There was no sentry outside; he must have gone in to share the drink with the others. The old hound lay like one made of stone, his front paws stretched outside his kennel, turned white by the moon; the grass gleamed silver with dew; from the grey stone dove-cot there shone flecks of soft white from the sleeping doves. The few shadows, sharp and black, of trees and walls lay at a distance.
But Montrose had only to reach that dark clump of trees across the field and he would be safe for the moment anyway. The wall of one of the policies ran towards it, and he made for that first of all so as to keep in its shadow as long as he could.
Just as he was reaching it, three or four troopers came out from beside it, towards the castle, singing and laughing together and walking slackly, at ease, but not drunkenly. They were none of the regular guard, and Montrose guessed at once that they must have got wind of the revelry up at the castle and come up from their quarters to see if they could get their bellyful of drink. He had no weapon, he was far too weak to outrun them, and they must have seen him before he saw them in the shadow of the wall, for they were making straight towards him, and now they hailed him.
He walked on resolutely, keeping his head down and his cloak drawn about his face. But now they were running towards him, they had reached him, one seized his cloak and pulled it back, another laid hold of his arm. It was the wounded one, but he scarcely noticed that, except to know that he could at least strike one blow for his freedom, and he swung his good arm round and hit the fellow who was holding him just under the jaw, knocking him out.
But now the others were on top of him, pulling him down. His weakness and the agony of his wounded arm as they dragged at it made him lose consciousness for a moment only, but it seemed some hours of darkness shot through with fiery stabs of pain before he came to and found himself lying on the ground with that tortured arm pinioned to the other behind his back, and above him the white placid face of the moon.
Then other faces swam across it, dark, twisted in jeering triumph. They were saying things to each other and to himself, but he heard none of them. They hauled him up to his feet, he would have fallen but they held him up, and dragged him back to the castle.
Next day Jean Durhame confronted General Leslie and his chief officers together with the members of the Committee of Estates in Edinburgh that had been sent to give greater security to the expedition, since public feeling was showing itself so strong on the side of the prisoner. She met them with the same aloof courage that she had shown the night before, an air too impersonal even for scorn. She merely stated her position, and theirs. She alone had contrived the escape, and regretted only that it had failed. Her husband and servants knew nothing about it; her husband had in fact been in bed when they arrived, sent there by her for his rheumatism (‘Get out from under my feet!’ was what she had really said).
The old laird looked at her admiringly and without any surprise. It was true he had known nothing of what was happening, but he knew well that this was what she would do.
‘Argyll dares not hurt me, and so you will find it,’ she finished coolly. They knew that, and set her and her household at liberty, only binding her over to appear before the Estates if summoned, but knowing well that she would not be.
Most surprising of all, she even managed to see the prisoner again alone before they went on their way. She would not let Montrose speak his admiration or his gratitude, nor did she give any sign of pity for his disappointment.
‘You did all that could be done, and that’s all that matters. Death does not; nor how it comes.’
But for all that, she offered him her dirk. ‘If you are too weak to strike quickly home, I will do it for you. I heard from the sergeant who was at Assynt that you had asked that of Macleod. I would not be as niggard in hospitality as he.’
‘I was spent then,’ he said. ‘I am stronger now. I’ll take my death when and how it comes, not by an easier way.’
Her strange blue eyes looked into his as though they saw them not at all, but saw all that he was; she stood very still; then with a sudden swift movement she leaned forward and kissed him.
‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘You’ll not give Argyll that satisfaction. He cannot make you afraid to meet whatever he can do to you. What can he do to you? Nothing. Go now on your way. You are free to meet the end.’
She stood for some time on the steps of her house and watched him go on his way, shading her eyes from the bright sunshine as the long line of troops swung into the roadway, their harness glittering and clanking, their horses whinnying to each other, and in their midst the solitary figure of their prisoner.
XI
Montrose was led through the Covenanting towns which had lived in such terror of his name five years ago that ‘if but a few goats are seen upon the tops of the hills in the twilight’, the country people took them for the scouts of his armies and rushed to give the alarm.
Yet at Dundee, that staunchly Covenanting city that had suffered more than most from his troops, the authorities showed their disapproval of his treatment by insisting on giving him clothes more fitting his rank. But their influence could not prevail on Leslie so far as to mount him properly. The rag-and-straw mat for saddle, the ropes for stirrups that tied his feet together under the horse’s belly until they seemed to cut into the bone, were a necessary precaution against escape, said the General, although his troops surrounded the prisoner on every side.
But his journey was drawing to its end. Soon the people in the country towns would flock no more to stare at him as at a raree-show, though in an awe more hushed than ever a monster provoked; soon the ministers would come and howl and intone and flap their ill-omened black sleeves no more; no more clattering of harness and thud, thud, thud of his guards’ horses all round him; no more words of sympathy from polite provosts, difficult to answer! ‘My lord, I am sorry for your circumstances.’
(‘So am I, sir’ – no, he must not say that.)
There were other things to look on beside all those gaping faces; there were the primroses thick at the side of the roadway; the young shoots of bracken danced as light as feathers over the hillside; the slender white forms of the birches had begun to shimmer with pale green leaf; there were bare-legged children driving their goats or cows, there were larks winging upward high into the blue sky, gypsies roving along, their strange dark faces looking so impassive between their heavy earrings. They came from Bohemia. ‘You are so Bohemian,’ he had once said to Louey, and so she was, he saw it now, a gypsy princess with her flying hair and her untidy dress, the strange slant-wise shape of her long eyes, and her wild behaviour.
Would he ever have tamed her? He would not have wanted to do so. They were at opposite poles, the ends of the parallel lines which never meet in geometry but do in real life. Life or death? What did it matter? He was a Presbyterian. If he did not live to marry her, she would become a Roman Catholic nun. She had once told him that, and for a little time it had troubled him, but not now.
Now it showed only the infinite freedom of spirit that they shared, yes, and would share after death. She was free of him as he of her. His death would not break her, as the fear of it had broken Magdalen long, long before it came. For Louey was an artist, and her life was independent of any other human life or chance. Louey would live and work though he was dead. The thought gave him great courage.
It could not matter now what that poor driven boy, King Charles II, had to do, or not to do, when he signed the treaty that the Covenanters had set before him. Each man must follow the line that he and his father and fathers had set before him, and Charles II, son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France, lover of Lucy Walters, suitor of Sophia of Bohemia, of La Grande Mademoiselle of France, of Agnes of Orange, and possibly of Anne Campbell, daughter of the Earl of Argyll, must follow his.
But he, Montrose, was free of all these, and of all else. He had only to follow the line of his shaggy horse’s nose, a nose bristling with rough beard from feeding on the whin of the open
moors, the line that was set by his enemies. There was no more choosing for him, no more planning, guiding, leading.
He had gone home to his wife’s father and his wife’s children and to those who had loved him since he had been a child. Now he was going home indeed, and a line in a play that Elizabeth had quoted to him at The Hague throbbed in his mind in time to the thud of his horse’s hooves:
‘All life is but a wand’ring to find home.’
A whole lifetime, his lifetime of thirty-seven and a half years, seemed to have been marched out on this last journey; it had led him through his first memories and stretched out far beyond his own life into that of his children; it had shown him the pitiful baseness of the Macleods, the triumphant gaiety of the old lady of Skibo, the lovely courage of his kinswoman at Pitcaple, and of Jean Durhame, and that moment of deep, warm, astonished feeling in Hurry when they had met at Inverness.
Since that meeting it was odd how they had seemed to march in company, though they had been allowed no further word together. They had passed all through Moray where he and Hurry had played their deadly game of hide-and-seek against each other in just this same merry month of May five years ago, when Hurry, as cavalry leader for the Covenanters, had all but trapped him at Dundee, then cleverly led him in pursuit up towards Inverness, only to turn in the night and make his surprise attack at Auldearn. And now they had passed by Auldearn at just the same moment of the year, in the same tempests of cold rain as had fallen on the battle when they had fought each other, the battle they had so lately enjoyed together as they talked of it walking on the seashore, only a few days before Carbisdale, that last fight for both of them.
As he was helped down from his Highland pony at the end of this day’s march (his ankles were so stiff and sore with the continued chafing of the ropes that he could not at first move them) he saw Hurry’s hard light eyes staring at him over the heads of his companions, and the two exchanged a slow smile that made their past enmity a curiously close condition of their present friendship.
They were unarmed now; their long march, first against, now with each other, was all but over. Now they were going home together.
They took boat and landed at Leith harbour on the afternoon of Saturday, May 18th. The Edinburgh magistrates met him there and he was given a cart-horse to ride while the rest of the prisoners walked on foot in front of him, tied together two by two, Hurry one of the couple immediately in front of him, as next in importance.
It was about four o’clock when they reached the Watergate and there saw the guards, the rest of the magistrates, the hangman’s cart drawn by four horses, and the hangman in his red bonnet and official livery, into whose hands he was now to be delivered. The magistrates showed him the order for his procession; he was to be mounted on a high seat in the cart with his head uncovered and his arms bound with ropes behind his back, tying him to the seat, and so led through all the town of Edinburgh to the prison of the Tolbooth.
He read the order; he knew well that the reason he was to be bare-headed and tied up with ropes was that he should not be able to defend his head or face from the stones and filth thrown at him.
All he said was that he was sorry that through him his master King Charles, whose commission he carried, should be dishonoured. But without any sign of personal dismay he quickly mounted the cart and allowed the hangman to uncover his head and bind his arms.
The long procession started in the bright chilly sunlight of the late afternoon. The rabble of Edinburgh were all out thronging the streets to see it, encouraged and marshalled by their leaders to hurl their missiles of hate at that sure cock-shy, whom every preacher in the city had assured them for years past was the cause of all their present troubles.
People had been waiting since dawn, were now trampling each other to see the Arch-Enemy go by. From every window in those tall, crooked, crazy houses that seemed to totter over each other’s shoulders in their eagerness to see his disgrace, there craned the hungry necks of men who craved to wreak their sense of grievance for all the miseries of their country upon some tangible object, something, moreover, that it would be safe, even commendable, to abuse.
Nor had their Governors trusted only in personal feeling engineered by the ministers. Men and women from all over Scotland that had lost their sons and husbands in those civil wars of five years ago had been searched out and brought to Edinburgh and paid good money in shillings sterling, not Scots, to throw stones at him. A sheer waste of money some had argued, hearing those streets buzzing with fury all day against Montrose’s Highlanders. No need to pay these people to take vengeance.
But they did not take it.
He rode through Edinburgh, mounted on the high seat of that cart, his face a sure target for the missiles of that hired rabble that was still being urged on by the ministers, who moved among them even now wherever they could force a passage in their black Geneva gowns, preaching hatred and revenge.
But the people did not notice them; they were staring at that figure mounted high above them, at his white face, unshaved, since his guards still feared he might cheat them of their triumph by cutting his throat with a razor, though he had taken no advantage on the way here of all the opportunities he had had to do so; they stared at the gaunt features, the fever-ridden eyes burning deep within their sockets, they stared and could not hoot nor jeer as they had been instructed, they forgot the duties for which they had been brought here and paid. Their hands with the missiles in them dropped to their sides, powerless, and many fell on their knees and prayed, they knew not for what nor to whom – certainly not to the God of their Covenant, a God delighting in revenge and blood sacrifices, but perhaps to the Unknown God that lives in the deep unspoken humility of all men’s hearts when they know that they must worship, and know not whom.
So they fell back in silence from before the hangman’s cart, which bore Montrose high above them.
The procession took three hours. He was driven down the steep hill between the tall houses of the Canongate in the clear golden light of the late evening, in a tense silence, broken, not by cries and jeers, but by the tears and sobbing prayers of his enemies.
There had been a grand wedding that day at Moray House, where Cromwell had lodged on his visit to Edinburgh eighteen months ago, and had held long private conversations with Argyll on, it was believed, ‘the necessity to take away the life of the King’, Charles I.
Now young Lord Lome, Argyll’s eldest son and heir, sat on the carved stone balcony with his bride, Lady Mary Stewart, to watch his father’s enemy go by to the prison from which he would only be released to the scaffold.
His father, that lifelong enemy of Montrose, who had brought him to this pass, was not so bold. He did not dare venture out upon the balcony, but waited behind half-closed shutters with Archibald Johnston of Warriston, the fanatic little clerk whom he had raised from obscurity and penury to so high a seat in the Government of Scotland.
As the cart approached Moray House, the driver pulled up, the horses stood still, and Montrose looked up to see for what reason this horrible procession had been checked. He saw young Lord Lome in his bridegroom’s clothes, his still younger bride beside him; he saw one of the Gay Gordons, Lady Jean, whom he faintly remembered as a spitfire child hurling defiance at her father, Lord Huntly, and demanding seven shillings from him, which he had not got, ‘to go to the dwarf’s wedding’.
She spat fire now, moved thereto by some twisted, miserable recollection of her splendid, showy, useless father who had met his end on the scaffold by command of her uncle Argyll, stirred to action, too late to be of any help to the royal cause, by his vain emulation of the man below who now rode to the same death. And her eldest brother, George Gordon, the only one of the family that had been worth anything, and she knew it, had adored Montrose, followed him to the wars and been killed by his side in one of his battles; her second brother, Aboyne, had deserted him and died abroad of a guiltily broken heart; the third, Lewis, was busily making his peace with A
rgyll – and quite right too! All these high notions led only, on a high cart, to the grave.
So she shrilled out an insult at him, and a voice in the crowd cried shame on her, that it were better she sat in the condemned cart herself to do penance for her adulteries.
Then Montrose saw the face of his enemy, Argyll.
Through the half-closed shutters it peered, obliquely, as it had looked, always, at all that life spread before him – an oblique, unhappy, suspicious face, fearful even in victory, knowing that for him there was no victory, no security, no satisfaction even in ordaining and watching the doom of his enemy.
‘There is Montrose,’ it said, ‘whom I have always hated, and now condemned to death. He will die and I will live – but how long, oh Lord, how long, and to what end?’
Did Argyll know in that instant of suspense between two ‘naked-thinking souls’ that his end would be the same as that which he had ordained for his victim – the same physically, but in spirit very different?
Beside him was the shivering, nervous, blood-shotten spirit of his creature, Warriston.
‘Have you not once got your fill of blood?’ That was not said to him but to one of his satellites, less bloodthirsty than he. And Archibald Johnston of Warriston had not yet got his fill of it. He gazed down at the pale proud face of the man in the condemned cart, and his hands shook with rage.
‘They have cheated us,’ he whispered to his superior, ‘all these women – and men too – to whom we have paid good money in shillings sterling, not Scots, to throw stones at the prisoner, and not one has been thrown! His hands are tied behind his back, yet there is no new scar, no fresh blood upon his face.’
That strange yellow crooked face of his master looked down on his companion, the squinting eyes, the twisted mouth showed nothing of what he was thinking. But a long hand stretched itself out like a claw from the black sleeve of the man who was the Governor of Scotland, and pushed the shutter to, leaving those two alone together in the murky half-darkness.
The Bride Page 38