The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  One was never allowed to mention the Earl of Gowrie. For that reason, the rebellious Kat thought of him more than of all her other relatives, with the exception of Jamie. But now Jamie would be going out into the world, and she would be left behind with nothing to look forward to but bearing children or not bearing children. Her passionate egoism revolted against it; she vowed to herself she would show Jamie that she was as capable of having adventure and seeing the world as ever he could be.

  The funeral rolled on merrily enough. Young Rollock vowed to wait for his Dorothea; the guests made up old quarrels and started new; several of them fell in love with Lilias, and soon forgot it; one or two fell in love with Margaret, and did not.

  And Jamie got his guardian, Lord Napier, to agree that he had best now go straight to college at Saint Andrews and start life in earnest – ‘as I knew it would be,’ muttered Master Forrett, his face puckered up like a withered yellow apple.

  His young master would not ride that road back to Glasgow, but he must do so to collect and pack all his treasures to be sent after him to Saint Andrews.

  And he must find another pupil when the funeral party would at last break up, and his young lord ride east this time instead of west, and Kat ride to Rossdhu with the fair Lady Lilias and Sir John Colquhoun and his servant Carlippis.

  Chapter Five

  Another world existed close to that of the funeral guests, and generally just below it. At night, their pages pulled out trestle beds from beneath those shared by the guests; while the servants slept in the hall before the fire, or less luxuriously on the pantry tables. In the chill darkness before dawn they tumbled off their hard perches, stretched and yawned, stamped the pins and needles out of their feet, whistled and blew on their fingers, worked their cramped arms and shoulders up and down, and stared heavily round them on the new day that had begun in this brief little new world.

  Few of the maid-servants at Kincardine kept their maidenhood till the end of the funeral. The men drank and made merry, discussed the doctrines of predestination and free-will over their porridge and thin ale, even as their masters were doing upstairs. Some of them had seen service beyond the seas and could talk of the wars in Germany or between France and Spain. Carlippis, the outlandish valet of Sir John Colquhoun, talked most of all.

  He was German, some said partly Italian, but that may only have been because he knew Italy so well. He had a fat rosy face like a jovial monk, with a small pointed blond beard : his little eyes, set flat on his round cheeks like currants on a bun, rolled and twinkled with all the humorous intelligence of an elephant’s. He was as ready to help a fellow to a wench as himself to one, for the only thing he hated was the waste of a good thing, he said, and he proved it wherever possible; in the exercise of a delightful voice and an original and witty mind, as well as in the ways denounced by Lord Napier’s stern Presbyterian body-servant, as gluttony, drunkenness, lechery, and the vice that was still patriotically stigmatized as ‘Italian’, in spite of the eminently Scots King Jamie’s example in the matter.

  Yet for all this good-fellowship Carlippis was not popular – he knew too much, he had seen too many people, he was inclined to brag too much when drunk, and when sober to show a rather mocking and devil-may-care indifference to his humble position as valet – as though he knew he was worth a deal more than that, but would not trouble himself to prove it to such fools as his fellow creatures.

  And then Sir John thought the world of him, as well he might, having made a fortune in one of the new joint stock companies through his advice, instead of leaving his money in his estate and farming his crops and cattle only to feed his retainers – as all his stick-in-the-mud neighbours were now praising the late Earl of Montrose for doing. While Sir John, to all who would listen, praised his servant Carlippis.

  Rare books, mathematical instruments, Eastern gems, a little convex mirror and hanging globes of coloured glass – all these treasures from Germany, Italy, and even farthest India, had been added to Sir John’s house of Rossdhu by this connoisseur. He had even made his master distribute handkerchiefs among all his household, even to the grooms and horseboys, and that simply because Carlippis himself could not bear to hear them sniff, nor see them wipe their noses on their sleeves – and so contrived to give Sir John a notion of his own fastidiousness, as unreal in the fine gentleman as it was genuine in the gross underling.

  Sir John indeed held original views on everything, but as he had learned them from his servant, they were apt to sound confused. His eyebrows would shoot up as if to forestall his company’s startled attention, while he announced that the pursuit of knowledge and power, too often stigmatized as sorcery, would prove in time the whole aim of man. Any experiment was justified that helped this aim – the whole of life should be an experiment – one should try everything once.

  Thus he showed the enlightened views of a travelled man – only unfortunately he had not yet travelled, and felt it the more bitterly every time Carlippis threw out some gay, knowledgeable reference to the vicious nuns in Venice or the galley slaves clanking their chains in the drinking booths at Marseilles.

  None of these home-grown, humdrum country lairds at his young brother-in-law’s table could appreciate the desires of his arrogant fancy. There they all were, discussing some tedious, outmoded subject. Could they never realize that John Knox was dead?

  Would that the cardinal virtues had gone out with the cardinals!’ he exclaimed, but old Graham of Balgowan had to ask him twice over what he had said. He should have said it to Carlippis.

  And under his feet, Carlippis, finding the kitchens as full of theological argument and stale beer as his master found the hall, stretched his arms above his head and yawned.

  ‘Hell mouth yawns!’ a pert page exclaimed, who alone had stared unabashed into that red cavern, at the pointed tongue curled back till it touched the gullet, at the domed roof of the foreigner’s mouth that made his voice like a bell, at the thick lips, curled back far over the red gums beyond the strong sharp teeth.

  Those yawns of Carlippis’, cracking, derisive, splitting the air with the titanic boredom, such as had made Satan and his angels burst the bonds of heaven, rent the contented merriment of his company of fellow servants, their harmony of little jokes and gossip, friendships, love-making and rivalries, so that each member of it stood dismembered, no longer a confident part of the company, but a separate, shivering rag of contemptible humanity, uneasily conscious of something ridiculous in himself.

  But now not even his yawn could appease Carlippis’ insatiable disgust with Scotch broth and argument. He got up, stamped, spat on the floor and lounged out into the courtyard, dragging his heavy feet after him like a tree walking, or a troll. He knew and hated his ugliness, especially the chubby, cheerful aspect of it. What did he see when he looked in the glass but the face of a foolish, good-humoured sot, such as all sensible fellows would want to split open?

  He stood there for perhaps an hour, scratching his thigh, blinking his eyes contemptuously at the pale Northern sunlight. The wet dead leaves, swept in heaps into the corners, stank in his nostrils; the year was rotting into decay, like everything else in this dank, sleepy place where nothing happened, nobody amused him, and there was no one to fear but God.

  In the laundry yard, maids were stepping out of the doorway with wet clothes, which they hung upon the lines for a brief hour or so before they had to come scampering out again to take them in from the next shower. The wet shirts flapped and dangled in the breeze, slack arms and flighty tails, a depressing parody of humanity that at once appealed to Carlippis’ fancy. Damp souls they were in this chilly climate, snivelling, disconsolate, always shrinking back in godly fear from the fluttering of their lusts. Only dim uncomfortable emotions like religion could get any grip on them.

  He thought of Italian sunlight, sharp and strong, that cut the narrow streets into stripes of white and dark, of hot and cold – of the pungent smell of wine booths, and the heavy sweetness of orange trees, an
d the sickly perfumes of brothels – of plots and conspiracies that called out all a man’s cunning, and danger bright and amusing as a play, and companions into whom he might easily find it necessary to stick a dagger the next night, but who spoke the same language as himself, figuratively as well as literally, knew when he was sneering, and what he was sneering at, in short were his companions, as these thick muddy wits of the North could never be.

  His master came through the archway in company with one of his younger sisters-in-law, and stood laughing and talking to her in the exaggeratedly courtly, chaffing manner that men are apt to use towards very young girls; while she stood silent, straight and slight as a hazel rod, with the embarrassingly critical air of thirteen.

  A groom led out their horses, Sir John held his hand by the side of her pony, but Lady Katherine ignored it; placing one foot in the stirrup, she swung herself into the saddle and cantered round the yard, calling to him to be quick and mount. He had got one foot into the stirrup when his horse, eager to follow the pony, danced sideways, and Sir John had to hop after him on a long lean leg, clinging to the saddle with his cloak flapping, looking like a lame crane. He flushed and swore, the stable-boy grinned, Kat laughed clear and high.

  The Italian-bred German who stood in the doorway, heavy with discontent, eyed the vanity of the man and the wildness of the girl, and thought, ‘There is material there – raw stuff, and slight – but something might be done with it. What use can I make of it?’

  The emotions of others were his stock-in-trade; his art was to play on them and turn them to his account. And a plan began to shape itself in his mind, whereby he might be relieved of the tyranny of his boredom.

  Chapter Six

  The funeral feast was over, but some of the lesser and needier family connexions showed a tendency to ‘sit on, picking their teeth, until the next funeral in the family,’ said young Patrick, the son of Graham of Inchbrakie, known to his still younger cousin of Montrose as Old Pate. Only three or four years his senior, this shrewd, gawky lad seemed to Jamie the complete man of the world.

  When all the guests had ridden their different ways, Pate escorted his young lord to college with his two pages. On a grey January day they rode into Saint Andrews, and were installed in their lodgings; and Pate unpacked Jamie’s books with his own hands, because servants were so careless with books. He placed on a shelf, nailed on to the new light panelling, all the small vellum volumes, and here and there some monster folio – among them, Jamie’s chief treasure, Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World. He hung up his young cousin’s weapons on the walls, and stacked the golf clubs and fencing foils all together in a corner just as they had stood in the Canonry at Glasgow, instead of primly separated by the servants; and then they sat on the familiar yellow and red counterpane, flung over the box bed that had been built into the wall, and thought the room looked rather less strange and empty.

  Jamie stared at the red table-cloth with Kat’s ink blob on it, and tried not to think he missed her. Old Pate glanced sideways at him with a wise and friendly grin beneath his perceptible moustache, and gave him a word or two of good advice, but not too much, and promised to send him one of the black setter’s pups as soon as she should be delivered, and gave him now as a parting present his own flat powder horn, scratched all over with a queer scroll pattern, that he had bought from a Highlander at a fair. At that, Jamie was near disgracing his new college manhood and admitting his homesickness, but Pate, not waiting to be thanked, was looking up at the slit of window which squinted oddly upwards at the great tower of Saint Salvator’s, so that a section of it could be seen slanting distortedly through the greenish bottle-glass.

  ‘Your old tower is drunk,’ he told Jamie just as Willy and Mungo came into the room, and the four boys all hooted at it, while the three who were to remain felt a secret pride in their mockery, already regarding the tower as their own personal property.

  So the new Earl of Montrose was left in his lodgings with his companions, a grown man with no one in the house in charge of him, a scholar in a scarlet gown, but more frequently a sportsman. He hunted and shot, he played golf on the links by the sea, he betted at the races at Cupar; and he rode races himself along the wide sands until he and his companions turned at last, scrunching the innumerable sea-urchins’ shells beneath their horses’ hoofs, and looked back through the mist of sea foam at the little smoky town of Saint Andrews, its dark towers shooting up into the clouds. Above the splash of the waves came the long thin cry of the sand-piper; a spreading wind-dog made lines of coloured rain – green rain, yellow rain, rain rose-pink, running into red – and behind it all that grey town, to which these riders to the sea must return in time for the lecture in Latin given by a famous foreign scholar.

  For a bet he climbed the ruined arch of the Cathedral which Bruce had consecrated as a memorial to his victory over the English at Bannockburn. It still dominated the town that had destroyed it, as though the despairing cry of its murdered Cardinal would remain frozen in stone for ever. ‘All is gone,’ he had cried – and well he might, for John Knox, who had joined his murderers, returned from the galleys to complete his work so thoroughly that now if a Papist wished to marry he had to do so in some wild and secret place by candlelight, for no priest dared do it in the open.

  Yet all was not gone, for the colleges remained, and the scarlet scholars, and even the thorn tree that Queen Mary had planted in the courtyard of Saint Mary’s College, which burst into as fresh a white and green this spring as though its queen had never been beheaded nor her church driven out of the land.

  Young Lord Wigton, the first of Jamie’s many college friends, would have taken Queen Mary’s side, and that of her Church, just because it was hers; but Jamie would not go so far.

  Rome was the intruder, the interloper, that had helped England to trouble Scotland, she had been the unseen arm behind those fingers that always poked into their pie. Rome had refused to acknowledge Robert Bruce as Scotland’s king, until the Scottish nobles had written to the Pope to tell him that neither Rome nor England should dictate to them – ‘and neither Rome nor England ever shall!’ cried Jamie.

  ‘Not for glory, nor riches, nor honour, but for liberty alone we fight, which no honest man will lose but with his life.’ Three hundred years ago, his most famous ancestor, Sir John Graham, the friend of Wallace and of Bruce, had helped write that letter. Now his sword hung on the walls of Jamie’s college rooms, beside his own, for Jamie had insisted on bringing it from home, now that he was the head of his house. On its blade was an inscription, added a century after its owner had fallen in battle,

  Sir John the Graeme, very wicht and wise,

  Ane of the chiefs relievit Scotland thryse,

  Fought with ys sword, and ner thout schame,

  Commandit nane to Beir it Bot his name.

  ‘1405,’ read out Jamie, running his finger nail along the thin lines on the steel, ‘and even then this sword was a hundred years old. That is to be famous.’

  And his eye fell from the old basket-hilted weapon to his own light, gilded rapier, hanging in the silk and silver scarf his father had given him, as he wondered what chance he would ever have to make that, too, famous.

  But little Kilpont, who was going through a course of cynic philosophy, remarked that his friend had better gaze hungrily at his pretty pearl-inlaid bow rather than his dainty sword – for his best chance at present to win fame both for himself and his college was to win the archery medal that would place him as the best marksman in the university of Saint Andrews. So let Jamie come along with him now down to Butts Wynd for half an hour or so of practice at the butts. It was high time Saint Salvator’s again won the medal.

  ‘And high time,’ added Jamie, unhitching the bow from its hook on the wall, ‘that a Graham won it rather than a Campbell.’

  Chapter Seven

  Archibald campbell, Lord Lorne, the eldest son of the Earl of Argyll, had won the archery medal for all Saint Andrews when he had bee
n up at the University six years before. The victory had given little pleasure to anyone, even the victor. For Archibald Campbell (whom nobody called Archie, as they called even the wise and elderly courtier, Lord Napier) had never been popular at college. His success therefore at the butts and at golf had only added to his bleak sense of grievance against his fellows; for it had only served to remind them that he preferred these peaceful accomplishments to riding or hunting, wherein he was apt to show nervousness.

  He was slightly lame – just enough not to impede his walk but to disfigure it, since it robbed his step of all the buoyancy and confidence of youth. Also he squinted a little and his face had a crooked twist to it that was likely to increase with age. And this man was destined to be the chieftain of the most important clan in the Highlands, where bravery and beauty were as necessary to a leader as to the hero of a fairy-tale.

  Lord Lorne had been unlucky in other ways; his mother had died in his infancy, his father had married again, his stepmother had been unkind to him, had even, he firmly believed, tried to poison him so as to make way for her own children. His uncle, the Earl of Morton, had taken the unhappy little boy into his own household for safety, and brought him up with as much care and affection as his own sons.

  But unkind had been young Lorne’s early impression of the world; and unkindness would always have more power over him than kindness. He thought of his cruel stepmother far more than of his kind uncle, with that intensity that only hate and fear can give.