There was nothing now in his head but an unhappy, turgid welter of emotion that filled his eyes with tears as he stammered out, ‘My lord, I too have bairns, a boy called Rob like yours, though now growing up, and my little Lillie, – and if there were anything that I could do for yours, you may be sure to trust me in that. I will consult my Lord Southesk and see what can best be done for them and for your estates hereafter, for sure the ruin of this present time cannot endure for ever, and your eldest son and heir will be able to return when these unhappy quarrels are over, to enjoy his own in Scotland – as you should have done, my lord – as you should have done—’
He could say no more, for he was fairly blubbering, and it was high time for him to go.
His companions were peeping in on him; they must not see that he was weeping while the prisoner, that he should have reduced to penitence, remained dry-eyed. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, giving a prodigious sniff, uttered a word or two of exhortation to impress the audience by the door, and joined them with a hasty stumbling tread.
‘What did you get from him?’ Mr James Guthrie inquired.
‘Did he admit anything of his guilt?’ Mr Robert Traill demanded.
‘The King? Did he still say nothing against the King?’ insisted Mr Mungo Law.
‘We never spoke of him,’ broke out Robert Baillie in an impetuous burst of anger.
‘Never spoke of him?’ Mr Mungo Law’s hands swept the air. ‘Sir, are you clean daft? You spoke with him alone and never got him to admit a word of the grudge he must have against the King? Never tried—?’
‘No confession at all?’ Mr Robert Traill’s voice was even more strident. ‘Lord save us, man, what were you about?’
‘Of what then did you speak together?’ came in a deep growl from Mr James Guthrie.
‘Of his private concerns,’ said Mr Baillie, and added hastily as he saw those amazed, indignant faces round him. ‘He spoke to me of his private sins only.’
‘What private sins?’ inquired Mr Mungo Law.
‘He means, his being given to women?’ Mr James Guthrie suggested hopefully.
Mr Baillie answered with what they felt to be quite unnecessary vehemence: ‘A man’s private sins are a matter for private confession, and not to be imparted to any.’
They had to make what good they could of that, and Mr Robert Traill duly noted it in his diary, but without the satisfaction of being able to record to what private sins James Graham had confessed.
But Mr Robert Baillie, whose impassioned interest in everyone and everything made him write so busily and copiously to everybody, to his wife, his friends, his colleagues, his Government, and himself in his private journals – and of everything, however small, such as what he had to eat and what he had to pay for it and how badly his servant behaved and how lucky he was to get another; or however great, such as my Lord Strafford slipping off in private to the Tower ‘lest he be torn in pieces’ while ‘the King went home in silence’, – Mr Baillie wrote not one word of his last talk with Montrose.
Like Charles I from Strafford’s death-sentence, he ‘went home in silence’, to his feather-bed and his good supper, where he broke out not very reasonably about their all being a lot of ‘bursten poke-puddings whose care was to dine not wisely but too well’; but Mrs Baillie, being possessed of much the same sound rock-bottom wisdom as himself, paid no attention to that, but merely followed up the meal by giving him a good large dose of the rhubarb wine she had brewed last summer.
XIII
The ministers had gone; it was now Major Weir’s turn to carry on the cry. As Montrose knelt to pray in the corner of his cell, Weir came in to jeer at him, and urged on his unwilling guards to disturb him by talking both to him and to each other. Leaning forward on his long staff, he puffed his pipe- smoke into the prisoner’s face and called to the others to do the same.
‘Come on, you fellows, here’s a wretch that’s too dainty to smell the smoke of tobacco, when he’s condemned to burn in the reek of hell fire to all eternity.’
The men were uneasy; one of them muttered that a man, however wicked, should be allowed to pray on the last night of his life. The Captain of the Guard swerved round on him, using his staff as a pivot.
‘What’s that, Dick Brodie? Are you stirring up insubordination with your blasphemies? James Graham has been condemned not merely to die but to burn in hell for ever, and you dare say his prayers are any use to him after that? They are nothing but smoke, the smoke of hell; so let him prepare his soul for it in the only way he can now, with good tobacco- smoke!’
They did not dare go against their commanding officer; they smoked and talked loud, according to his orders.
Montrose had been cheered by Baillie’s kindness; now a sick despair fell on him. It had been of no use to plan and work and fight to get his country under a saner, happier rule. Men did not want to be sane or happy, they chose devils for their masters; Argyll, Warriston, even this monstrous creature, the Captain of the City Guard, were proof of it. They delighted in tyranny and cruelty:
‘Torture is put upon the rays of the sun.’
If only he could have died fighting – fighting at Philiphaugh or at Carbisdale as he had longed to do, or even fighting these mean wretches round him – that at least would have given some satisfaction to the end of a life that had now lost all its meaning.
He could not. There was nothing he could do but break out and revile them, – and that his pride would not let him do. There was nothing but hate round him, nothing but hate that governed this world. God Himself was the lie with which men tried to refute it.
Then, as he despaired, a thin wreath of the tobacco-smoke he loathed went coiling up against the sickly yellow light of the single candle, a cloudy spiral of blue mist, and he saw again Louey’s face when he had come on her smoking in the studio, and they had talked, and he had told her he could not love her, and had done so. A longing for her presence swept through him, overwhelmed him; if he could see her, speak to her, touch her, but for an instant, he could be brave again and know that God and love were real.
But that very torment made him brave, for in thinking of her he forgot his own misery in the thought of what hers would be when she knew what had happened to him.
His pity for his love healed the bitterness of his own pain. It was to comfort her that he now longed to see her before he died.
At the moment of death, his spirit, released, would wing to her.
Knowing this, he saw and heard nothing more of his jailers. He prayed; and soon they were astonished to find that in spite of their continued noise and talk together, he was in a deep sleep.
When the next morning, Tuesday the 21st of May, the ministers and politicians thronged into his cell again, Warriston himself was with them. They found Montrose combing his hair, a vanity that struck Warriston as a personal insult.
All the fourteen years since he had first seen Montrose now rolled away; he was looking again at the young nobleman whose fire and beauty and easy, unconscious courage had appealed so swiftly to the people of Edinburgh that they had at once acclaimed him as their leader, even as two days since they had refused their rulers’ commands to stone him as their enemy – and why?
Because he had appealed to the pride of the heart and the lust of the eye, where Warriston, shivering and nervous, his voice weak, his eyes red-rimmed and blurred with sleepless nights of prayer, had failed utterly to touch the hearts of the people and incline them to the Lord. Never had he forgot the miserable failure of that first speech of his to the people. He had been up all night preparing it, he had warned Christ how much His own interests were concerned in it, he had told Him, ‘Thy credit is now engaged – let me know that Thy Father denies Thee nothing.’ Yet God had denied both Christ and him; his speech had failed utterly. But with a careless word or two Montrose had swung the crowd to himself instead; they had surged forward as one man to answer his call, had swept him up on to their shoulders, shouting and cheering, and borne him in t
riumph round the Mercat Cross – where today he was to die.
And that was how God now at last answered His servant, Warriston. At last he was proved the ruler, and he himself had read the sentence of death on this proud nobleman. Of what use to Montrose now were his fine looks and his fine clothes, those carnation silk stockings knitted for him by his adoring nieces, his curling hair, which even now he took care to comb?
Warriston’s voice rasped out across the dark cell: ‘Does James Graham trouble how his head shall look, when in so short a time it will be cut from his body?’
Montrose answered, ‘My head is still my own. Tonight, when it will be yours, treat it as you please.’
There was a sound like thunder outside; it was the roll of drums beating to arms. They told him that armed troops were being called out to line all the streets, in case the people were so mad as to try and rescue him.
He flung back his head and laughed. ‘What, am I still a terror to them? Let them look to themselves! My ghost will haunt them.’
Warriston shivered uncontrollably. A sudden sick terror had come upon him like a seizure; he knew in that instant that Montrose’s words were true, that he would be haunted all his life by the image of this man, and by the fear that his Highlanders would sweep down into the streets of Edinburgh to avenge his death on himself.
Had the haunting even begun?
‘Tonight, when it will be yours, treat it as you please.’ As Montrose had said the words, his pale gleaming smile had seemed to light that head that he held so high; to Warriston’s horrified imagination it appeared to swim in light, already severed from his body, to approach him, offering itself to his hands as if in anticipation of ‘tonight, when it will be yours’. Then Warriston could take it between his clutching fingers and look exultantly into those eyes, now bright and unconquered, that would then at last be glazed and ghastly, mere bits of inanimate matter, which Warriston could, if he so pleased, grind beneath his heel.
Would he so please? Would he dare touch that head when it should lie bleeding before him? It was the thing he had longed for, ever since that day fourteen years ago, to deface and trample on this man’s destroyed beauty. Now his wish had come true – which is the common idea of heaven, but is more commonly the truth of hell.
So it was to Warriston. For as he fearfully met those eyes that soon would see nothing, their power of vision was so clear that for one blinding instant Warriston saw through them into his own heart, saw it crawling with black and evil thoughts, saw his hideous imaginings as the work, not of God as he had believed, but of the Devil.
He put his hands before his face to shut out those eyes of Montrose.
But they would not be shut out, they would never be shut out, not even when they were glazed and dull; they would still look at him and tell him he was Satan’s servant instead of God’s.
From that moment uncertainty entered Warriston’s frantic mind and drove it on the road to madness, so that when at last he too came to die on the scaffold, his life had for long been so miserable that he would have welcomed death even in this form – but that he had no wits left to know what was happening to him.
XIV
‘And when we cam to the lower prison
Where Willie o’ Kinmont he did lie—
“Oh sleep ye, wake ye, Kinmont Willie,
Upon the morn that thou’s to die?”
‘ “ Oh I sleep salt and I wake aft,
It’s lang since sleeping was fley’d frae me!
Gie my service back to my wife and bairns
And a’ gude fellows that speir lor me.” ’
Hurry woke with a start on Tuesday morning the 21st of May with that snatch of the ballad of Kinmont Willie ringing in his ears. It was many years since he had heard it as a lad at Pitfichie while that bold Border thief had been still alive. All that King James VI of Scotland had done in reparation of that raid to rescue Kinmont Willie from Carlisle Castle, as the ballad sang, had been to christen his little daughter Elizabeth as namesake of his ‘loving cousin’, Queen Elizabeth of England, and to ask that enraged old lioness down in her palace at Westminster to ‘stand gossip’ to his infant daughter, Princess of Scotland, so soon to be Princess Royal of England, then to be Queen of Bohemia.
And Hurry had talked with her, had gone and inspected her stables at The Hague with her in what he had taken to be the proudest moment in his life. He had never had a chance to tell his Maggie about it after all; that had gone by like everything else.
It didn’t really matter when you had come to ‘the morn that thou’s to die’.
Nobody else thought so, anyway. He had pleaded his ‘wife and bairns’ to the Committee of Estates, but they had regarded it as an insufficient reason for him to go on living. Maggie and all those long-haired brats of theirs had had to do without him most of the time all these years at Pitfichie; no doubt she would marry one of the neighbouring landowners – that respectable widower Dick Tweedie most probably, with his fat foolish face like an underbaked scone – and continue to do without him in much greater comfort. Dick would find tochers for the girls, all five of ‘em; he was just the sort of fellow to provide for another man’s children – and hadn’t he good reason to, if he had only known it, since Hurry had provided him with most of his own?
He’d be one of the ‘good fellows that speir for me’ – there weren’t many left in Aberdeenshire.
The guards gave him a good sup of whisky for his late breakfast. That showed there was going to be no chance of a reprieve; so did their kindly apologetic manner. One of them had brought him a couple of fresh eggs from his own hens, ‘laid this morning’. A fellow was no doubt entitled to two eggs for breakfast on the day he was to be executed.
He asked about Montrose. Sleeping had not been ‘fley’d frae’ him; he had slept as peacefully as a child on the top of hearing that ghastly sentence yesterday.
‘Sentence one day, execution the next,’ said Hurry; ‘they killed off Rizzio even quicker, and that’s all you can say for it. But no one called that an execution – or will call this anything but murder.’
‘Ay, it’s been quick work,’ said one of the guards, uncomfortably loquacious. ‘Davie Sands’ men were at it all night to get up that giant gallows in time to greet you – and then had to add sixteen wine-puncheons to make the platform big enough for it.’
‘As to that, I’d as soon die on wine-puncheons as anything.’
‘Ah, but they’re empty, General.’
‘They’ll be full enough of blood by the time your ministers have done.’
There was an uneasy laugh. They were good fellows. Like all men, they liked telling him a thing or two against their superior officers, but they evidently had not dared to tell all they would like to against Major Weir. But Hurry’s sharp eyes could see as far through a brick wall as most.
As he was led out of prison, his hands bound to his side, Major Weir was standing at the gates of the Tolbooth, waiting for him, his eyes cast on the ground as usual, but he raised them as Hurry approached, and looked into his face with curious delight.
‘Your master has gone on before you,’ he said, ‘to show you the way to tread the scaffold. You’ve turned your coat many times, Sir John Joseph, whose coat bears so many colours, but you turned it wrong at the last. Here you are on the wrong side after all at the end, and God and the Devil himself together will laugh you to scorn.’
The frosty eyes of his prisoner stared back into those strangely glowing eyes.
‘I’ve been hearing a deal about your City Guard of Edinburgh,’ said Hurry in a casual conversational tone. ‘They tell me it’s of great antiquity, so old that some of the guards attended the Crucifixion.’
‘That may well be,’ said Weir with a touch of simple pride that made him much more human, ’since we hold King Solomon’s own original portrait which they looted from the Temple at Jerusalem at that time.’
‘A certain proof of it. And you, Major, have stood at this gate today to insult and taunt
the Marquis of Montrose as he went to execution – as you’ve done to every prisoner who’s left these gates to his death, and as you’d have done to Christ on the Cross if you’d been there with the City Guards of Edinburgh.’
Major Weir knocked his staff down upon the stones with an angry rattle. ‘You go to your death blaspheming! You have dared compare the dog’s death that James Graham is to die with that of our Saviour. You will go to hell with that devil’s lie burning your tongue till it withers at the root.’
‘Ay, you’re “Angelical Thomas” of the Bowhead Saints – but there are one or two things I know now of you, Angelical Thomas, and there’s one satisfaction in being condemned to die, and that is, you can’t do any worse than is to be done to me today, and I can say what more than one man and woman would like to say – your own sister Jean Weir for one – whom you’ve seduced both to your will and your Master’s; and that is, you need a long spoon to sup with the Devil, but even that tall black wand of yours won’t be long enough to help you against him when your time comes.’
Twice Major Weir had raised his staff in furious signal to the guards to march the prisoner on. But that stalwart fellow, half a head taller than the men on either side of him, held his ground while he rapidly finished his imperturbable speech. Nor were his guards, for all their air of shocked determination, at all sorry to hear to the end of it. They did not dare look at their Major, but stole glances at each other under their helmets as they finally pushed Hurry on.
‘No need for that now I’ve said my say, lads,’ he told them, squared his shoulders, and fell into the line of march.
All round him he saw troops lining the streets, and behind them the white faces of the crowd, and he heard the amazed murmur of their speech.
The day had been heavy and overcast with thunder-clouds, but now the early afternoon sun was piercing them in long white shafts of light. The puddles between the cobblestones gleamed like mirrors, and the windows on one side of the street were a dazzle of pale gold.
The Bride Page 40
