The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  Here it was, in the placid landscape of her home, a landscape of grass and water and waving rushes, with the hills no more than a blue line in the distance, that Jamie grew aware of Magdalen Carnegie, and knew that she would be his wife.

  She was the youngest, some said the best-looking, and certainly the quietest of the Carnegies. As an infant she used to sit by the hour together in her favourite shelter under the table, silently nursing some stump of wood or scrap of leather which she had chosen to represent the glories of the universe; and her big brothers and five elder sisters and whichever of the elder Graham sisters who happened to be with them, would duck their heads under the table, calling her, coaxing her. But not all their imperious affection could dislodge her; if anyone used force she would yell and kick; nor did she allow anyone to caress her but their nurse. Before she could walk, she made her own world, and hoarded her secret treasure.

  She grew older, and ‘like a heron’ her sisters told her, for her head and nose and legs were all rather long; but her deep-set eyes were very large and blue under their black lashes, and her arched eyebrows, which had given her a deceptively plaintive look in childhood, thickened and darkened in effective contrast to the clear pallor of her face. A lily of the valley hiding beneath its leaves, was the comparison made by prospective suitors when she reached her teens. She was a little younger than the Earl of Montrose, who now swept down on his neighbouring house, and filled it with gay company for his sister’s wedding.

  He had given a grand house-warming last year at Kincardine to celebrate his succession to the title; now he must glorify this occasion. Without telling anyone why, he suddenly rode off one day to Edinburgh, and all to get presents of necklaces and embroidered gloves for each of his sisters. His page, Willy, protested that he could have got them, but that would never do, for he might not have chosen the colours right – blue and green for Margaret, and carnation for Lilias, and mulberry for Dorothea, and orange tanny for Kat, and cramoisy for Beatrix. There were slighter gifts too for the rest of the girls in the party – silver buttons and painted Italian boxes and plaits of ribbons hung with little bells.

  Back he came with his presents, and stood in the hall with the girls all crowding round him, circling and swooping and shrilling over their spoils – ‘like a pack of silly seagulls,’ cried Kat, suddenly swerving out of the group.

  Her brother came up to her with her present – ‘orange tanny for you, Kat, because your hair is so dark.’

  She had brought him too out of the group, to where she stood apart – erect, alert, ready for anything. She ran one hand up through her hair as he spoke of it, and it crackled, and sparks came out of it, as when she brushed it the wrong way. She held up the necklace in her other hand, a little stream of orange light between her fingers; and laughed and said she did not care for jewels, and never would wear gloves – she would rather have a new riding whip – and suggested in her casual way that Jamie should transfer her present to Magdalen, and dropped it in his hand again, and ran off, singing.

  ‘What can be the matter with her?’ asked Margaret, and Lilias shrugged her shoulders and murmured that she was always being difficult. So ungracious too, when the poor lad—

  They were all looking at the ‘poor lad’, wondering anxiously what he would say or do to show his anger. But he only stood looking after her for an instant, and then as he turned, he saw Magdalen; his face flushed, he hesitated, then said with grave, boyish dignity, ‘I would like to give you her present, but you will not want to take it now.’

  Magdalen did not want to, but neither did she want to hurt his feelings by a second refusal. She took his jewel in her hands, and the colour flooded her pale face. They were both angry with Kat, it was a strange thing to illumine their passive, childish acceptance of each other, with the possibility of future passion. She wished the Grahams did not matter so much to each other. Her brothers would never mind the rudeness of a younger sister, except to reprove and punish such intolerable manners. But then her brothers would never ride off for three days to choose their sisters’ presents. The Grahams all thought each other too important.

  It was a flash of prescient jealousy, but it was also a warning of the unwilling adoration that she was to suffer, when it would seem to her that all other people led safe, enviable lives, because they did not love Jamie.

  Chapter Nine

  That evening she sat by his hearth, wearing the fiery jewel that he had given Kat; and knew that he was looking at it, and at her.

  All the party from Kinnaird were staying the night, for as there was no moon, the path would not be safe by night over the bog; and the beds were large enough to hold two or three extra occupants apiece.

  Lord Carnegie’s eldest son was with them. He had lately returned from six years at the university at Padua, transformed from a slight youth into a swarthy, stalwart stranger, with a decisive nose.

  His forcible manner and downright speech, giving only the briefest answers to all the questions on his travels, made him the most dominating person now in the wedding party; it made Sir John Colquhoun feel guilty that he had never travelled, and Lilias anxious as to whether Italian women were more attractive than Scots; it made Jamie burn to prove himself a man, and Magdalen all the more uneasily conscious of Jamie’s impulsive nature.

  She was thankful that her brother’s keen black eyes had not watched their childish follies that afternoon; and she grew hot with shame for Jamie when Beatrix, with the indiscriminating pride of a younger sister, insisted on telling David Carnegie all about her brother’s college escapade of shooting over the tower and wearing an arrow in his hat. Even at twelve years old, Beatrix should know better than to try and impress this man of the world with such silly schoolboy mischief. She thought he had a harsh, contemptuous air as he gave one glance at the new young Earl of Montrose, then turned to talk politics with Willy’s father, old Sir Robert of Morphie, while the pipes spun and shrilled their indefatigable music, and the young people danced reels – Beatrix with young Drummond of Madertie, Magdalen with Montrose.

  When they were tired out they flung themselves down on benches, stools, and the few high carved chairs, into a brief pool of quiet, broken only by Sir Robert’s plodding voice, saying – ‘The young king does not know his own country, that is the whole trouble. Once he comes up for his coronation in Scotland, we will settle the matter – we will show him it is no use to think he can do what he likes about the church tithes.’

  ‘Poor king,’ said Lilias to David Carnegie, ‘I thought kings could do what they liked.’

  ‘Only in England,’ he answered her.

  ‘That is true,’ said Sir Robert. ‘The Tudors were a bad education for kings. Here in Scotland we have always known how to deal with them.’

  ‘By murdering them, usually,’ said a sweet girlish voice, which was not at once traced to Kat. Sir John applauded her with his loud laugh. Jamie turned impatiently away, his resentment with her flaming up in a hot desire to express scorn for something or somebody, it did not much matter what.

  ‘The English have always been slaves,’ he said. ‘They are used to being conquered by other nations – now they change their religion whenever their sovereign tells them to.’

  ‘That has ceased to be true,’ said Carnegie curtly.

  The boy bit his lips, seeking a retort that would not sound too rude from a host, but before he could find it, Sir John snatched his opportunity to rush into the conversation.

  ‘The church tithes have been our property for generations—’

  ‘Property’ – ‘tithes’ – Magdalen had noticed that no other two words in the language had such power to stir the company. She had also noticed her brother’s tone to Jamie, and the boy’s angry look in return. Men talked politics, but they thought other things behind them.

  Before David had gone to Padua, Jamie had given him the silent worship of nine years old. Why should David snub him now? Jamie was as good at sport as David had been, and better. He had won the ar
chery medal for Saint Andrews. His college friends here, Wigton and the lively Kilpont and the studious Madertie, all adored him. Her father liked to tease him, with that attentive chaff that elder men so often use to cloak their admiration for a brilliantly promising youngster. Her mother loved and petted him. Her sisters treated him with friendly superiority, to show they recognized that he was too young for them matrimonially – an attitude that Magdalen wished in vain to copy.

  She was not really at ease with him, but then she was not often that with anybody.

  She was glad when the talk ceased, and the travelling minstrel, or Dusty-foot, came forward with his harp, and the scattered company spread out into a wide semicircle round the fire.

  The gnarled logs lay piled on the hearth, hoarily encrusted with lichen, grey-green, primaeval, like monsters that had survived another age; their red-hot noses met together, pointing into the flames, they blazed and roared, hissed and spat out showers of burning sparks; they sucked all the air in the room into a dozen draughts that blew out the curtains from the shuttered windows and whistled up the great chimney; whirlpools of white wood ash fluffed out and danced in feathery, fan-shaped patterns over their surface.

  There, in the glow of the candlelight,

  ‘And the charcoal burning red,’

  the faces of the company, turned towards the harpist, heard the story of the wife whose former lover came back after seven years and enticed her away from her husband and children, telling her how

  ‘I’ll show where the white lilies grow

  On the banks o’ Italie.’

  So off they went in his ship,

  ‘With mariners and merchandise

  And music on every hand,’

  but they had not sailed a few leagues from the shore when a frightful storm sprang up, and the face of the lover changed to that of the devil, and he stood over the poor woman as high as the mast of the ship, and with a shriek of splitting wood the ship was rent in two, and she heard his voice mocking her:

  ‘I’ll show where the white lilies grow

  In the bottom o’ the sea.’

  The harp crashed through the close of the nightmare to a sudden, unearthly silence. Dorothea screamed, and said she would be afraid to go to sleep tonight for what she might dream; but her bridegroom whispered to her and made her smile.

  Dark and intent, Kat’s eyes, alone among those of the girls, showed no fear, but resolve.

  Then Margaret asked for something with a happy ending; and Jamie called for the ballads he liked best; and the harp twanged a gay answer, and the harpist’s voice rang out in the tale of some bold ruffian whom his friends had loved. Back they bore him in triumph on their shoulders from the English prison whence they had rescued him, chaffing him about his weight, as he chaffed them about the roughness of his steeds, until they had placed him again by his own fireside, and there knocked the fetters from his wrists, and

  ‘“Now Jock my billie,” quoth a’ the three,

  “The day is come thou wast to dee,

  But thou’s as weel at thy ain ingle-side,

  Now sitting I think ‘twixt thee and me” ’

  Jamie’s voice had joined in the last verse. Madertie’s and Kil-pont’s with him. What a happy ending was that, to sit at your own fireside with your friends all round you, on the day you had been condemned to hang! What friends, what triumph of courage and loyalty and laughter, equally ready with a joke to greet the hangman, had he called for him that morning instead of his rescuers! They were bad times, those of the Border raids – all the older men said what a good thing it was that they had passed away – but then what great-hearted friendships they had bred, what things worth living for, more than life itself!

  For like all youth that lives intensely, imaginatively, Jamie could only think of life as a splendid thing when it was disregarded, and cast away. And so the happy or the unhappy ending made little odds to him, whether the raid or the day’s hunting ended by the hero’s fireside, or with—

  Now Johnnie’s gude bend bow is broke

  And his gude grey dogs are slain,

  And his body lies dead in Durrisdeer,

  And his hunting it is done.

  ‘That is how it will be one day,’ thought Magdalen, ‘he will die and lie under the earth.’

  But she saw that even though he sang it, he did not believe it – who could believe it, who looked as he did now?

  The music ceased, releasing her from that flash of troubled fancy. A spell had been broken, people were talking, telling queer tales to cap the ballad-monger’s marvels.

  Witches had sailed on the sea in sieves on the eve of the late King Jamie’s wedding; they had danced on the shore at North Berwick, led by a black-haired girl, playing on a Jew’s-harp. No one had ever made a ballad about that. No one had dared.

  A schoolmaster a few years ago had loved the sister of one of his pupils, and had promised the boy never to birch him for the rest of his schooling, if he would but bring him three hairs from his sister’s head. But the cunning boy, suspecting mischief, yet anxious to close with so good a bargain, brought instead three hairs from a heifer’s tail. On these hairs the poor schoolmaster wrought a love charm, so that the heifer pranced after him everywhere, even to the church door, leaping and dancing upon him, to the scandalized amazement of the congregation.

  They all laughed at that, and Jamie said that it was a pity old Forrett had never fallen in love with Kat, or they might have tried the experiment on him.

  ‘Queer tales,’ said Sir John Colquhoun a trifle portentously as he stirred his punch, ‘you all tell queer tales, but they are none of ’em as queer as what my man, Carlippis, could tell you.’

  And he summoned his servant forward within the fire-lit circle, with a snap of his plump, well-kept fingers, and a ‘What are you doing back there in the shadow, you rascal?’

  ‘Looking at my young lord’s books,’ said the man, shutting a great tome upon the shelf as he came forward.

  And instantly Jamie knew that it was his Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World that Carlippis had been looking at; it was the only book of that size that he always troubled to bring back with him from college, for he would have it with him wherever he went, it was his talisman against defeat or depression or minds like Carlippis’ – not that he knew this, any more than he knew defeat, depression or Carlippis’ mind – only that when he heard the heavy sound of the book shutting, and knew that Carlippis had been grasping it with his spread hands, peering into it with those little eyes enclosed in fat, he wanted to tear it from him, kick him out of the room, choke him round the throat till those eyes goggled.

  He half rose, not knowing what he would do in his rage, he had time only to say, ‘You have been looking at my Raleigh!’ and then Colquhoun said pleasantly, ‘Yes, tell us of Raleigh.’

  And then Carlippis was talking. His fierce and restless mind disguised itself in a bitter-tasting good-humour. It found in all men something to laugh at; it found in all deeds, heroic or terrible, virtuous or vicious, the little grain of commonplace, the trivial motive of vanity or self-distrustfulness or fear, which linked the doer of them with one’s most shamefaced thoughts, or with those of any schoolboy who is anxiously striving to show off.

  Was Sir Walter Raleigh really one of the greatest men that ever lived? Carlippis, who knew everybody, had once, long ago, seen the superb adventurer at Court. That story of his throwing his pearl-embroidered cloak in the mud for the old English Queen to tread on – that showed the man all over – the servile gesture that was yet magnificent, like the fawning caress of a wild beast. ‘But to see that, you should have seen the man, the great shoulders, the long nervous hand of the adventurer – and then the earrings, the rosebud mouth to please the women – but then the eyes – of a startled hare! Does he not write of “Death that doth pursue us and hold us in chase from our infancy?” That was himself, longing, but not daring to glance back at his pursuer. Even a Court painter could not conceal it; he has painted h
im afraid – as he has painted himself in the preface to this book you read so often, my lord, the book he wrote in prison, and would have dedicated to Prince Henry, in the hope that his young highness would get him freed, since he liked to come and listen to his travellers’ tales, to glance at his scribbling. But his young patron died on him – and there he was, a rat in a trap, walking up and down the Tower grounds, and hearing the men calling to each other in the dockyards below, at their work on the new ships that he would never sail – and going in again to write into his preface fresh praises of the infinite justice and clemency of that merciful monarch who kept him mewed up there. All to what purpose? That the merciful monarch, King James, should at long last strike off his head, as a pretty compliment to the Spanish ambassador.’

  The magic of that deep, foreign-sounding voice, guttural yet musical, snapped off in a brittle sharpness, as though that were the end of the life of man, even of the greatest – a contemptuous flick of the finger of fate.

  But Jamie could not endure to admit it. Envy, not pity, was his tribute to Raleigh. In that very same preface wherein Raleigh had made his piteous bid for life, was a passage that Jamie had never known he had by heart till now, when he found himself saying it aloud, while all those listening, wondering faces turned towards him :

  ‘“Only those few black swans I must except, who behold death without dread, and the grave without fear – and embrace both, as necessary guides to endless glory.”’

  ‘Who said that?’ and – ‘Jamie, who is that?’

  ‘The true Raleigh,’ he replied, a little shamefacedly, not daring to glance at Carnegie.

  Yes, Raleigh, despite his apprehensions, had been one of these ‘few black swans’. Above all earthly ambitions Jamie prayed that he too might prove to be another.