The Heir of Douglas

by Lillian de la Torre

  “But remember,” said he, “if Mr. Archibald Stuart suffer that boy to be present, it will be the last thing he shall do as my agent.”

  So it happened that when the meagre cortège left the humble cottage with all that was mortal of Lady Jane Douglas, the weeping little figure in mourning-weeds who was torn from the first carriage and left desolate upon the step was the disowned heir of Douglas.

  One thing I’m sure of, that the Duchess of Douglas had all the qualifications of a great woman, and would have made an excellent empress—she was rather a strong duchess … strong, but not neat.

  (CHARLES KIRKPATRICK SHARPE)

  Chapter V

  “Peggy,” said the old-young clergyman, stung by the lady’s rough repartee, “you may rally me for an old fusty bachelor with frost upon my pow; but remember I am master of the parish register where your age is recorded, and I of all men know when you must be called an old maid, in spite of your juvenile airs.”

  “What care I, Tom?” said she, “for I have sworn to be Duchess of Douglas, or never mount the marriage bed!”

  The picnic party rocked with laughter. Red-faced Miss Peggy Douglas of Mains was a popular wit, with her merry glance and her rough good-natured tongue with the strong Scotch burr to it. Though she was a remote connection of clan Douglas, she was only a farmer’s daughter. The idea of her wedding the surly, half-mad, middle-aged Duke whom nobody ever saw was an excellent jest. But Miss Peggy Douglas meant it.

  She had perforce to bide her time. In Stockbriggs’s day nobody could come at the Duke save the Hamilton faction. The Duke got on well with his rakish cousin of Hamilton and the Irish beauty he had married. He rather enjoyed working his would-be heir for what he could get out of him. He fished the Hamilton streams, presented clergymen to the Hamilton benefices, and bred his bitches to the Hamilton dogs. Young Hamilton was always glad to oblige him; he hoped for a manyfold return.

  With Jeanie gone forever, the Colonel in gaol, and the discarded boy dropped out of sight, success was in sight for the Hamilton campaign. On October 1, 1754, the settlements were signed and sealed. James, Duke of Hamilton, became the Duke’s heir.

  Shortly after, at Holyrood House, the beautiful Duchess bore Hamilton an heir. They named him George James, and George II stood sponsor. In autumn of 1756, the succession was doubly assured when Betty Gunning bore a second boy, and cannily named him Douglas.

  Meanwhile there were changes at Douglas Castle. In July 1755, after an undisputed tyranny of twenty years, Stockbriggs died. His enemies got busy with his memory. The minister was at last able to vindicate himself of the charges of reading the newspapers on the Sabbath day and lying in adultery with the cook’s wife. Noble kinsmen told how their letters had been intercepted and themselves kept from dining by being told the Duke would rather fall on his knife point than give a dinner or even a bottle of wine to anybody. The inflammable Duke took umbrage, and relieved his feelings by going to law with the fellow’s heirs.

  However, he continued to favour his cousin of Hamilton, and when he acquired more lands, by purchase or legal action, he settled them also on the young Duke.

  But the Duke of Hamilton, old at thirty-three with his rakehelly ramblings, was not destined to live to inherit. In January 1758, a sudden chill shuffled him off in a hurry. George James, four years old, became Duke of Hamilton. His affairs were put into the hands of a committee of tutors (which is Scotch for guardians), consisting of some influential noblemen and gentlemen, and—to do the work—the Hamilton men of business, Archibald and Andrew Stuart, Writers to the Signet (which is Scotch for solicitors).

  Archibald Stuart was a dour, close-mouthed, close-fisted Scot who had known and disapproved of Colonel John Steuart since they were young men together. While handling the Duke of Douglas’s affairs some years before, he had learned to disapprove of him still more strongly. Andrew Stuart, his son, now thirty-three, had been bred up to his father’s business, adding to the old man’s sober caution a personal elegance and cold brilliance that prepared him to play a notable part in the affair of the heir of Douglas; but his time was not yet.

  It was Peggy Douglas’s time. With Stockbriggs dead, and the Duke of Hamilton in his grave, the way was for the first time open from the farm-house of Mains to the Castle of Douglas. Peggy was turned forty, and she had no time to waste. The Hamilton Duke was not cold a month before she set about her cherished project.

  She gauged the Duke shrewdly. She went boldly to the inn at Douglas, and sent him a message he could not resist. She said she wanted to consult him about a law-suit.

  He came at once. He had always been a handsome man, and now in his sixties he was handsomer than ever, with his snowy hair, his fine eyes, and the grace of his gestures. Peggy Douglas, with her buxom figure and her rosy, shrewd glance, was hardly his match in appearance. She was more than his match in wits. What mixture of impudence and good-nature, flattery and blunt wooing she used can only be inferred. The bemused Duke was soon bagged. First he bestowed upon her as a love-gift a piece of fine plate, and then he agreed to marry her out of hand.

  Her appalled friends remonstrated with her. How could she think of marrying a madman?

  “Hech, sirs,” cried saucy Peggy, “when I choose I can be as mad as he.”

  She soon made good her words.

  On February 28, 1758, she set out for Douglas Castle to be married. It was a most unpretentious bridal party. She set forth in a hack-chaise, and for attendants she had only the clergyman who was to tie the knot, and the post-boy to handle the reins. When they came to Douglas burn, the stream was running in spate. The post-boy looked at the rush of the water and shook his head. He would not risk driving through. But Miss Peggy would not risk the erratic Duke changing his variable mind. She clapped a pistol to the astonished post-boy’s head, and bade him drive on. The post-boy looked from the swollen stream to the lady’s grim red face. He drove on. The water came above the wheels, and wetted the lady to the knees, but the chaise lurched through, and brought the bride in safety to the bridegroom’s gate. She was still in haste; wetted as she was, she then and there stood up before the clergyman and made sure of her Duke. She used to relate the story with great glee in after years: “I was a very draggled bride,” she would say.

  The new Duchess soon set about taking her proper place in society. She called upon the widowed Duchess of Hamilton, and got a cool reception. Duchess Betty lounged nonchalantly upon the settee and beat the devil’s tattoo with one leg over the other while Duchess Peggy tried to make conversation. At last Duchess Peggy got tired of the careless, contemptuous manner and the curt answers. She looked in the beautiful face, and said to herself: “Aye, play awa’ wi’ that bonny fit and show your leg, and what a bonny ankle ye ha’e. Gif my Duke were here, it micht cast dust in his e’en, but I’m a woman like yersel’ and I’ll gar ye rue your wagging your fit at me.”

  Duchess Betty might better have offended any other peeress in Scotland. If Duchess Peggy made up her mind to gar the rude Hamilton rue, a weapon lay ready to her hands—little Archie Douglas, forgotten and forlorn, eating the bread of charity with strangers somewhere in Scotland.

  Duchess Peggy had many better reasons for taking up the cause of dead Lady Jane’s boy. She had natural loyalty and kindness of heart. She had no child of her own, and was unlikely at her time of life to duplicate Lady Jane’s feat and bear one. Here was a child she could have for the taking—if she could manage the Duke. She went warily to work.

  It amused her to start by setting the Hamilton faction by the ears. Busy among them was Archibald Stuart’s son-in-law, Major Thomas Cochrane, a roaring old fellow who was much about the Duke. He was meddling in the matter of the Duke’s heir, now promoting one and now another. The Duchess got hold of a rash letter he had written. In it he pressed the Duke to by-pass Hamilton in favour of another willing kinsman, and reminded him that the boys were Pretenders. Lady Stair had discovered it, he said, because a glance at the children’s teeth proved they wer
e of different ages. “If ever you find me vary from the truth,” wrote the Major, who was addicted to rodomontade, “believe me to be a damned villain, and not, my Lord Duke, your Grace’s most obliged etc. etc.”

  The Duchess of Douglas passed this epistle around. When the Duchess of Hamilton saw it, she gave its writer a clierie, which is a wigging. When Lady Stair saw it, she came to the Duke’s house in a fury.

  “I have now,” she said, “lived to a great age, and never before have I been brought into any clatters or lies of this kind. I never said the children of Lady Jane were fictitious, for I never doubted of their being Lady Jane’s. Once indeed I said to her, I wish, Lady Jane, you had come home, and borne them in as public a manner as the Queen of England; and she replied that she was sick to death at sea, and her having done so would have endangered her and the unborn together.”

  As to Thomas Cochrane, she applied to him the epithet he asked for:

  “He’s a damned villain!” she cried, and thumped the floor with her tall staff. “A damned villain! (Thump!) A damned villain! (Thump!)”

  It was Thomas Cochrane who told her the gossip about the Count Douglas letter; the Duke had told him, said he, that he would not expose his sister during her lifetime, but after his death the Count’s letter would be found in the bosom of the settlements on Hamilton.

  “That conversation,” said Lady Stair, “was my reason for withdrawing my sympathy from Lady Jane, and I believe that she died in want of the common necessaries of life.”

  The tears came to her eyes as she spoke, and to the Duke’s as he listened.

  The omens were good. The new little Duke of Hamilton was a poor substitute for his sporting father, and the Duke was becoming lukewarm toward the Hamilton connection. He sometimes thought they would not value though he were hanged, dead, and damned. Duchess Peggy began bringing the idea of Archie to the fore.

  “It is a shame that the Marquis of Douglas’s grandchild, and your sister’s son, should be fed upon the scraps of charity.”

  “He is not my sister’s son.”

  “If he is not your sister’s son, I would not desire that he should have a sixpence. God forbid that I should harbour an impostor in the family of Douglas! But pray, send proper persons abroad to make inquiries.”

  “It is too late, after so many years.”

  “The longer it is delayed,” retorted the Duchess, “it will be still the worse.”

  In this she was certainly right; but she could not as yet set the Duke in motion. Neither could she move him from Douglas Castle to give her a season in Edinburgh. She yearned for the tea-drinkings and oyster-suppers and parties of pleasure to the play-house. It was hard that she could not even see John Home’s tragedy of Douglas, a gloomy-romantic piece about the long-lost Douglas heir kept out of his inheritance by wicked kinsmen. It was not written in reference to Archie’s story, pat though it proved to be; but it brought the author the Douglas patronage, and the Duchess had a right to the first box.

  The problem was suddenly solved in a way so completely characteristic of Duchess Peggy that it was generally deemed to be her act. Douglas Castle burnt to the ground. The fire spread from my Lady’s dressing-room so rapidly that the family barely escaped in their night-rails.

  They were in Edinburgh for Christmas. The Hamilton Duchess was in London, and the Duke moved in, rent-free, to the Hamilton lodgings at Holyrood. A nobleman who visited him there recognized him for the last of the feudal lords. John Home, author of Douglas, was present with two other gentlemen. When anything was said about the Douglas family, John Home got a nod from the Duke to narrate the pertinent passage from history. The other two gentlemen were barely honoured with a single nod.

  “I have seen,” remarked the nobleman, “your new house that you have begun to build.”

  Legend has it that the Duke had ordered of the brothers Adam a new house ten feet longer, ten feet wider, and ten feet higher than the mansion they had built for the Duke of Argyll. The Duke was set on out-extending his brother peers.

  “I have heard,” he now remarked worriedly, “that the Earl of Northumberland is building a house, the kitchen of which is as large as my whole house.”

  “If the Douglases,” Duchess Peggy reduced the Duke’s worry to absurdity, “were to meet the Percies once more upon the field, then would the question be, whose kitchen is the largest?”

  Upon this the complaisant Duke nodded to his tame dramatist to narrate the feats of Douglas in the field.

  The Duchess took full advantage of the Duke’s mellow mood. Good things began to be said about Lady Jane. The Duke of Argyll spoke in her defence. Mr. Loch the man of business was called in, and made a valuable ally. He had in his possession a priceless paper, no less than Lady Jane’s apologia. He never made it public, but he showed it to the Duke. It seems to have been designed to clarify my Lady’s conduct in the cloudy Buccleuch episode. It so softened the Duke that he sent for Loch to hear more of his sister. Mr. Loch seized the occasion to expatiate on Lady Jane’s sufferings. When he withdrew, the Duke burst out:

  “I shall sleep none tonight, so much has the account of my sister’s distresses affected me; for I see by reading that paper that she was certainly the most injured woman in the world; for,” said he, pressing his hand to his heart as if there was a pain there, “she has been neglected not only before her death, but after it,” and he wept with regret for the neglect he had shown to his sister Jeanie.

  Mr. Loch soon acquired an ally he would rather have been without—Colonel John Steuart, completely down-at-heels and out-of-pocket, following his infallible nose for a loose guinea once again to Edinburgh. He had finally been enlarged by Act of Parliament. They kept him away from the Duke. He busied himself writing long eloquent screeds to his Grace, and Loch suppressed them. Loch was progressing nicely without them.

  One night, dining with the Duke, he found him mellowed beyond belief. His Grace almost—but not quite—offered to part with some money.

  “I hear,” he offered, “that Lady Jane died owing you a considerable sum of money.”

  Mr. Loch gambled away the money on the chance of legitimating Archie.

  “It is true that Lady Jane owed me some money, not a great deal, and I do not mean to ask it of your Grace; but if your Grace will allow me the honour to bring into your presence Lady Jane’s son, it is all the favour I would ask or expect.”

  The Duke was complaisant. The very next morning Archie Douglas was rigged out in his best, a sturdy, swarthy boy of ten, and Mr. Loch carried him down to Holyrood.

  The Duke and Duchess were in their respective bedrooms. Mr. Loch sent up a message that he was there to wait on them, with a young gentleman with him, and desired to be admitted to the Duke’s bedchamber.

  Back came the answer; the Duke was under the weather. The Duchess sent down a dinner invitation for Mr. Loch, and a poke of sweeties for Archie; but the Duke was not to be seen.

  Back they went to Mrs. Hewit’s lodging, and reported to her and Colonel John. The Colonel took the rebuff with his unfailing optimism. They had lost no ground, and were a poke of sweeties to the good; he thought matters were in a very good way of succeeding.

  It was just about then that things went wrong. The Duchess lost her patience. She decided it was time for strong measures, and launched herself on a broad-scale program of being madder than the Duke.

  She chose a dinner party for her first audience. First she refused to come to the table. The party went to the table without her, which hardly suited her purpose. Halfway through the meal, the diners heard a noise in the next room. The Duke bade the minister reconnoitre. He found my Lady Duchess flat on her face on the floor. Her gentlewoman stood by wringing her hands. The Duchess would neither speak nor budge.

  “Do you,” said the minister to the gentlewoman, “take one arm, and I will take the other, and we will help her to bed.”

  The minute they touched her, the outrageous Duchess flopped over on her back, an indecency which put the m
inister to flight. Soon the Duchess’s gentlewoman ran in to the diners and contributed her part to the comedy:

  “’Tis needless to send for physicians, for the Duchess cannot live five minutes!”

  The Duke took this pronouncement with calm, and dinner proceeded without intermission. These tactics served to get the Duchess up off the floor. She then began buttonholing the diners and asking them a hypothetical question:

  “I charge you, as you shall answer to the great God, at the day of judgement, that you answer me, without fear or favour, or respect of persons! Suppose you had a sister that had disobliged you, but this sister has a promising young son, would not you give your estate to your sister’s son?”

  They side-stepped her, as having no estate, or being in no such situation. The Duchess persisted, and caught a Tartar. The Duke’s doer begged to be excused, as his sentiments might alter with his condition.

  “Why,” said the Duchess rudely, “you have not honesty and resolution enough to declare your mind!”

  “Then I will frankly do so. I have but one sister, who never disobliged me, and she has two sons, very hopeful lads, who never offended me; but I should take it extremely ill, if my wife, or any other relation whatsoever, would tell me that I must give my estate to my sister or nephews.”

  “Who then should be your heirs?”

  “Any person that I should think proper; and while there is a person of my name in Scotland, a stranger should not get my estate!”

  “You have changed your mind,” snapped the Duchess, “since Colonel Jack Campbell is married to the Duchess of Hamilton! But you have been too long about the Duke of Douglas, and I desire you will get you gone down stairs.”

  “I will do so,” said the doer stiffly, “and I will not return until I am sent for.”