his efforts were increasing his fever, and that was why he had this illusion that he was being followed - just as he had believed that Louey was walking beside him in the rain on the hillside.

  But this present imagination was of no friendly familiar, no wraith of his other self; he was being watched, dogged, by some-thing alert and cunning, for its own purposes. He rounded a corner of the shore, then turned sharply back, and saw at some distance the elderly red-bearded servant whom he had first seen on entering the castle. He had hastened his steps as Montrose rounded the rock, and now fell back, disconcerted at being seen. Montrose stood still to wait for him and ask why he was following him, but the servant, after coming a few steps forward, turned round and loafed off towards the castle.

  That sharp turn and sudden standstill had made Montrose realize his weakness. Feeling very giddy, he sat down on the rock to rest, and tried to think why the servant had been following him, but he could not, the buzzing in his head was too loud, and now the wavelets against the shore sounded louder still; he could hear voices in them, hushed, half-whispering voices, they came all round him, from behind him as well as from in front on that low white shore.

  This must be the fever again; but no, he could hear not only voices now but words, coming nearer and nearer, - ‘twenty-five thousand pounds Scots’, they were saying in a woman’s insistent voice, ‘think - think - think what we could do—’

  (‘Think - think - think how little it will mean to you to die the richer by a thousand pounds!’)

  Who had said that? Why, fat Ned Hyde in his miserable lodging at The Hague, telling him with pardonable self-satisfaction how he had thus rebuked some time-serving friend in England. That was a great little man, a pity he had gone to Spain instead of staying with his King this past winter.

  Thinking of Ned Hyde and of young King Charles, he had missed the answer to that fierce feminine injunction, but he could not in any case have heard it, for the words that answered her were mumbled and broken on a note of misery. They came as from a much further distance than those brisk tones – and then suddenly they stopped. No woman spoke again. There was no sound now but the soft wordless lap-lapping of the waves.

  So harsh and abrupt was that silence that it startled his feverish senses sharper than any sound. He lifted his head and looked quickly round at the grassy slope behind him, and saw Neil Macleod and his wife standing there, staring at him, and in Neil’s hand a letter.

  For an instant they stood as still as if they had been turned to stone, and then Neil began to stuff the letter into the pocket of his leather coat, but his wife snatched it from him and smoothed it out and came forward to Montrose, striking at it with her other hand, her fair face pushed up into a worried frown.

  The debts on this estate,’ she said, ‘are the curse of our lives. You have fairly caught us at our usual game, my lord, discussing how under heaven we can make both ends meet.’

  He said nothing. He looked at the piece of stiff paper crackling and curving in her hand, a small moving patch of white in the dusk. The silence gathered about them again like a thundercloud about to break over their heads.

  But it did not break. Christian Macleod saw to that. She began to say what a shock it had given them to see their guest had walked so far; obviously he had tired himself out. She had given Hamish, Neil’s body-servant, instructions to keep an eye on him whenever he went out, so as to be at hand in case of need – had Montrose perhaps noticed his following him?

  ‘You must give my Lord Marquis your arm, Neil, – indeed, my lord, you must not try to rise and walk without help.’

  With a very ill grace Neil shambled forward. Yet Montrose felt that his reluctance to help him showed more kindness of heart than his wife’s concern for him. He lifted his head and looked him in the face, but the young laird’s eyes fell before his and he stared at the ground as he awkwardly held out his arm.

  ‘Will you tell me,’ Montrose said, ‘why you wish me to come back with you to your house? If it is to betray me to my enemies, then I have a last favour to ask you. You have your dirk. If you kill me now, you can tell them that you did it when I was trying to escape, and you will save me a long torture and humiliation. Will you do this for me, Macleod, and I will forgive you my death, for I see that you are helpless.’

  A low sobbing moan like a hurt animal’s broke from the young man; he crumpled up on his knees before Montrose, but in the same instant his wife darted forward and pulled him to his feet, crying shame on him for taking such an insult so tamely, – ‘but no wonder his heart is broken at your suspicions, my lord, and indeed they come ill from you after all we have done to prove our friendship!’

  She was talking now, talking, talking, the air was full of her sharp little cries, of the indignant rustle of her voice, and ‘Hamish!’ she called again and again, the name shrilling high through the dim air, answered by the discordant cries of the startled gulls.

  Hamish came running over the dark slope of the land; his mistress spoke rapidly to him in Gaelic, reproaching him for not keeping a better watch on the Lord Marquis; he and Neil helped him to his feet and walked him back to the castle, on either side of him and each with a hand on his arm. Now indeed he was a prisoner and could not escape, and why did that woman still try to preserve any contrary fiction, walking beside them, still talking, still fluttering that false white paper in her hand? Or was he indeed delirious and had accused them wrongly?

  He said in a low voice to Neil, while she was still talking, ‘If I have wronged you, I am sorry. I know that you would not willingly betray me.’

  But no sound came in answer from the young man, and his head was too bent for Montrose to see the face.

  The moon, still in her first quarter, had begun to show plainly in the clear sky as they came into the courtyard of Ardvreck, and there they stopped dead.

  Montrose felt Macleod’s shoulder go rigid against his, and from the horror in the other man’s flesh there shot a spasm down his own arm as if a sinew had been twisted. This he felt before he raised his eyes and saw that the courtyard was full of mounted men.

  One of them spurred his horse a little forward at the sight of them.

  ‘Is this the prisoner?’ he said.

  Macleod’s hand dropped from Montrose’s arm like a stone falling. He swung round and without a word broke into a blundering run, out of the courtyard, away over the moor.

  His wife stepped forward.

  ‘You have come very quickly, sir,’ she said. ‘Is it Major-General Holbourn himself?’

  The burly man on the big horse dismounted.

  ‘Yes, madam. We left on the instant that we got your message, and your husband, I suppose, despatched it as soon as he heard from your brother, Captain Andrew Monro. It was I advised Monro writing to you after Corbiesdale so that your husband might do all in his power to apprehend any fugitives, and particularly James Graham should he come your way.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I have my brother’s letter here.’

  She was crackling it backwards and forwards, showing some nervousness now, but Holbourn took no notice of that. In the dim air his round red face glowed fresh from his long ride as he set about his business.

  ‘We’ve another prisoner here. Have you anywhere we can put them?’

  ‘There are the cellars. Hamish, show the way.’

  Her voice had won back to something harsher than its usual briskness.

  ‘And my men?’ Holbourn was saying instantly. ‘You have food for them? They can quarter in the barns. And feed for the horses – madam? They’ve had some hard going.’

  ‘Yes, General, yes.’ The harassed female voice came again, anxious to sound eager and obliging, yet with a strained note in it as though at any moment it might break into a scream of r
age at all these orders. ‘And you will dine with us, General – we were not expecting your arrival so soon, but you will find us ready – and glad, very glad to entertain you. My husband – I cannot think where – oh, he has gone to make arrangements for your men, that is why he has left us. This is a small place, and simple, but—’

  That voice was still trailing away behind him, getting fainter and fainter above him, up there in the open air of the spring evening, as Montrose was led by two of Holbourn’s men down into the cellars, and there turned to see the other prisoner who was being brought down after him.

  It was Major Sinclair.

  The soldiers went out. The heavy doors swung to on them, and they heard the rusty bolts clanking as they were drawn, and the chill darkness closed all round them, shutting out each other’s faces.

  VII

  ‘IT is you, isn’t it, Sinclair? Where did they get you?’

  ‘On the moor, sir.’

  ‘Did they find Sir Edward?’

  ‘No, and if they do, he’ll be past them. He hadn’t long to last. So Macleod sold you, my lord.’

  ‘For twenty-five thousand pounds Scots.’

  ‘You know the figure!’

  ‘I heard them mention that sum. I think I knew then that it was my price.’

  Had he known even before then that Macleod would betray him? Probably. It was an odd relief to be certain. He was more free now in this cold darkness with his friend than he had been with that whispering couple while they were making up their minds to betray him.

  The two men talked a little, but not much. There was no purpose now to serve by straining their eyes into the future. There was nothing Montrose could do now any more to persuade Macleod and try to counterbalance his wife’s influence, to test his strength by seeing how far he could walk, and wonder if he had not better try to make a dash for it alone, ill as he was, rather than wait here and trust to those whom he had begun to feel untrustworthy. There was nothing more to be done but sleep, and he wrapped himself in his cloak and slept more soundly than he had done since he had come to Assynt.