And now it was barely three weeks since they had heard of the dreadful death of their mother’s brother. There was some fatality about visits of condolence to their mother; clearly she was unfitted by fate as well as nature ever to receive them.
Eliza, with the nervous desperation of an unready plotter, had just begun to say something of her fears to Louey, just begun to say, ‘We must say – what can we say? – A sick friend perhaps—’ And Louey, with that blank angelic stare that showed she had not taken in a word, was softly answering, ‘Why a sick friend? Why not a sound one? And why say either of them to whom?’ when a page came into the room and announced the Marquis of Montrose.
Louey saw him standing at the end of the long room in the cold grey light reflected through the windows from the snow outside, so still in that instant’s pause that he might always have stood there between the door and the windows and only in this moment become visible, a spirit conjured up by her vehement thought of him.
‘He is there – here in this room,’ it was saying; ‘now he is coming towards us, and I shall see his face clearly.’
But she had no need to see it, for already she had seen his eyes.
He had come forward; that pale light from the snow no longer hung over him, he was beside them in the warm firelight that danced over the inlaid marble floor and light painted walls, he was in this familiar room that glimmered with polished surfaces like a china bowl. She heard his voice, measured and grave, with the slight Scottish burr that gave each syllable so much more value than did the voices of their London visitors. She saw the irregular lines of his features, the faint jagged line of a scar at the side of his face, and that his lithe wiry figure made him look tall, but he would not seem so beside their giant brothers, Rupert and Maurice.
None of these things, nor the bows and greetings and Eliza’s apologies for their mother’s absence, broke the spell of that first sight of him.
Those eyes, keen and resolute, were inscrutable; they had looked on something that other men had not seen, something beyond sorrow or hope or despair, though it had once included all these things. She had just been reading how for two winters, bitter even for Scotland, wandering with his followers on the freezing mountains ‘without quarters, without even tents, he had endured all war’s hardships, with nothing to appease his thirst and hunger but icy water or melted snow, without bread and salt, and with only a scanty supply of lean and starveling cattle.’
Now he stood in their drawing-room and answered the correct things her sister was saying, and she might never get a chance again to hear him speak. She had heard him come riding into their courtyard, as all the great men in the world came riding to see her mother – and went away again. She saw them once, or perhaps twice, and often never spoke to them herself at all. This time she would speak to this man herself.
II
Sir Edward Hyde, Chancellor of the Exchequer, had gone to the Palace of the Binnenhof for an interview with his young master, the new King Charles II, who had been staying all this winter at the Binnenhof as guest of his brother-in-law, the young Prince William of Orange. But King Charles had forgotten the appointment and gone out skating.
In no hurry to get back to his draughty lodging, Hyde was strolling along the gallery that connected the outer buildings with the massive old central fort, talking extremely brilliantly to one of the Dutch officers of the household in the hope that he would appreciate his wit sufficiently to ask him out to dinner, when his companion must needs interrupt one of his best sallies to look out of the window and exclaim at something that was happening outside the Palace. A troop of horse, he said; some great personage must be arriving to see Prince William – or perhaps the English King.
Hyde had perforce to look out too, at which his whole train of lucid and sparkling thought was interrupted, his jaw dropped, and his round face turned as pale as it was possible for that choleric complexion to do.
‘Yes, I know the leader,’ he replied abstractedly to his companion’s question. It was five years since he had seen him among the King’s Court at Oxford, but he was not likely to forget him, even at this distance and on horseback. ‘It is the Marquis of Montrose, come in his own person.’
His companion’s large face shone like the sun with satisfaction. ‘The Great Marquis! I have long wished to set eyes on him. Introduce me, I beg of you; it is something to say one has met the most famous soldier of one’s day.’
Hyde tried to acquiesce affably as they hurried down the stairs together, but he felt he would give a deal to avoid meeting the famous soldier at this moment, and yet see him he must as quickly as possible – warn him he must – but good God, when had he ever done anything else but warn him? And even in his last letters he had flatly forbidden him by command of his new Sovereign to approach The Hague.
Hyde had tried to meet him at Sevenbergen, but before he could do so the news of Charles I’s death had fallen like a thunderbolt on them all, and it had been a messenger, not Hyde himself, that brought the news to Montrose. He had uttered no word in answer to that news, no message had come back, Montrose had remained shut in his room for two days, seeing nobody but his servants. His friend and chaplain, Wishart, had afterwards found a verse he had scribbled on a torn scrap of paper, in which his rage and pity and over- generous admiration burst from his heart like a gush of blood, and held up his own image of the King he had served with so great passion:
‘Great, good and just, could I but rate
My grief, and thy too rigid fate’—
It was an odd way for a great soldier to take the blow, but it affected many people oddly, stunning some, driving others to despair and even suicide, while more than one had died simply of a broken heart. Personal loyalty was not the only cause for such violent grief; this death done in the open with a show of law, but in direct defiance of the laws of England, was more than the murder of a king; it was the death of a world, of all confidence in old beliefs. Nothing would ever be the same again.
To Hyde it was the death of law, of decency, of sanity, of all that he thought of when he thought of England. When he had been homesick for England it had been for a land which now had ceased to exist as utterly as if it had vanished under the sea. The sea might recede and something of England appear again, but never as it had been before.
His step was heavier now than it had been a month ago, and not by reason of the gout, as he plodded down the stairs and out over the drawbridge to meet the Marquis.
‘He has changed,’ he thought as he looked up at that spare active form in black, mounted on the big horse; but then which of them had not changed in these half-dozen years? Only, of most you could say, ‘He is more worn,’ or ‘He is stouter,’ or ‘He is graver,’ and you would not at first say any of these things of Montrose.
It was as though another man looked out of those steady and brilliant eyes down into Hyde’s. Did Montrose even recognize him? – but surely he himself had not changed as much as that? – or was he seeing Hyde’s thoughts so plainly that he had scarcely leisure to observe the man?
And here was this ridiculous Dutchman pulling at his sleeve for an introduction to a famous general, when they themselves could hardly wait to greet each other as persons.
‘Is the King here?’ said Montrose, and Hyde told him, no.
‘If Your Lordship will come to my poor lodging—’ He looked nervously at the Marquis’ large retinue: Lauderdale and his faction would make trouble over that. He might as well have said it out aloud, for he saw Montrose’s smile following his glance. Confused, unwontedly at a loss, he did not know how it happened that the Marquis had dismounted and dispersed most of his followers, while the Dutchman had disappeared.
They were now walking together beside the frozen lake of the Binnenhof on which people were skating and playing games. He was trying to give his reasons for attempting to keep Montrose from The Hague and realizing uncomfortably that he had already written them several times over, – and now all his balanced arguments were b
eing brushed away.
Montrose was driving at him, ‘You write and ask my help with one hand while with the other you support Lauderdale and now Argyll. You pander to them and keep me at a distance. I have obeyed the King as long as I could – now I cannot. I have no apology to make for defying His Majesty’s commands. The explanation is for you to give – why the King’s recent enemies are to be trusted rather than his loyal servants.’
Yet this was said, though sternly, without temper, or at any rate such temper as Rupert would have shown. There was an icy logic in it that worsted Lawyer Hyde, as he felt, at his own game. The result was to ruffle his own temper. He began desperately:
‘If Your Lordship chooses to ignore His Majesty’s commands—’
‘His Majesty is not yet nineteen. His commands are prompted by his advisers. I am speaking to the chief of them.’
‘But not the only one. This Court is a whirlpool of contrary opinions. And we have only got him away this winter from his mother in Paris. All last year she was urging him, as she urged the late King, to ally himself with the Covenanters. Queen Henrietta Maria can see little difference between one Protestant and another; she has pinned her faith, as did the late King, to the split between Cromwell’s army and their former allies in Scotland – a split that has certainly widened enormously in the last weeks. All Scotland is in uproar at King Charles’ murder, the whole nation has gone into mourning. What’s more, they have openly defied the English Parliament’s decree to abolish Monarchy. Argyll himself—’ he hesitated, then stopped altogether.
It was impossible to go on with those eyes upon him. In the silence that hung on the frost-still air, scarcely broken for them by the cries and laughter of the people playing on the ice, so near them yet as remote as the starved birds that also swooped and cried to each other, he heard Montrose’s deep voice finish his sentence for him – not as Hyde had intended.
‘Argyll himself,’ Montrose said, ‘is sending commissioners to the King. That is why I can no longer obey the King, and have come here at last myself. Argyll is my greatest enemy, I freely admit it. But Argyll is no more my enemy than he is the King’s.’
‘My lord, you may well be right. I at any rate believe you to be-in part,’ he added judicially. ‘But at least it is something that Argyll is the present ruler of Scotland, if only by force and fear—’
‘Add also by wealth and usury. There is scarce a family in Scotland that is not bound in his toils. Add also by the powers of death and hell. Argyll as Chief Elder of the Kirk rules more by terror of excommunication and eternal damnation than by the armed forces of the Covenant. The country is in the grip of a nightmare.’
The passion with which the younger man spoke gave Hyde a momentary sense of advantage as the practical man of the world.
‘My lord, let us keep to the main issue. Whatever the reasons, the Marquis of Argyll is the ruling power of your country, and we cannot afford to ignore the fact that he has broken his alliance with Cromwell and is holding out his hand to King Charles II.’
‘Because that hand has been forced by the public opinion of his country. Even Argyll has had to listen to the groan of horror that went up from every corner of Scotland at news of the King’s murder. Yet it is known that he sold the King to his murderers, it is believed that he and Cromwell discussed-planned rather – that murder together when he entertained him at his house in Edinburgh last autumn. And now you’ll take his hand and hope for his help, while you refuse mine!’
His anger, restrained till now, had broken into open fury. Hyde made an attempt to calm him, but he himself was indignant, flustered, and in spite of himself unbearably anxious. He reminded the Marquis that King Charles II, so far from refusing his help, had written through himself to beg for it, to which Montrose with a short laugh added, ‘With my hands bound!’
It was too much. Hyde exploded with an oath, muttered an excuse that his gouty foot was troubling him (and so indeed it was, swathed inside a too large shoe, having to pad up and down keeping pace with this long springy stride), and asked whether Montrose would not take this opportunity, since King Charles was not at the Binnenhof, to present himself to the Dowager Princess of Orange, a greater power at present in Holland than her young son William.
‘She hopes for a match between her daughter and the young King, and favours the Covenanters,’ replied Montrose coolly. ‘I find myself well able to wait for another opportunity to be presented to the Princess Amelia. But will you direct me to the Queen of Bohemia’s house?’
‘You wish to go there this moment?’
‘On the instant.’
A round bright eye rolled indignantly up at the Marquis. This man was in a mighty hurry and, like Prince Rupert, determined to take his own way, and no one else’s advice. But he seemed so unaware of his error that Hyde swallowed it with something of a gulp, and answered:
‘It is behind you – the Wassanaar Hof, that big corner house, two houses rather, round to the right at the end of the Voorhout; it is just out of sight from here.’
Montrose spun round so sharply on his heel that his spur clanked on the icy ground. In doing so he looked for the first time at the figures skimming over the ice in their thick bunched clothes, and stared at a little group standing at some distance round a man who was swinging a long clubbed stick backwards and forwards at a ball, which at last he struck and sent spinning to the end of the lake.
‘If you must needs go and visit the King’s aunt now—’ Hyde began huffily, stuffily, and stopped, suddenly hearing how his voice sounded.
But Montrose did not seem to have heard it, nor his words. ‘I did not know they played golf on the ice here,’ he said. ‘It is a game I have played very often in my own country, but I have not seen it elsewhere.’
‘King James tried to introduce it into England,’ said Hyde, ‘but it has never proved popular. Its simplicity makes it more suitable for peasants than for a nation of tennis-players.’
He cursed himself for his rudeness as Montrose, without seeming to notice it, took his leave of him with a cold and distant courtesy and strode back to the end of the lake where his personal attendants were waiting with his horse.
Hyde watched him go, and thought of Rupert whom Montrose had wished to meet here. What a pair they would have made! They might well have been able together to sweep everything before them – sweep it indeed further than he himself approved.
These younger men, strong, active, indifferent to their elders, swinging through life on light, easy-moving feet, careless whether the next step were to their own death, – how insolent was their certainty, their contempt of brains better than their own, merely because those brains were cooped up in bodies less free and vigorous than their own. Confronted with them, even Hyde’s self-satisfaction was forced to contrast that agile mind of his with his clumsy, aching body, grown too quickly old. He envied, and condemned.
Rupert blowing into his lodgings like the nor’-easterly gale that had driven his ships from these shores, disregarding, even despising Hyde’s requests; Montrose marching openly with all his men into this sufficiently perturbed city in flat disobedience to the King’s commands and Hyde’s most urgent warnings - this was insolence, vanity, a harsh blot upon the nobility of the Marquis’ character.
Hyde could recognize that nobility as well as anyone, but he could recognize faults too, and it gave him considerably more pleasure to do so. Did these soldiers, with all their showier opportunities for displaying their nobility, ever recognize Hyde’s?
He knew how much he had it, and so, in unfortunate corollary, he felt he had earned full right to criticize even ‘the clearest spirit and of the greatest honour’ among the King’s servants. He had acknowledged the Marquis to be that, and in firm hard handwriting, and laid down his considered opinion as solidly as a foundation-stone, that he believed ‘his clear spirit to be most like to advance the King’s service’. Yes, and he held to it, but there was another side to all things, and Montrose made it exceedingly dif
ficult for others to get on with him.
‘Damnable proud’ had been the verdict on him ever since his first appearance as a youth at the English Court, when he had at once contrived to make an enemy of the very man who could best advance his interests, the Duke of Hamilton. He had been ‘altogether too remarkable a young man’ for Hamilton’s taste. Hyde had now no opinion himself of the Duke of Hamilton, but that did not prevent his remembering Hamilton’s opinion of Montrose with relish, and looking forward to his return to his cold lodging and the private notes for his magnum opus to which he could confide his own opinions. (These were sometimes inconsistent, since they were apt to vary according to whether the person described had lately agreed with him or not.)
And there was another obscure grievance, as yet undiscovered, that he had against the Marquis. Suddenly he discovered it.
‘Damnation!’ he swore. ‘And I never managed to introduce that Dutchman after all – there goes any hope of a dinner from him!’
III
As Montrose turned and walked back towards his men they at once rode up with his horse for him to remount, and it took him only a minute or two to reach the Queen of Bohemia’s house after turning at right angles at the end of the lake.
The game of golf he had just noticed had crowded out everything else in his mind in an absurd way. Here he was in yet another strange foreign city after travelling in the last two and a half years through Norway, Denmark, Germany, Flanders, France, Italy, Vienna, Prague, Poland, and Brussels; but he was not here, he was back in Scotland, up on the links of Old Montrose playing a match with his brother-in-law Sir John Colquhoun on the eve of his own wedding the next day to Magdalen Carnegie, daughter of the Earl of Southesk.
That familiar scene in the windy autumn twilight of nearly twenty years ago was more alive in his mind’s eye than this frost-bound foreign city with people calling to each other in yet another strange language. He had ridden up to Kinnaird late that evening after the game on a sudden impulse to see Magdalen once more before she became his bride on the morrow. She had stood there so still, a girl of sixteen, looking at him with those deep eyes of hers. Had she in that instant seen all the agony that he would bring her?
The Bride Page 8
