She was looking down a path of flowers and sweet herbs, all tossed and tangled with the last storm that had swept over from the sea. Almost she could hear the roaring of the waves against the coast, five miles away – or was it only the wind in the big trees? Bushes of drowned roses bowed before her, the campanulas had the wet blue of rain-sodden clouds. Only the new Nancy-pretty was too slight to be battered by the storms, it stood up as feathery as ever, a quivering, dancing pink. The hot sun on the rain had brought out all the scent of the rosemary, the mint and musk.
On either side of the flower walk were the vegetable beds, in which Lord Southesk took more pride than in any flowers. Rich brown earth neatly dotted with green, they were sturdily undaunted by the storm, and there, bent double over them, was Daniel Muschet, digging. He stood up straight as she came up to him, a tall old man who looked at her out of shrewd, small, screwed-up eyes, blue and happy. It was a fine head with a big nose, the Carnegie nose, spare and lean and strong. Magdalen found herself wondering for an instant what was his probable relationship to herself, but passed at once to the more immediate problem of potatoes.
Daniel proudly led the way to the steely blue-green leaves, parted them with his hand, showing the hummocked ridges of earth in which he had planted them – burrowed in them, first on one side, then the other, and pulled out two or three balls of a purplish brown colour, only a little lighter than plums.
The great Raleigh had ventured to America for this rare delicacy, as they still were up here in the north, regarded as half fruit, half-vegetable; only a few were to be gathered even for honoured guests.
‘You’ll get none finer than these in England itself,’ he boasted, ‘and I hear they are fonder of them there. A dull rooty thing I call it myself, and the first time my lord ever showed one to me, I thought it a lump of earth.’
‘How did you know how to grow them, then, Daniel?’
‘I did not. I stood here with them in my hands, balancing them this way and that, and I said to myself, “Now, how shall I plant them?” And I heard a voice from the end of the garden, as though someone had called out to me from behind that wall, “Plant ‘em in rows.” So I did, and I hummocked the earth up a bit as I planted them, and they came up well. But I had no knowledge of how to plant them till that moment, and then I heard that voice as plain as I hear you—’
In country fashion he began to tell his tale all over again, while she scanned those old, keen, triangular eyes.
She had never known he had the second sight, she said – but he denied it; that was the only time that the like had happened to him; except that if he were to meet anyone on the road, no matter who it might be, he always found himself thinking of them a minute or two before he saw them.
He was turning up the potatoes now in his fingers, filling her basket with them.
‘Do you ever see more than that? Do you ever see what is round a person – his weird?’
She had suspected glimpses of second sight in herself – a gift to fear. Was it that that prevented her from sharing as wholeheartedly as she longed to do in her mother’s simple happiness in the preparations for Jamie’s home-coming?
Daniel turned round on her with the basket full in his hands; his look showed her that he had seen her thought.
He said, ‘I’ll tell you what I see round your young lord, and that is a great glory and gladness – and stories and songs springing up round him like flowers under his feet. Whatever death he may die, it would be better to be himself than any man in the length and breadth of Scotland.’
She turned from him. She was choking back the tears that came so rarely to her. ‘It is true, it is true,’ she sobbed in an undertone so low the old man never heard her (—’Whatever death he may die’ – what death then?—). No, never think of it. It does not matter. There’s a strange thing to say of the death of one’s husband, but it is true, it is his life that matters, springing up like a flower that never knows nor cares if or how or when it be cut down.
‘Give me the basket.’ She held out her hands, her face still turned away. She felt his gnarled hand placed over hers as in benediction.
‘I am seventy this year,’ he said, ‘and not a year but I have found life sweet.’
‘Oh, Daniel, I wish I were as young as you.’
He did not understand that, but let it pass.
‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘when I was as young as you, my heart was like a bird, ready to fly out of my breast, and if I were on the one side of this hedge and anyone were on the other, I would leap over it just for the gladness that was in me. That is how it is with your young lord, and that is how it should be with you, my young lady, for it is a great thing to be young, and to have the love of such a man, and indeed you have little to complain of.’
She was smiling now as she met his eyes.
‘You know everything, Daniel,’ she said.
He answered gravely, ‘I knew nothing when I first worked here, but I have gone on working here in the evenings when my sons have gone to dance with the lassies as soon as work is over, and I know now which plants to plant at sundown, and which at the new moon, and now here is this rare Dutch plant and I must take a cutting from it, and get up out of my bed tonight to do it, for it’s best done at the turn of the moon.’
She took the potatoes and walked away. Her dress made a blue patch through the iron gates, then disappeared; he heard her singing on the other side of the wall; her voice went up along the path through the bracken and away into the wood. He stood listening until he heard only the wind in the trees.
She was singing a wild song of two sisters who loved the same knight, but she was not thinking of what she sang; the words in her head were – ‘Jamie is coming home today, and I shall see him with my own two eyes.’
The old man had given her the courage to be happy; she was no longer thinking of delays in Edinburgh, or disappointments in London, for disappointment of some sort there had certainly been.
But what did it matter? What could anything matter but that he was coming home?
Chapter Four
There is a special place for women in the Scottish ballads, perhaps because women have always held a special place in Scottish life. Not for them did such home-grown proverbs spring up as those in England on the way to treat a wife, a dog and a walnut tree.
Even the fury of witch hunting that raged through Scotland was a fearful tribute to their power, distorted into a horrible fantasy by the twisted mind of that misogynist, King James.
In the ballads the woman’s place is in the home; sometimes an active one, for she ‘takes her kirtle by the hem’ and runs through the open country to raise armed men against those who are attacking it; or she guards it herself against her husband’s foes while he is away, refusing surrender even when the house is fired and her children are dying in the smoke.
But more often her part is the passive and plaintive one of the adviser, whose guidance is seldom followed, but always regretted. For the man rides out to rob his neighbour’s cattle and even so small a spoil as ‘three auld coverlids’ off the gude-wife’s bed; or else he takes down his bend-bow to go deer poaching – and little use it is for his mother to wring her hands, and tell him there is plenty of good wheat bread in the house, and plenty of blood-red wine,
‘And therefore for nae venison, Johnnie,
I pray ye, stir frae home.’
And still less use is it for her to wail over his dead body at the end of the day:
‘Ye wadna be warned, my son Johnnie,
Frae the hunting to bide awa’!’
That is the sigh of women through all the ages. Behind all these tales of daring – magnificent or cruel, high adventure or robbery and bloodshed – there murmurs the voice of the women:
‘But I wat they had better ha’e staid at hame.’
When Magdalen saw Jamie, all the three years he had been gone seemed to narrow and concentrate themselves into these last two days. All that she had expected to hear of foreign lan
ds, Italy, France, and England (‘yes, but in London, what happened when you saw the King?’ But no, she would not ask about that, not yet – none of them had liked to ask yet) – all these things seemed to have been left behind at the Border – for he would talk only of what Napier had said to him in these last two days at Merchiston.
Like all travellers, he could not tell what he had seen. The sun out there was very hot. He had met Angus in Rome. Queen Anne of Austria was not as beautiful now as they had said.
The treasures that he brought for her, the Italian shawl, the little fantastic shoes of stamped leather with absurd heels, the French enamel casket for her jewels, the Chinese chest of tea from London – these things were so much fairy gold, showing only that he had been where she had not.
But now he was here again, with her and their sons. ‘Hey, you young rascal, how high have you grown? High as my shoulder, aren’t you? Up you go, higher and higher.’
And up he hoisted Johnnie on to his shoulder, two small hands clutching at his hair. ‘I left no one half so big behind me,’ he said, ‘I don’t know you. Do you know me?’
‘Yes sir, I do. You are the man in the picture.’
And so he was, the very same, now that he had stopped playing with the children.
What made him so different from those other men at the table as they sat at dinner – from her father and brother with their close-clipped beards and big noses, their shrewd, sardonic eyes – and then the anxious, scholarly face of Mr Henderson? They were all so old beside Jamie – even her brother, who was only a few years older – they would always be older than he could ever be.
There was Mr Henderson gravely answering his patron’s half-jocular inquiries into the Church question. Southesk was asking if he did not think these English High Churchmen and their fads were like a lot of old women – no doubt it was all owing to the white petticoats they wore.
‘And now,’ said Henderson, in tones suitable for national disaster, ‘they are determined to bring their surplices back into Scotland.’
‘That will further the interests of the washerwomen,’ said Jamie with a burst of laughter; and she was suddenly conscious with him of the narrow little world to which he had returned after the broadening influences of foreign travel. But even as he was laughing, he remembered John Garn’s fanatical rage against popish surplices that autumn evening years ago when he and Colquhoun had drunk cappie at John Garn’s inn, and Colquhoun had talked of Kat, and he himself had never known it.
‘The tithes,’ he said, ‘who cares for them? They affect only pockets, and those of the landowners, like ourselves. The surplice is a symbol for anyone to see.’
His volte-face was too much for David, who retorted, ‘I thought it was only a question of washerwomen’s wages? Do they matter to you then more than our rightful property?’
The old note of family argument was creeping into the talk. But mercifully Mr Henderson had taken up the matter, and so earnestly as to abash both the young men.
‘Of what account,’ he demanded, ‘is either property or symbol, when the primitive truth and simplicity of our religion is being threatened by a papacy as strong as Rome’s?’
These prying fingers were those of England, but the brain behind them, the arm that gave them their strength, were those of Rome. So they said, ominously, shaking their heads.
And behind the slow, conscientious figure of the King, was that passionate little Roman Catholic, his Queen.
‘Oh tell us of the Queen, Jamie!’ Lady Southesk interpolated swiftly. ‘Does she indeed dance half-naked as a heathen goddess in those masques at Court? What did you think of her?’
‘As a very small brown bird, with a twig too large to carry. She took the part of an Amazon, and her bow was far too long for her, and so were her speeches. The prompter said most.’
‘And what did she say to you?’
‘Nothing. I was never presented to her.’
‘In the name of heaven, Jamie, why not?’
‘What went wrong?’
‘What happened at Court?’
Their questions burst round him, and there he sat in the middle of them, shy, angry, determined not to show what he was feeling. David’s question came last.
‘What did the King say to you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Were you not presented to him either?’
‘Yes, I was. He gave me his hand to kiss, and turned his back on me.’
‘But why—?’
‘Who introduced you?’
It all began again.
He answered as haughtily as if he were addressing the man he spoke of.
‘The Marquis of Hamilton. He told me how to behave to the King. I did not like his advice – so I suppose he told the King how to behave to me.’
Southesk burst out – ‘I knew it – you and your precious Raleigh! They always said he was “damnable proud” – must you copy him in that too?’
And then David began, but Southesk turned on his son and bit off his words, since it was the lad’s first night at home, and he himself may have forgotten it for an instant, but nobody else should.
But his wife, more tenderly concerned than any except Magdalen, could not restrain her laments that he had not at least met the Queen, who would have loved him at sight, declared the partial mother-in-law, ‘for it’s as my lord says, you are over-proud, Jamie, but if a man does not love a lad any better for that, a woman does.’
But the Queen could not love him, for she had not seen him. ‘It was a pity’ – ‘If you had only’ – ‘But why did you?’ – or ‘Why did you not?’ – these were the beginnings of sentences that rose in all their minds, and were choked down, exasperating their sorrow into anger.
You had better ha’e staid at heme.
But it had to remain unspoken on this his first evening, so they hurriedly passed on to other matters, showed exaggerated pleasure that he looked so well – he was so brown and strong, his shoulders had broadened out, they believed he had even grown taller, though surely that was impossible.
Twenty-three he was now, and the father of a growing family – high time to settle down and see to his estates for a bit, said his father-in-law, with bluff tact covering the point that since his sovereign had ignored him, there was no alternative at present to rustic retirement.
They were all covering things over now, making them easy. Only be patient and sensible, they seemed to say, and everything would turn out for the best. Even this business of Church reform would all come to nothing in the long run, Southesk was sure of that. And back they were safely on politics – only they did not sound so safe to Magdalen when Henderson was talking.
For though no man was less of a firebrand than Henderson, with his quiet voice, and dark, disturbed eyes, yet he made all in his presence feel that what he said had a power beyond his own.
That power was the Kirk of Scotland, creating a new mind in the nation, turning it at last from the barbarities of Border warfare and robber raids, giving it a tough intellectual fibre, a passion for argument, theology and education, making a spiritual democracy, that was hardening into bone and sinew in the close and murky air of the parish church.
In the house of God all men were equal; the bulk of the congregation might stink to heaven, but every member of it had equal rights with the young Earl of Montrose himself, sitting in his Sunday finery with his flowers to his nose, but sitting on no more than a stool, as did all the rest, and with no stronger voice than they when they appointed their minister.
There Magdalen had sat beside him while the hour-glass on the pulpit was turned and sometimes turned again, and the sun shone to no purpose for them through the dusty motes that wafted slowly up and up through the dim and stuffy air, and their still feet grew colder and colder on the stone floor. Life was short, but heaven and hell were eternal, and most preachers preferred to describe the latter.
Not so Mr Henderson. The goblins that haunted his mind were those of the present situation; he was a st
atesman, who found the times out of joint and was being reluctantly forced to the conclusion that he must do what he could to set them right.
For what was to happen in the country when this threatened Prayer Book from England should burst upon it? Every congregation in Scotland from the chief elder to the humblest peasant was demanding that their ministers should refuse to be ruled by a few bishops from London.
His company listened with respectful attention; Lady South-esk’s indeed was almost a glare; Magdalen suspected her mind to be secretly wandering from the minister’s words. Had the red and purple feathers not been found? The thought of them nodding over that earnest, sallow face in bed made a sudden and most unusual onslaught on her gravity; she had to bow her head, pretending attention to one of the dogs, and when she looked up and caught Jamie’s eye, believed that he was sharing her mirth.
But no, it was not mirth that made his eyes bright, and flung back his head on his throat as though he were laughing.
What fresh enterprise was it then that stirred in his breast, like a bird finding its wings?
‘Oh stay with me,’ her heart was crying, ‘you have not been home one night, and are you already eager to be off again?’
Off on some new high enthusiasm that Henderson could share, and Napier too, apparently, that austere though urbane man – but not herself. She was out of it, listening to a lot of talk about a Book of Canons, when suddenly there was his voice among it all, ringing like a call to arms.
‘This Prayer Book is a dead book. It has nothing to do with us. Are we to have a corpse thrust into our living Kirk? It is all the doing of the men at Court – they engineer trouble as the Campbells do with the clans of Macdonald, for the sake of what fishing they may get in the muddy waters. But these English robbers have a greed worse than Argyll’s – they have stolen the King’s conscience and put it in their pockets.’
A call to arms it was; she could see the spark, that he had caught from Henderson’s grave harangue, flash back to the minister, rise and glow between them. That was how he would fire others. Would he, would other men, really be such fools as to start a war over this matter? War – and Jamie riding out with his head held high, and that laugh on his face – but no, whatever happened, she must shut out the rest of the picture, or it might come true.
The Proud Servant Page 17