The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  Perhaps it was because Sir John Colquhoun pronounced Italian too well, or flourished his hands, or looked too eagerly for applause; but Jamie was never very happily at ease with him.

  That Monday afternoon in early November on the rough sheep-nibbled turf above the town of Montrose, only widened the gulf between them – perversely so, for all the time Sir John seemed to be trying to lessen it, to treat his young brother-in-law as a fellow-man and a brother, perhaps even as his confidant.

  The sun had not shone all day, and now there was a dark wind blowing, which did not clear the sky but sent dead leaves scurrying into the air, where the plovers whirled and harshly cried. The fore-caddie stalked ahead of them through the grey air to mark the next hole, a scarecrow figure with the gesture of an avenging prophet as he stopped and flung out his arm.

  Jamie was playing with a slender spoon-faced wooden club, but Sir John, with his superior height, had chosen for his first club a long-shafted heavy ‘putter-faced” bludgeon. He complained of its weight, that its face was not sufficiently lofted to grip the damp leather surface of his ball, which had skidded at his first stroke. Why could they not discover some way to make the surface rougher? He would speak to James Melville about it – a pretty thing it was for a man to have the monopoly of making golf balls, and never do anything to improve them!

  ‘Yours are wet, that is all,’ said Jamie, who had bought a new lot in Montrose that morning. But Sir John had neglected to do that, and his had been drenched while playing in the rain two days ago, every feather in them was sodden, heavy as lead – ‘How can a man hit a hatful of wet feathers?’ he exclaimed in fury at the third hole, and disproved his words by swiping the ball off the toe of his club so that it sailed away to the right in an unfortunate curve that landed it right off the course in the deep heather among the whin bushes.

  A lost ball meant a lost hole; Sir John tried to dispute it – if the ball were struck into the water, the penalty, according to the most ancient rules of Aberdeen, was only a lost stroke – and he held it more than likely that his ball had disappeared in that puddle over there, which the rain had enlarged into a pond. A game should be a game, not a contest with the unreasoning forces of nature. And when at the fifth hole (the whole course measured six) Jamie laid him a stymie, he coupled the unreasonable forces of nature with those of chance, and damned them together with the inclemency of this hideous climate, which alone could have bred such a barbaric and old fashioned sport.

  His long nose shone blue in the raw air; but Jamie, who had a good circulation, and never wanted a warming pan in his bed, like his luxurious sisters, was exhilarated by this sour wind whistling in his ears. He strode on in pursuit of his ball, while behind him, like the negligible croakings of a ruffled crow, Sir John’s protests fluttered up against the wind, and by the wind were carried away – ‘Monstrous – damnation – may the curse of God—’

  A few dead leaves raced past from the blown bushes, and ‘crash- suck back and surge, surrrge forward, crash,’ came the sound of the sea ahead of him. ‘It is the Lord that ruleth the sea; the voice of the Lord is a glorious voice.’

  He thought of Magdalen, silent among her chattering sisters, embroidering with them the blankets that had been woven in the cottages from the Kinnaird sheep and dyed scarlet and green – scarlet for him and green for her, the sisters said, holding up before their laughing faces the enormous rugs of rough bright homespun wool that would lie on the great bed, made for them both. They sewed at clothes that were to make her yet more beautiful, for him. ‘The king’s daughter is all glorious within; her clothing is of wrought gold.’

  Words from the Psalms and the Song of Solomon shouted in his heart and made it throb so that the blood stung his nostrils as though he were fighting. He thought of peacocks prancing before the gate of a sultan’s palace, of their strut and pomp, the glitter and the rattle of their spread tails. ‘Thy neck is as a tower of ivory. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.’

  ‘I am most damnably off my game,’ said Sir John.

  ‘And balls at three pounds Scots a dozen,’ muttered Sir John’s caddie, as he searched the whins in vain for yet another lost ball.

  And having lost the match as well, Sir John went back with his young brother-in-law to John Garn’s for a drink; and they sat on a rough bench with their cap ale in wooden bowls, and smelt the peat smoke and the pig-styes behind the door, and saw the firelight leap on the rafters, and heard John Garn’s opinion of the beastly and superstitious practice of surplices for the clergy; which interested Jamie, not in John Garn’s opinion, but in the wild light it lit in his eye, transforming his heavy, animal face into that of a passionately thinking man.

  But Sir John waved the tiresome fellow away, for he had only a few minutes now in which to say all he had not said on the links, and he had so much to say, so much good advice – his young kinsman must not waste his life in dull domesticity, as he perhaps had wasted his; he must go about and see the world, go to England and get the ear of his King – or perhaps it would be best to wait for that till the King came up here to be crowned in Scotland, and then would be their chance – his and Jamie’s – when the King would see them in their own place and all their native importance.

  Jamie could not quite make out all the things that he must do, which were in some way to remedy the things that Sir John had left undone. For when Sir John inveighed against the dangerous sluggishness induced by matrimony, then he broke off in delighted envy of those very dangers – ‘Oh! to be seventeen, and on the eve of your wedding, and your bride as young as you!’ –how exquisite was youth in a woman, the freshness, the abruptness, the very crudities of youth so pure and absolute that one could hardly distinguish it from the youth of a boy. (‘But Magdalen is not a bit like a boy,’ said Jamie, and was not heard) – the freedom, the gay courage, the passion for adventure – ‘You have no idea what a passion that can still be to some of us even in these days of money-grubbing and joint stock companies,’ – and, yes, he would take another drink.

  ‘Eating and drinking, the pleasures of the flesh, it is all we have left to us,’ he cried.

  John Garn replenished his bowl with cappie, and made the severe remark that he had best not let the Lord overhear him. But Sir John was talking far too hard to hear John Garn. He had discovered that it was the curse of this age to be unhappy; the old Church had been destroyed, and all the old guides and safeguards; people were left rudderless, blind, separated from God, all trying new things, each struggling with his own fate.

  And by the time he had persuaded himself of the general un-happiness of modern man, he had made himself quite happy.

  His nose now warmly purpling with the cappie, his eyes shining like dark plums, arrogant, self-conscious, he was well pleased with himself once again. The Black Cock o’ the North, he had been nicknamed from his complexion – ‘I’ve seen him practise his “dark glances” in the glass,’ the wicked Kat had once told Jamie.

  But through all his florid and uneasy talk, it was odd how that important-looking face became blurred and as it were thrust aside by another, which was not there – by a bloated, battered face, with a look of purposeful joviality, a bright light eye and round hard red cheeks, as though made of crudely painted wood, like a dummy set up as a cock-shy at a fair; and like that dummy, battered and buffeted, so that beneath all the jolly good-fellowship of its exterior show, one felt the disillusionment, the dead-ness of spirit.

  So that Jamie, not listening to the rich dramatic voice of his brother-in-law, but remembering the face of his servant Carlippis, thought how sad sin was, though his thought found no words.

  He rose and paid John Garn, as he had won the shillings they had laid on the match, and went to the door, and saw it was nearly dark. A bleak tree, already bereft of its leaves, tossed its spidery twigs against the torn black clouds. Magdalen would be sitting snug in the firelight at Kinnaird; perhaps she was looking at his portrait, which should h
ave reached her by now. Suddenly he knew that he himself must visit her this evening, if only for one moment; he could not wait till tomorrow, when he would see her as his bride.

  Chapter Twelve

  He rode over the dark and windy landscape, through the park gates, then pulled up sharply, seeing the crouched figure of the lame boy who held them back. He was as old as Jamie, but much smaller, for he was misshapen. Jamie leaped off his horse and handed him the reins.

  ‘Hold him till I come back,’ he said; ‘that will make me come in time.’ He put six shillings with the bridle into Lame Tom’s hand, and ran up through the little wood. Above the black network of the branches the sky still glimmered grey. Some big bird, probably a wood-pigeon, clattered through them, startling the still air; the sodden twigs and leaves crackled and squelched beneath his feet, the damp air clung to his face; he did not know if it were raining or not, he would not have known if it had been pouring.

  All that talk just now, sound and fury, rolled out of his head – and his golf, and the grouse shooting yesterday, and the stag hunt the day before, and the banquet at Aberdeen with all the speeches and toasts – but not the bells, for they were still ringing in his head, ding dong, ding dong, and his heart was thumping in a loud, wild song, that seemed to break into a shout when he saw the lights of the castle.

  Now he was inside it, and Magdalen before him, looking at him, speaking to him, showing him something, his portrait.

  ‘Do you like it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What have you been doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. You look so—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Grave,’ he said, to tease her, for she had shown that she knew he was going to say, ‘so pretty,’ or was it, ‘so beautiful’?

  But their laughter echoed into silence; an odd hush fell on them both; they who knew each other so well could find nothing to say, and stood as if enchanted. She was no longer somebody that he had known from childhood; she was a princess that he had rescued from her lonely tower; a white pillar of a ruined temple that he had found standing alone in the wilderness. For always there would be this touch of the austere and the desolate in his images of her beauty, always he would think of her as unattainable – as she would always think of him.

  So that she turned her eyes from him to his portrait, a possession to secure that it would outlast them both by hundreds of years. Yet even in the painted presentment of her lover there was something that eluded her. What right had any eyes to look so hopeful and yet so secure? Especially when his hopes were so likely to be fantastic. And on an impulse of real humility that underlay her distrustfulness of herself and others, she prayed that she would not be one of those to disappoint him (‘not more than is necessary,’ added her ironic conscience). The boy’s grave yet smiling face looked out of its frame on her and past her – into what future neither he nor she could guess.

  And the boy beside her, who would wear at his wedding tomorrow that new velvet suit in the portrait, with the sleeves slashed with oyster satin, was telling her he could not stay, or he would never get to Morphie and her aunt Euphemia by tonight.

  It was far too late to go, said Lady Carnegie – was there ever anything so wild as this lad, to come miles out of his way merely for one glimpse of Magdalen, whom he was going to see for the rest of his life when he came back here tomorrow.

  But it was Magdalen Carnegie he had come to see, he said, and her he would never see again. He would go, he was far too restless and excited to stay, and he wanted to hear again the song that his heart had sung when he was alone.

  He went back through the little wood to where Lame Tom was waiting for him with his horse in the rain that was now falling. He mounted and rode through the rain and the darkness, and he heard his song, but no words with it; there was no rhyme nor reason in his head; only a wild music, clear and high, like the single shrilling of the pipes when they play without the drones – like a thin air that he had once heard on the sea-shore at Saint Andrews, when there had been no man on all that wide shore to play it; and he had gone home wondering if he had indeed heard fairy music.

  Chapter Thirteen

  His childhood had passed without his knowing, like one of its own endless midsummer days when he had been asleep before that late Northern twilight at last stole up to veil the midnight sky.

  Even matrimony made no sharp break in his tutelage, for his father-in-law had made it a condition in the settlements that the young Earl should stay at his wife’s home for the first three years of their marriage, and continue his studies until he was of age and ready to go abroad. He was spared the growing pains of adolescence; and only added to the boyish activities of sport and study those of a proudly adoring young husband, and, before very very long, those of a still prouder father.

  In discovering the ardours and powers of his body, he felt that he had discovered Magdalen – and moreover rescued her, as if from cruel guardians – though all that her guardians had done was to bring about their match so easily and comfortably that Jamie now found himself established in yet another welcoming home.

  Now her laughter was an echo of Jamie’s, free of criticism whether of people or of life, bubbling up from some irrepressible source of enjoyment of all the world. There was no holding him, when, barely nineteen, he wrote to his old tutor, Master Forrett, MA, to tell him that he must prepare himself to be tutor to his son and heir with all speed, since the boy at two days old was already showing remarkable intelligence.

  ‘And see to it that he does not swallow a toad in his cradle,’ he instructed the young mother, who looked as anxious as if it were a likely accident, for she hated any reference, even in joke, to the supposed uncanny propensities in her husband’s race.

  At present surely there was no one and nothing that could harm him, not even himself. There they were safe in the home of her parents, who loved Jamie as if he were their own son. But everybody loved Jamie – was it in that lay her fear of losing him? But his loyalty came too naturally to cost him any effort or her any question. Her only impulses of jealousy were those that she was ashamed to admit even to herself. And they were for his sisters, to whom he was always riding off – and what could she fear from them?

  She walked in the new garden that her father had planted at some distance below the castle, snug and sheltered within its stone walls, while outside the wind raced over the bare landscape. It tasted salt when it blew from the sea, it was sharp and bitter then from the east, and old Daniel covered up his precious new vegetables with flannel as tenderly as if they were his infant children.

  But the wind that disturbed her most blew from the west, with a scurry of soft raindrops, and clouds piling up above the garden walls as huge as mountains. And that wind came from the mountains, from the Grampians that traverse Scotland; and there on the other side of them, in a hollow among the hills, lived Kat, who was alive and free as Jamie was, and she herself could never hope to be, except when carried away by his bold and laughing spirit. And there Jamie had ridden yet again.

  While the wind blew at Kinnaird, in the west it was so hot that even Jamie was content to sit still for once. He had joined his sisters at their Italian reading on the smooth white pebbly shore of ‘our little Mediterranean’, as the Colquhouns liked to call it ever since a traveller had compared Loch Lomond to that foreign sea.

  With Carlippis to correct their pronunciation, they sat under the silver birch trees and read Boccaccio’s amusing stories. Lilias took a simple pleasure in the resemblance of their al fresco gathering to that smiling and worldly company of the Decameron who had sat in a ring on the olive terraces above Florence, seeing nothing but the fair silent towers of the plague-stricken city below, escaping from the reality of sickness and death into the airy bawdry of novelists’ imaginings.

  The resemblance was nearer than Lilias knew. She and Sir John had come to feel themselves as spiritual exiles, and all because of Carlippis’ pride in the lead that Italy had given to th
e world these last two centuries. His passion was that of a convert – of a German for the land of his adoption; he rationalized it, compared the glories of her Renaissance with the dreary theologies of the Reformation.

  ‘Sermons instead of pictures, arguments instead of plays, John Knox instead of that holy trinity, Leonardo, Raphael and Michael Angelo – that is the best these poor Northern savages can do with the New Learning.’

  His master shared the foreigner’s sense of superiority; his mistress read, listened, or forgot to listen, wove daisy chains and cast them on the smooth waters of the loch, thinking – ‘Shall I ever go to Italy?’ And both escaped in day-dreams from the knowledge of what was slowly happening round them, bringing them nearer and nearer to disaster.

  It was Jamie whose attention was first awakened.

  He had been lying on his elbow, trying to play ducks and drakes in that difficult position; and then on his stomach, staring first down and then up the loch, for they were at the end of the little peninsula of Rossdhu, nearly at the middle of the loch, and had a long view in both directions. But he never much cared to look down it, for there were only the low, peaceful pasturages round Glasgow, where, in the old days, he used to ride back to school. He would look in that direction only for the satisfaction that it gave him to turn to the other, and see the heather-covered hills rising higher and higher, until the mighty head of Ben Lomond, flushing blood-red in the sunshine, overtopped them all. There, round the bend of the loch beneath Ben Lomond, the gleaming water disappeared.

  That gap in the hills had always invited him to go through it in search of adventure. There, where Ben Lomond looked towards Ben Nevis, lay the true Highlands, whence from time immemorial the wild mountain clans had rushed down in torrents to raid this sheltered land and carry off its fat cattle. There at Inveraray, to the west of Ben Lomond, lay the heart of the Argyll country, whose elderly young lord, the future MacCaillan Mhor of the great clan Diarmaid, had supped with him at Saint Andrews, and shown how he hated to taste his salt.