The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  But how grave the company had grown, and – ‘can you not tell us of something more cheerful, Carlippis?’ asked Lilias.

  And at once he gave them something more cheerful, gave of good measure, broad and running over. Had her ladyship heard the latest gossip of the fair young Queen of France, whom everyone called Anne of Austria? The Duke of Buckingham had fallen madly in love with her, but Queen Anne’s Spanish etiquette had made her excessively prudish, until lately, in a garden at Amiens—

  In that icy room, where the draught blew under their chairs and froze their heels even as they roasted their toes at the fire, the garden at Amiens grew before their eyes – the scent of jasmine and of orange trees in tubs, the music, the coloured lights in the warm darkness, the titters and whispers of faithless maids of honour, the shriek of a frightened queen, the strong English oaths of the Duke of Buckingham, discovered, dishevelled, enraged.

  There was a touch of insolent contempt in the agility with which Carlippis’ mind leaped down to the level of that of his mistress and gave this tit-bit from the outer world. So might a great ape leap to the lower branch of its tree and offer its discarded nut-shells. His splayed features, widening yet further in a mechanic grin, the expansive gestures of his broad hands, on which the thick red hairs glistened in the light of the fire – here indeed was the servility of the wild beast, of which Carlippis himself had spoken. But with it was the scorn that belongs, not to beast, but to devil.

  His little light eye flicked out from under the red lid and round his company, and in that cold flame each one seemed to have withered a little. Even David Carnegie’s silent disapproval of the scandal, of this glib, insolent fellow of Colquhoun’s, made no good case for virtue, so sagging and sullen was his expression.

  Kat alone of the company seemed unaffected by Carlippis – did not even listen. She sat on a cushion, clasping her knees; she never stirred; nor laughed; nor looked up when the others spoke. The firelight on her pale face made it like a cameo carved in amber; it turned her dark hair to copper, and the shadows in her green dress into rivulets of purple and black; the dress flowed out into a circle round her; it might have been an enchanted circle, imprisoning her, removing her from their company.

  So had she sat and stared at the fire as a child, sphinx-like, remote, yet not quite like this. Jamie forgot his anger with her in a sudden apprehension. She must not sit so still – too still. He leaned forward and touched her on the shoulder. She did not start at his touch, but raised her eyes, and for an instant he looked into their bright, blank gaze.

  ‘You stare so hard you are squinting,’ he said. It was what they had told her as a child, but it was not true at the moment, and he said it only because her gaze made him uncomfortable, and he wished to force some expression into it. But it did not alter, and he added, ‘You have not heard one word.’

  ‘I heard the sounds.’ And suddenly she laughed, the eyes flashed, the whole face seemed to open, widen, soften. The spell was broken, she was there again. ‘Carlippis is my musician,’ she said, ‘I have no need to listen to what he says.’

  And as the servant bowed his mocking gratitude to her, once again there was that disconcerting glimpse as of a primitive beast, for all his superior subtlety, holding them under his red and hairy paw, condescending to pretend at playfulness the while he waited to use them for what he wished.

  Then the music began again, the music of the gayest dances and the saddest songs in the world; it went on until even this company had at last to go to bed.

  Chapter Ten

  David carnegie hurried the rest of the family home at an early hour the next morning, because he must walk all round the policies with his father, who wished to consult him on the new gardens he was planting. Their young host, who did not know how early they were leaving, was not down to say good-bye – surprisingly for him, since he had been out each morning earlier than any of them, to fly his hawks over the uplands above the marsh. But just this morning he was late – ‘it would be so,’ thought Magdalen, watching her brother’s contemptuous glance at Mungo Graham, as he came running into the hall with apologies for his lordship, who had been rather sick in the night, explained the page.

  ‘Over-eaten himself,’ was Carnegie’s comment, somewhat justified by the weeks of feasting and over-exertion and excitement of the festivities.

  Magdalen rode back to Kinnaird beside her brother. It was pleasant to see her father waiting for them, full of plans about his orchards. Years of peace and prosperity and settled home life would be necessary to bring them to maturity; he could count on them, for he had always had them. His confidence in the future had expressed itself in the planting of a rare silver fir which would take more than a century to reach its full growth. And there were the three young ash trees that his children had irreverently named Adam and Eve and Samuel.

  ‘Why Samuel, and not the Serpent?’ Magdalen had asked as a child, and was told not to bring the devil into this garden.

  Round the new gardens, that were being banked up out of the surrounding marsh, she walked in the wake of her father and brother – an obedient girl, moving as softly as one of the fawns in the park, in and out of the spring sunshine and the shadows of the trees, slender, silent, attentive to the weighty masculine pronouncements on the property – thankful that for this once they did not mention the tithes question.

  Old Daniel Muschet, the gardener, joined the peregrination; solemn as a church ceremonial of the old days, they proceeded over the holy ground. ‘Honour thy father and mother that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.’ This it was to be safe, to be settled, to be firmly planted in the soil – wild soil, reclaimed from the bog, which was once useful only in warfare, as a defence from invaders. That was why Kinnaird Castle had been built here in the old evil days.

  Wars with England, or civil wars, they were all over; even family feuds and killing affrays had practically ceased since all the laws passed in the last reign; only the Highland clans were still untamed, and carried on their lawless raids upon their neighbours. But that was in the mountains, and here at Kinnaird, only a wave of blue on the horizon marked their outposts.

  From there, along the Grampians, right across Scotland, from that great loch that lay at the beginning of the Western Highlands, the young Earl of Montrose came riding when he had been staying at Rossdhu, where lived his sister Kat, and that man, Carlippis. Kat, Carlippis, Jamie himself – there was something disturbing to Magdalen in each of these… . Perhaps her brother was right not to take to Montrose; he was generally right. He belonged here to the plains, and Montrose to the hills; you never knew what he would do next.

  Now they had nearly reached the rise in the ground, covered with scrub and bushes and wind-twisted thorn trees, where Montrose had always ridden and waved in signal on his way to the uplands, to see if any from Kinnaird would join his party at hawking. But today there was no horse standing on the hill, and no scarlet scarf waving like a banner in the breeze – and that although he had not been down to say good-bye to them. But you never knew what he would not do next.

  And when she looked at his necklace, chosen to match Kat’s tawny eyes, she wished she had not worn it – she would not wear it again – nor share his presents nor anything else with Kat.

  It was a pleasant encouragement to her resolve, to remember that young Ogilvy, the Master of Airlie, was riding up from Saint Andrews to pay them a visit of some days. He was one of the admirers of the Carnegie sisters in general who had begun to concentrate his attentions on the youngest – so that there had even been some talk of his hopes from his father, the Earl of Airlie, to Lord Carnegie. Here then was an offering indubitably Magdalen’s very own, not to be shared with her sisters, nor with his. She awaited it with a pleasant sense of the balm to be laid upon her injured vanity, which no one could have guessed who saw her calm demeanour.

  But young Ogilvy did not arrive that day, as expected; nor the next. Later they heard that his horse had stumbled
while crossing a river, swollen by the April rains, and that he had had a ducking. Young Ogilvy was a self-conscious youth; horsemanship was his most tender spot; he had on a new suit of black velvet, which was ruined; and he could not face the laughter of the sisters. The grave and gentle Magdalen would not laugh, he thought – but the others. He shuddered in spirit as well as body, and returned to Saint Andrews, where he had a bad cold.

  ‘But why did the young fool not come on up to Kinnaird and get dried?’ asked Lord Carnegie.

  ‘I would have given him a brandy and black currant posset that would have snipped off his sneezes before ever they began,’ said Lady Carnegie.

  ‘And I would have lent him my new rose-coloured dress to wear while his fine mourning suit was drying,’ said her daughter, Agnes.

  ‘Whatever should he come courting for in black?’ asked Agnes’ sister, Elizabeth.

  ‘To show he could have been faithful unto death, if only he had been drowned,’ said their youngest sister, in a voice so small and still it was almost a whisper.

  The others were delighted that that little mouse Magdalen could laugh herself at her silly young lover. Who would have thought she had it in her? They repeated what she had said; Magdalen tried to stop them, but it was too late, and her sarcasm soon reached the Master of Airlie, whose streaming cold now had a fresh bitterness added to its salty rheum. He recovered within two or three days, but did not ride again to Kinnaird; and now Magdalen felt far more bitterness against herself than she had uttered in that first impulse of annoyance against her suitor.

  ‘I shall always say things I am sorry for,’ she had discovered. And added to this came a fresh discovery – that of her injustice to the young Earl of Montrose, who must have been really ill on the morning of their departure from his house, for no sooner had he returned to Saint Andrews than he had fallen very ill indeed – not with just a cold, like that silly sulking young Ogilvy, but with first one doctor and then another, at double the fee of the first (the worst possible sign), and then a barber to cut off all his long curling hair, close to his head, because of the fever.

  And it took so long to get news, and her father, the only one who noticed she was more pensive than usual, told her not to pine for that foolish young puppy, Ogilvy (when she had quite stopped thinking of him), for he would get her the best match in Scotland; and by his smile and indulgent shake of the head she knew he meant Montrose – but what was the use of promising her Montrose, when nobody knew how he was getting on, or if he ever thought of her, as he lay there tossing in his bed?

  But at last there came news from the factor at Old Montrose that my lord must be sitting up, for he had sent for his chessboard and packs of cards, and had ordered trout from his river at Kincardine to be sent to him, for none of the doctors had known how to cure him until he had told them to order him aleberry and claret and his own trout.

  Whereupon Magdalen in her relief remarked dryly that Montrose seemed altogether too cock-a-hoop to have been really ill, but her mother (who never ceased lamenting the loss of the boy’s lovely shining locks) ran herself in indignant refutation to the kitchens, to prepare a great jar of chicken and calves-foot jelly from her own particular recipe, that she might send it back by my lord’s servant to Saint Andrews.

  Fruit and flowers and eggs and cream and wine and jellies, presents of all these things came showering in on the popular patient, where he lay sick to death of convalescence. Nearly three weeks he had lain there in his room that looked on to the street; it had been May when he fell ill, and now it was June, and summer was slipping on past him, and he not there to enjoy it; and there had been something he wanted to tell Magdalen Carnegie, but before he could do that, there was something that he must say to his sister Kat, and at first it had all been clear in his head what he was to say to them both, but it grew less and less clear as his head grew hotter and the room buzzed round him more and more rapidly. That had stopped now, but his head was empty, he had forgotten what he had wanted to say.

  Down below his window, carts rattled over the cobbles, horses neighed and stamped, clanking their harness, voices called to each other in the burring, unhurried tones of the Lowland Scot. Often when he woke, he lay for an instant, unsure of his condition, not knowing why he felt so slack, so disinclined to jump out of bed, until the heavy pad, pad of a football and the shouts of boys at their impromptu game in the street below, reminded him that he was ill, that he could not get up, he could not play.

  He opened his eyes once again on that slightly crooked new curtain, that had been hung across the window since his illness, and had become an irritating symbol of it. The curtain moved only a little in the draught, but to his fevered imagination it was bouncing and fidgeting, and the voices of the boys below in the street surged up and filled his ears with a confused drumming sound.

  A queer little scene came into his head that he had imagined, or else had quite forgotten. He was first of all standing in the orchard at Rossdhu (and this he had done a hundred times) when the apple-blossom had just begun to sprout in tight rosy buds on the gnarled grey trees, and the blue of the loch shone behind them. Cow-parsley and buttercups grew in the long grass; and the twisted shadows of the branches lay very faintly across it. He was waiting for Kat, but she did not come, so he went back into the house, and without thinking why, he turned towards the west turret and went up the narrow winding stair and into the little round room at the top of it that had been given to Carlippis for use as a study in his experiments in chemistry.

  There stood that gross man, leaning over a small table that was crowded with objects; his fat hands moved dexterously among them, his under lip was sucked in, his red bushy eyebrows met together in a frown of intent absorption. Behind him stood Sir John Colquhoun, for once remarkably still. The pale last rays of the sun slanted in at the window, and lay across the edge of the table, lighting up three short dark curling hairs.

  This scene now presented itself so vividly in Jamie’s mind that it became clear enough to wonder what had happened next, or if indeed any of this could actually have happened – for how could he ever have come to forget it?

  Nevertheless, when he was well, he forgot it again, so that years afterwards when it stood again in his mind, he could not be sure that it was not only a dream of his delirium.

  Chapter Eleven

  Montrose was not yet seventeen, Magdalen Carnegie a few months younger, when they became betrothed in the easy effortless fashion in which such matters were arranged among a host of other important matters. For he was back again at college, winning more medals and silver arrows at sport, and losing his money at billiards – and acting as Lord of Misrule in the holidays in a Christmas play at Balcarres, where he led the whole company on hobby-horses, improvised out of broomsticks and painted cloths, playing on drums, and on trumpets made of cows’ horns, and whistles of elder stems, led them through the house and into the church and churchyard, where the villagers waited to offer him ale and cheese and cakes, and the company crowned him with silver paper, and then chased him back into the house, tore his crown from him, his bells and his ribbons, and cried that he was deposed.

  For it was the law of Misrule that its Lord, chosen for a day, should be condemned at the end of it; so had the Boy Bishops, in the days of the old religion, led the tomfoolery in the church, and been kicked out at the end; so had the appointed victim of a still older religion been crowned and hung with garlands as king and god, and sacrificed in grim earnest at the end; so now did the young Earl of Montrose, after leading his merry company on his wild-goose chase, bend his neck before his page, Mungo Graham, to be executed with a sausage.

  And from Balcarres he came to Kinnaird, and he and Magdalen ate their Twelfth Night cake together, searching in it for the tokens that would tell them their future – a bean for a king, a clove for a knave, a rag for a slut – which of these things would they become?

  Now, among all these activities, matrimony presented itself, but not startlingly. He was so
intimate with the Carnegie family that Magdalen seemed to him very much like one of his own sisters, whom he did not know quite as well as them, only because she talked less. But since their betrothal, which happened without their quite knowing how, and had more to do with their guardians than themselves, she became more remote to him, rather than less; and he was suddenly shy of her as never before.

  No one, least of all himself, knew what she thought of the matter; as of old, she guarded her secret treasure. But it was characteristic of that guardianship that the only thing she wanted from her betrothed was a portrait of himself; for then, she thought, wherever he went, she would always keep his image with her.

  So Montrose rode to Aberdeen for a couple of sittings with Jamesone, since, luckily for the restless youth, the artist was a lightning portrait painter; and his cousin and curator, Sir Robert Graham of Morphie, told him to send the bill of £2 4s. 5d. sterling in to him, and that would be his wedding present to the young couple.

  And at Aberdeen, in the intervals between his sittings, in his wedding clothes, and buying new buckles for his spurs, and elegant new gloves of Spanish leather for his wedding, he was made a burgess of the city, entertained at a great banquet given in his honour, and had all the bells in the town ringing to greet him.

  With the peal and clash of bells in his ears, he rode from one gay visit to another on that last week before his wedding, staying with his bride’s relations – Friday night with her married sister, Marjory Haliburton at Pitcur, and Saturday to Monday at Halkerton for an energetic week-end of hunting and shooting, and back to Montrose on the Monday for a couple of rounds of golf with Colquhoun, and on after them to stay that night in the Mearns with Sir Robert Graham of Morphie and his wife, who was Marjory’s Aunt Euphemia, and would be Jamie’s after tomorrow. For this was now the afternoon before his wedding day, a month after his seventeenth birthday.