It was under the lash of a natural exasperation I went up Mademoiselle's stairs determined on an interview. Bernard (of all men in the world!) responded to my knock. I could have thrashed him with a cane if the same had been handy, but was bound to content myself with the somewhat barren comfort of affecting that I had never set eyes on him before. He smiled at first, as if not unpleased to see me, but changed his aspect at the unresponse of mine.
“I desire to see Miss Walkinshaw,” said I.
The rogue blandly intimated that she was not at home. There is more truth in a menial eye than in most others, and this man's fashionable falsehood extended no further than his lips. I saw quite plainly he was acting upon instructions, and, what made it the more uncomfortable for him, he saw that I saw.
“Very well, I shall have the pleasure of waiting in the neighbourhood till she returns,” I said, and leaned against the railing. This frightened him somewhat, and he hastened to inform me that he did not know when she might return.
“It does not matter,” I said coolly, inwardly pleased to find my courage much higher in the circumstances than I had expected. “If it's midnight she shall find me here, for I have matters of the first importance upon which to consult her.”
He was more disturbed than ever, hummed and hawed and hung upon the door-handle, making it very plainly manifest that his instructions had not gone far enough, and that he was unable to make up his mind how he was further to comport himself to a visitor so persistent. Then, unable to get a glance of recognition from me, and resenting further the inconvenience to which I was subjecting him, he rose to an impertinence—the first (to do him justice) I had ever found in him.
“Will Monsieur,” said he, “tell me who I shall say called?”
The thrust was scarcely novel. I took it smiling, and “My good rogue,” said I, “if the circumstances were more favourable I should have the felicity of giving you an honest drubbing.” He got very red. “Come, Bernard,” I said, adopting another tone, “I think you owe me some consideration. And will you not, in exchange for my readiness to give you all the information you required some time ago for your employers, tell me the truth and admit that Mademoiselle is within?”
He was saved an answer by the lady herself.
“La! Mr. Greig!” she cried, coming to the door and putting forth a welcoming hand. “My good Bernard has no discrimination, or he should except my dear countryman from my general orders against all visitors.” So much in French; and then, as she led the way to her parlour, “My dear man of Mearns, you are as dour as—as dour as—”
“As a donkey,” I finished, seeing she hesitated for a likeness. “And I feel very much like that humble beast at this moment.”
“I do not wonder at it,” said she, throwing herself in a chair. “To thrust yourself upon a poor lonely woman in this fashion!”
“I am the ass—I have been the ass—it would appear, in other respects as well.”
She reddened, and tried to conceal her confusion by putting back her hair, that somehow escaped in a strand about her ears. I had caught her rather early in the morning; she had not even the preparation of apetit lever; and because of a certain chagrin at being discovered scarcely looking her best her first remarks were somewhat chilly.
“Well, at least you have persistency, I'll say that of it,” she went on, with a light laugh, and apparently uncomfortable. “And for what am I indebted to so early a visit from my dear countryman?”
“It was partly that I might say a word of thanks personally to you for your offices in my poor behalf. The affair of the Regiment d'Auvergne is settled with a suddenness that should be very gratifying to myself, for it looks as if King Louis could not get on another day wanting my distinguished services. I am to join the corps at the end of the month, and must leave Dunkerque forthwith. That being so, it was only proper I should come in my own person to thank you for your good offices.”
“Do not mention it,” she said hurriedly. “I am only too glad that I could be of the smallest service to you.”
“I cannot think,” I went on, “what I can have done to warrant your displeasure with me.”
“Displeasure!” she replied. “Who said I was displeased?”
“What am I to think, then? I have been refused the honour of seeing you for this past week.”
“Well, not displeasure, Mr. Greig,” she said, trifling with her rings. “Let us be calling it prudence. I think that might have suggested itself as a reason to a gentleman of Mr. Greig's ordinary intuitions.”
“It's a virtue, this prudence, a Greig could never lay claim to,” I said. “And I must tell you that, where the special need for it arises now, and how it is to be made manifest, is altogether beyond me.”
“No matter,” said she, and paused. “And so you are going to the frontier, and are come to say good-bye to me?”
“Now that you remind me that is exactly my object,” I said, rising to go. She did not have the graciousness even to stay me, but rose too, as if she felt the interview could not be over a moment too soon. And yet I noticed a certain softening in her manner that her next words confirmed.
“And so you go, Mr. Greig?” she said. “There's but the one thing I would like to say to my friend, and that's that I should like him not to think unkindly of one that values his good opinion—if she were worthy to have it. The honest and unsuspecting come rarely my way nowadays, and now that I'm to lose them I feel like to greet.” She was indeed inclined to tears, and her lips were twitching, but I was not enough rid of my annoyance to be moved much by such a demonstration.
“I have profited much by your society, Miss Walkinshaw,” I said. “You found me a boy, and what way it happens I do not know, but it's a man that's leaving you. You made my stay here much more pleasant than it would otherwise have been, and this last kindness—that forces me away from you—is one more I have to thank you for.”
She was scarcely sure whether to take this as a compliment or the reverse, and, to tell the truth, I meant it half and half.
“I owed all the little I could do to my countryman,” said she.
“And I hope I have been useful,” I blurted out, determined to show her I was going with open eyes.
Somewhat stricken she put her hand upon my arm. “I hope you will forgive that, Mr. Greig,” she said, leaving no doubt that she had jumped to my meaning.
“There is nothing to forgive,” I said shortly. “I am proud that I was of service, not to you alone but to one in the interests of whose house some more romantical Greigs than I have suffered. My only complaint is that the person in question seems scarcely to be grateful for the little share I had unconsciously in preserving his life.”
“I am sure he is very grateful,” she cried hastily, and perplexed. “I may tell you that he was the means of getting you the post in the regiment.”
“So I have been told,” I said, and she looked a little startled. “So I have been told. It may be that I'll be more grateful by-and-by, when I see what sort of a post it is. In the meantime, I have my gratitude greatly hampered by a kind of inconsistency in the—in the person's actings towards myself!”
“Inconsistency!” she repeated bitterly. “That need not surprise you! But I do not understand.”
“It is simply that—perhaps to hasten me to my duties—his Royal Highness this morning sent a ruffian to fight me.”
I have never seen a face so suddenly change as hers did when she heard this; for ordinary she had a look of considerable amiability, a soft, kind eye, a ready smile that had the hint (as I have elsewhere said) of melancholy, a voice that, especially in the Scots, was singularly attractive. A temper was the last thing I would have charged her with, yet now she fairly flamed, “What is this you are telling me, Paul Greig?” she cried, her eyes stormy, her bosom beginning to heave. “Oh, just that M. Albany (as he calls himself) has some grudge against me, for he sent a man—Bonnat—to pick a quarrel with me, and by Bonnat's own confession the duel that was to ensue was to beà outrance. But for the intervention of a friend, half an hour ago, there would have been a vacancy already in the Regiment d'Auvergne.”
“Good heavens!” she cried. “You must be mistaken. What object in the wide world could his Royal Highness have in doing you any harm? You were an instrument in the preservation of his life.”
I bowed extremely low, with a touch of the courts I had not when I landed first in Dunkerque.
“I have had the distinguished honour, Miss Walkinshaw,” I said. “And I should have thought that enough to counterbalance my unfortunate and ignorant engagement with his enemies.”
“But why, in Heaven's name, should he have a shred of resentment against you?”
“It seems,” I said, “that it has something to do with my boldness in using the Rue de la Boucherie for an occasional promenade.”
She put her two hands up to her face for a moment, but I could see the wine-spill in between, and her very neck was in a flame.
“Oh, the shame! the shame!” she cried, and began to walk up and down the room like one demented. “Am I to suffer these insults for ever in spite of all that I may do to prove—to prove——”
She pulled herself up short, put down her hands from a face exceedingly distressed, and looked closely at me. “What must you think of me, Mr. Greig?” she asked suddenly in quite a new key.
“What do I think of myself to so disturb you?” I replied. “I do not know in what way I have vexed you, but to do so was not at all in my intention. I must tell you that I am not a politician, and that since I came here these affairs of the Prince and all the rest of it are quite beyond my understanding. If the cause of the white cockade brought you to France, Miss Walkinshaw, as seems apparent, I cannot think you are very happy in it nowadays, but that is no affair of mine.”
She stared at me. “I hope,” said she, “you are not mocking me?”
“Heaven forbid!” I said. “It would be the last thing I should presume to do, even if I had a reason. I owe you, after all, nothing but the deepest gratitude.”
Beyond the parlour we stood in was a lesser room that was the lady's boudoir. We stood with our backs to it, and I know not how much of our conversation had been overheard when I suddenly turned at the sound of a man's voice, and saw his Royal Highness standing in the door!
I could have rubbed my eyes out of sheer incredulity, for that he should be in that position was as if I had come upon a ghost. He stood with a face flushed and frowning, rubbing his eyes, and there was something in his manner that suggested he was not wholly sober.
“I'll be cursed,” said he, “if I haven't been asleep. Deuce take Clancarty! He kept me at cards till dawn this morning, and I feel as if I had been all night on heather.Pardieu——!”
He pulled himself up short and stared, seeing me for the first time. His face grew purple with annoyance. “A thousand pardons!” he cried with sarcasm, and making a deep bow. “I was not aware that I intruded on affairs.”
Miss Walkinshaw turned to him sharply.
“There is no intrusion,” said she, “but honesty, in the person of my dear countryman, who has come to strange quarters with it. Your Royal Highness has now the opportunity of thanking this gentleman.”
“I' faith,” said he, “I seem to be kept pretty constantly in mind of the little I owe to this gentleman in spite of himself. Harkee, my good Monsieur, I got you a post; I thought you had been out of Dunkerque by now.”
“The post waits, M. Albany,” said I, “and I am going to take it up forthwith. I came here to thank the person to whose kindness I owe the post, and now I am in a quandary as to whom my thanks should be addressed.”
“My dear Monsieur, to whom but to your countrywoman? We all of us owe her everything, and—egad!—are not grateful enough,” and with that he looked for the first time at her with his frown gone.
“Yes, yes,” she cried; “we may put off the compliments till another occasion. What I must say is that it is a grief and a shame to me that this gentleman, who has done so much for me—I speak for myself, your Royal Highness will observe—should be so poorly requited.”
“Requited!” cried he. “How now? I trust Monsieur is not dissatisfied.” His face had grown like paste, his hand, that constantly fumbled at his unshaven chin, was trembling. I felt a mortal pity for this child of kings, discredited and debauched, and yet I felt bound to express myself upon the trap that he had laid for me, if Bonnat's words were true.
“I have said my thanks, M. Albany, very stammeringly for the d'Auvergne office, because I can only guess at my benefactor. My gratitude——”
“Bah!” cried he. “Tis the scurviest of qualities. A benefactor that does aught for gratitude had as lief be a selfish scoundrel. We want none of your gratitude, Monsieur Greig.”
“'Tis just as well, M. Albany,” I cried, “for what there was of it is mortgaged.”
“Comment?” he asked, uneasily.
“I was challenged to a duel this morning with a man Bonnat that calls himself your servant,” I replied, always very careful to take his own word for it and assume I spoke to no prince, but simply M. Albany. “He informed me that you had, Monsieur, some objection to my sharing the same street with you, and had given him his instructions.”
“Bonnat,” cried the Prince, and rubbed his hand across his temples. “I'll be cursed if I have seen the man for a month. Stay!—stay—let me think! Now that I remember, he met me last night after dinner, but—but——”
“After dinner! Then surely it should have been in a more favourable mood to myself, that has done M. Albany no harm,” I said. “I do not wonder that M. Albany has lost so many of his friends if he settles their destinies after dinner.”
At first he frowned at this and then he laughed outright.
“Ma foi!” he cried, “here's another Greig to call me gomeral to my face,” and he lounged to a chair where he sunk in inextinguishable laughter.
But if I had brought laughter from him I had precipitated anger elsewhere.
“Here's a pretty way to speak to his Royal Highness,” cried Miss Walkinshaw, her face like thunder. “The manners of the Mearns shine very poorly here. You forget that you speak to one that is your prince, in faith your king!”
“Neither prince nor king of mine, Miss Walkinshaw,” I cried, and turned to go. “No, if a hundred thousand swords were at his back. I had once a notion of a prince that rode along the Gallowgate, but I was then a boy, and now I am a man—which you yourself have made me.”
With that I bowed low and left them. They neither of them said a word. It was the last I was to see of Clementina Walkinshaw and the last of Charles Edward.
Ihave no intention here of narrating at large what happened in my short career as a soldier of the French Army, curious though some of the things that befell me chanced to be. They may stand for another occasion, while I hurriedly and briefly chronicle what led to my second meeting with MacKellar of Kilbride, and through that same to the restoration of the company of Father Hamilton, the sometime priest of Dixmunde.
The Regiment d'Auvergne was far from its native hills when first I joined it, being indeed on the frontier of Austria. 'Twas a corps not long embodied, composed of a preposterous number of mere lads as soft as kail, yet driven to miracles of exertion by drafted veteran officers of other regiments who stiffened their command with the flat of the sword. As for my lieutenancy it was nothing to be proud of in such a battalion, for I herded in a mess of foul-mouthed scoundrels and learned little of the trade of soldiering that I was supposed to be taught in the interval between our departure from the frontier and our engagement on the field as allies with the Austrians. Of the Scots that had been in the regiment at one time there was only one left—a major named MacKay, that came somewhere out of the Reay country in the shire of Sutherland, and was reputed the drunkenest officer among the allies, yet comported himself, on the strength of his Hielan' extraction, towards myself, his Lowland countryman, with such a ludicrous haughtiness I could not bear the man—no, not from the first moment I set eyes on him!
He was a pompous little person with legs bowed through years of riding horse, and naturally he was the first of my new comrades I introduced myself to when I joined the colours. I mind he sat upon a keg of bullets, looking like a vision of Bacchus, somewhat soiled and pimply, when I entered to him and addressed him, with a certain gladness, in our tongue.
“Humph!” was what he said. “Another of his Royal Highness's Sassenach friends! Here's a wheen of the lousiest French privates ever shook in their breeks in front of a cannon, wanting smeddum and courage drummed into them with a scabbard, and they send me Sassenachs to do the business with when the whole hearty North of Scotland is crawling with the stuff I want particularly.”
“Anyway, here I am, major,” said I, slightly taken aback at this, “and you'll have to make the best of me.”
“Pshaw!” cried he vulgarly and cracked his thumb. “I have small stomach for his Royal Highness's recommendations; I have found in the past that he sends to Austria—him and his friends—only the stuff he has no use for nearer the English Channel, where it's I would like to be this day. They're talking of an invasion, I hear; wouldn't I like to be among the first to have a slap again at Geordie?”
My birse rose at this, which I regarded as a rank treason in any man that spoke my own language even with a tartan accent.
“A slap at Geordie!” I cried. “You made a bonny-like job o't when you had the chance!”
It was my first and last confabulation of a private nature with Major Dugald MacKay. Thereafter he seldom looked the road I was on beyond to give an order or pick a fault, and, luckily, though a pleasant footing with my neighbours has ever been my one desire in life, I was not much put up or down by the ill-will of such a creature.
Like a break in a dream, a space of all unfriended travelling, which is the worst travelling of all, appears my time of marching with the Regiment d'Auvergne. I was lost among aliens—aliens in tongue and sentiment, and engaged, to tell the truth, upon an enterprise that never enlisted the faintest of my sympathy. All I wished was to forget the past (and that, be sure, was the one impossible thing), and make a living of some sort. The latter could not well be more scanty, for my pay was a beggar's, and infrequent at that, and finally it wholly ceased.
I saw the world, so much of it as lies in Prussia, and may be witnessed from the ranks of a marching regiment of the line; I saw life—the life of the tent and the bivouac, and the unforgettable thing of it was death—death in the stricken field among the grinding hoofs of horses, below the flying wheels of the artillery.
And yet if I had had love there—some friend to talk to when the splendour of things filled me; the consciousness of a kind eye to share the pleasure of a sunshine or to light at a common memory; or if I had had hope, the prospect of brighter days and a restitution of my self-respect, they might have been much happier these marching days that I am now only too willing to forget. For we trod in many pleasant places even when weary, by summer fields jocund with flowers, and by autumn's laden orchards. Stars shone on our wearied columns as we rested in the meadows or on the verge of woods, half satisfied with a gangrel's supper and sometimes joining in a song. I used to feel then that here was a better society after all than some I had of late been habituated with upon the coast. And there were towns we passed through: 'twas sweet exceedingly to hear the echo of our own loud drums, the tarantara of trumpets. I liked to see the folks come out although they scarce were friendly, and feel that priceless zest that is the guerdon of the corps, the crowd, the mob—that I was something in a vastly moving thing even if it was no more than the regiment of raw lads called d'Auvergne.
We were, for long in our progress, no part of the main army, some strategy of which we could not guess the reasoning, making it necessary that we should move alone through the country; and to the interest of our progress through these foreign scenes was added the ofttimes apprehension that we might some day suffer an alarm from the regiments of the great Frederick. Twice we were surprised by night and our pickets broken in, once a native guided us to aguet-apens—an ambuscade—where, to do him justice, the major fought like a lion, and by his spirit released his corps from the utmost danger. A war is like a harvest; you cannot aye be leading in, though the common notion is that in a campaign men are fighting even-on. In the cornfield the work depends upon the weather; in the field of war (at least with us 'twas so) the actual strife must often depend upon the enemy, and for weeks on end we saw them neither tail nor horn, as the saying goes. Sometimes it seemed as if the war had quite forgotten us, and was waging somewhere else upon the planet far away from Prussia.
We got one good from the marching and the waiting; it put vigour in our men. Day by day they seemed to swell and strengthen, thin faces grew well-filled and ruddy, slouching steps grew confident and firm. And thus the Regiment d'Au-vergne was not so badly figured when we fought the fight of Rosbach that ended my career of glory.
Rosbach!—its name to me can still create a tremor. We fought it in November month in a storm of driving snow. Our corps lay out upon the right of Frederick among fields that were new-ploughed for wheat and broken up by ditches. The d'Auvergnes charged with all the fire of veterans; they were smashed by horse, but rose and fell and rose again though death swept across them like breath from a furnace, scorching and shrivelling all before it. The Prussian and the Austrian guns went rat-a-pat like some gigantic drum upon the braes, and nearer the musketry volleys mingled with the plunge of horse and shouting of commanders so that each sound individually was indistinguishable, but all was blended in one unceasing melancholy hum.
That drumming on the braes and that long melancholy hum are what most vividly remains to me of Rosbach, for I fell early in the engagement, struck in the charge by the sabre of a Prussian horseman that cleft me to the skull in a slanting stroke and left me incapable, but not unconscious, on the field.
I lay for hours with other wounded in the snow The battle changed ground; the noises came from the distance: we seemed to be forgotten. I pitied myself exceedingly. Finally I swounded.
When I came to myself it was night and men with lanterns were moving about the fields gathering us in like blackcock where we lay. Two Frenchmen came up and spoke to me, but what they said was all beyond me for I had clean forgotten every word of their language though that morning I had known it scarcely less fully than my own. I tried to speak in French, it seems, and thought I did so, but in spite of me the words were the broadest lallands Scots such as I had not used since I had run, a bare-legged boy, about the braes of, home. And otherwise my faculties were singularly acute, for I remember how keenly I noticed the pitying eye of the younger of the two men.
What they did was to stanch my wound and go away. I feared I was deserted, but by-and-by they returned with another man who held the lantern close to my face as he knelt beside me.
“By the black stones of Baillinish!” said he in an unmistakable Hielan' accent, “and what have I here the night but the boy that harmed the bylie? You were not in your mother's bosom when you got that stroke!”
I saw his smile in the light of his lanthom, 'twas no other than MacKellar of Kilbride!
He was a surgeon in one of the corps; had been busy at his trade in another part of the field when the two Frenchmen who had recognised me for a Scot had called him away to look to a compatriot.
Under charge of Kilbride (as, in our country fashion, I called him) I was taken in a waggon with several other wounded soldiers over the frontier into Holland, that was, perhaps, the one unvexed part of all the Continent of Europe in these stirring days.
I mended rapidly, and cheery enough were these days of travel in a cart, so cheery that I never considered what the end of them might be, but was content to sit in the sunshine blithely conversing with this odd surgeon of the French army who had been roving the world for twenty years like my own Uncle Andrew, and had seen service in every army in Europe, but yet hankered to get back to the glens of his nativity, where he hoped his connection with the affair of Tearlach and the Forty-five would be forgotten.
“It's just this way of it, Hazel Den,” he would say to me, “there's them that has got enough out of Tearlach to make it worth their while to stick by him and them that has not. I am of the latter. I have been hanging about Paris yonder for a twelvemonth on the promise of the body that I should have a post that suited with my talents, and what does he do but get me clapped into a scurvy regiment that goes trudging through Silesia since Whitsunday, with never a sign of the paymaster except the once and then no more than a tenth of what was due to me. It is, maybe, glory, as the other man said; but my sorrow, it is not the kind that makes a clinking in your pouches.”
He had a comfortable deal of money to have so poor an account of his paymaster, and at that I hinted.
“Oh! Allow me for that!” he cried with great amusement at my wonder. “Fast hand at a feast and fast feet at a foray is what the other man said, and I'm thinking it is a very good observation, too. Where would I be if I was lippening on the paymaster?”
“Man! you surely have not been stealing?” said I, with such great innocency that he laughed like to end.
“Stealing!” he cried. “It's no theft to lift a purse in an enemy's country.”
“But these were no enemies of yours?” I protested, “though you happen to be doctoring in their midst.”
“Tuts! tuts, man!” said he shortly. “When the conies quarrel the quirky one (and that's Sir Fox if ye like to ken) will get his own. There seems far too much delicacy about you, my friend, to be a sporran-soldier fighting for the best terms an army will give you. And what for need you grumble at my having found a purse in an empty house when it's by virtue of the same we're at this moment making our way to the sea?”
I could make no answer to that, for indeed I had had, like the other three wounded men in the cart with me, the full benefit of his purse, wherever he had found it, and but for that we had doubtless been mouldering in a Prussian prison.
It will be observed that MacKellar spoke of our making for the sea, and here it behoves that I should tell how that project arose.
When we had crossed the frontier the first time it was simply because it seemed the easiest way out of trouble, though it led us away from the remnants of the army. I had commented upon this the first night we stopped within the Netherlands, and the surgeon bluntly gave me his mind on the matter. The truth was, he said, that he was sick of his post and meant to make this the opportunity of getting quit of it.
I went as close as I dared upon a hint that the thing looked woundily like a desertion. He picked me up quick enough and counselled me to follow his example, and say farewell to so scurvy a service as that I had embarked on. His advices might have weighed less with me (though in truth I was sick enough of the Regiment d'Auvergne and a succession of defeats) if he had not told me that there was a certain man at Helvoetsluys he knew I should like to see.
“And who might that be?” I asked.
“Who but his reverence himself?” said Kilbride, who dearly loved an effect. “Yon night I met you in the Paris change-house it was planned by them I was with, one of them being Buhot himself of the police, that the old man must be driven out of his nest in the Hôtel Dieu, seeing they had got all the information they wanted from him, and I was one of the parties who was to carry this into effect. At the time I fancied Buhot was as keen upon yourself as upon the priest, and I thought I was doing a wonderfully clever thing to spy your red shoes and give you a warning to quit the priest, but all the time Buhot was only laughing at me, and saw you and recognised you himself in the change-house. Well, to make the long tale short, when we went to the hospital the birds were both of them gone, which was more than we bargained for, because some sort of trial was due to the priest though there was no great feeling against him. Where he had taken wing to we could not guess, but you will not hinder him to come on a night of nights (as we say) to the lodging I was tenanting at the time in the Rue Espade, and throw himself upon my mercy. The muckle hash! I'll allow the insolency of the thing tickled me greatly. The man was a fair object, too; had not tasted food for two days, and captured my fancy by a tale I suppose there is no trusting, that he had given you the last fewlivreshe had in the world.”
“That was true enough about thelivres,” I said with gratitude.
“Was it, faith?” cried Kilbride. “Then I'm glad I did him the little service that lay in my power, which was to give him enough money to pay for posting to Helvoetsluys, where he is now, and grateful enough so far as I could gather from the last letters I had from him, and also mighty anxious to learn what became of his secretary.”
“I would give the last plack in my pocket to see the creature,” said I.
“Would you indeed?” said Kilbride. “Then here's the road for you, and it must be a long furlough whatever of it from the brigade of Marshal Clermont.”
Kilbride and I parted company with the others once we had got within the lines of Holland; the cateran (as I would sometimes be calling him in a joke) giving them as much money as might take them leisuredly to the south they meant to make for, and he and I proceeded on our way across the country towards the mouth of the River Maas.
It was never my lot before nor since to travel with a more cheerful companion. Not the priest himself had greater humour in his composition, and what was more it was a jollity I was able the better to understand, for while much of Hamilton'sespritmissed the spark with me because it had a foreign savour, the pawkiness of Kilbride was just the marrow of that I had seen in folks at home. And still the man was strange, for often he had melancholies. Put him in a day of rain and wind and you would hear him singing like a laverock the daftest songs in Erse; or give him a tickle task at haggling in the language of signs with a broad-bottomed bargeman, or the driver of a rattel-van, and the fun would froth in him like froth on boiling milk.
Indeed, and I should say like cream, for this Mac-Kellar man had, what is common enough among the clans in spite of our miscalling, a heart of jeel for the tender moment and a heart of iron for the hard. But black, black, were his vapours when the sun shone, which is surely the poorest of excuses for dolours. I think he hated the flatness of the land we travelled in. To me it was none amiss, for though it was winter I could fancy how rich would be the grass of July in the polders compared with our poor stunted crops at home, and that has ever a cheerful influence on any man that has been bred in Lowland fields. But he (if I did not misread his eye) looked all ungratefully on the stretching leagues that ever opened before us as we sailed on waterways or jolted on the roads.
“I do not ken how it may be with you, Mr. Greig,” he said one day as, somewhere in Brabant, our sluggish vessel opened up a view of canal that seemed to stretch so far it pricked the eye of the setting sun, and the windmills whirled on either hand ridiculous like the games of children—“I do not ken how it may be with you, but I'm sick of this country. It's no better nor a bannock, and me so fond of Badenoch!”
“Indeed and there's a sameness about every part of it,” I confessed, “and yet it has its qualities. See the sun on yonder island—'tis pleasant enough to my notion, and as for the folk, they are not the cut of our own, but still they have very much in common with folks I've seen in Ayr.”
He frowned at that unbelievingly, and cast a sour eye upon some women that stood upon a bridge. “Troth!” said he, “you would not compare these limmers with our own. I have not seen a light foot and a right dark eye since ever I put the back of me to the town of Inverness in the year of 'Fifty-six.'”
“Nor I since I left the Mearns,” I cried, suddenly thinking of Isobel and forgetting all that lay between that lass and me.
“Oh! oh!” cried Kilbride. “And that's the way of it? Therms more than Clemie Walkinshaw, is there? I was ill to convince that a nephew of Andy Greig's began the game at the age of twenty-odd with a lady that might have been his mother.”
I felt very much ashamed that he should have any knowledge of this part of my history, and seeing it he took to bantering me.
“Come, come!” said he, “you must save my reputation with myself for penetration, for I aye argued with Buhot that your tanglement with madame was something short of innocency for all your mim look, and he was for swearing the lady had found a fool.”
“I am beat to understand how my affairs came to be the topic of dispute with you and Buhot?” said I, astonished.
“And what for no'?” said he. “Wasn't the man's business to find out things, and would you have me with no interest in a ploy when it turned up? There were but the two ways of it—you were all the gomeral in love that Buhot thought you, or you were Andy Greig's nephew and willing to win the woman's favour (for all her antiquity) by keeping Buhot in the news of Hamilton's movements.”
“Good God!” I cried, “that was a horrible alternative!” even then failing to grasp all that he implied.
“Maybe,” he said pawkily; “but you cannot deny you kept them very well informed upon your master's movements, otherwise it had gone very hard perhaps with his Royal Highness.”
“Me!” I cried. “I would have as soon informed upon my father. And who was there to inform?”
Kilbride looked at me curiously as if he half doubted my innocence. “It is seldom I have found the man Buhot in a lie of the sort,” said he, “but he led me to understand that what information he had of the movements of the priest came from yourself.”
I jumped to my feet, and almost choked in denying it.
“Oh, very well, very well!” said Kilbride coolly. “There is no need to make afracasabout the matter. I am just telling you what Buhot told me. And troth! it was a circumstantial story he had of it; for he said that the Marshal Duke de Bellisle, and Monsieur Florentin, and Monsieur Berrier, and all the others of the Cabinet, had Fleuriau's name and direction from yourself, and found the plot had some connection with the affair of Damiens. George Kelly, the Prince's secretary, was another man that told me.” He gazed along the deck of the scow we sat in, as if thinking hard, and then turned to me with a hesitating suggestion. “Perhaps,” said he, “you are forgetting. Perhaps you wrote the woman and told her innocently enough, and that would come to the same thing.”
I was overwhelmed with confusion at the idea, though the possibility of my letters being used had once before occurred to me.
“Well, if you must know, it is true I wrote some letters to Miss Walkinshaw,” I confessed shamefacedly. “But they were very carefully transmitted by Bernard the Swiss to her, for I got her answers back.”
He burst out laughing.
“For simplicity you beat all!” cried he. “You sent your news through the Swiss, that was in Buhot's pay, and took the charge from Hamilton's pistols, and did his part in helping you to escape from jyle with a great degree of humour as those of us who knew what was afoot had to agree, and you think the man would swither about peeping into a letter you entrusted to him, particularly if it was directed to hersel'! The sleep-bag was under your head sure enough, as the other man said.”
“And I was the unconscious wretch that betrayed our hiding in the Hôtel Dieu!” I cried with much chagrin, seeing at a flash what all this meant. “If I had Bernard here I could thraw his neck.”
“Indeed,” said he, “and what for should it be Bernard? The man but did what he was told, and there, by my troth! when I think of it, I'm no' so sure that he was any different from yourself.”
“What do you mean?” said I.
“Oh, just that hersel' told you to keep her informed of your movements and you did so. In Bernard and you she had a pair of spies instead of only the one had she trusted in either.”
“And what in all the world would she be doing that for?”
“What but for her lover the prince?” said he with a sickening promptness that some way left me without a doubt he spoke with knowledge. “Foul fa' the day he ever clapt eyes on her! for she has the cunning of the fox, though by all accounts a pleasant person. They say she has a sister that's in the service of the queen at St. James's, and who kens but for all her pretended affection for Tearlach she may be playing all the time into the hands of his enemies? She made you and this Bernard the means of putting an end to the Jesuit plot upon his Royal Highness by discovering the source of it, and now the Jesuits, as I'm told, are to be driven furth the country and putten to the horn.”
I was stunned by this revelation of what a tool I had been in the hands of one I fancied briefly that I was in love with. For long I sat silent pondering on it, and at last unable to make up my mind whether I should laugh or swear. Kilbride, while affecting to pay no heed to me, was keen enough to see my perturbation, and had, I think, a sort of pride that he had been able to display such an astuteness.
“I'm afraid,” said I at last, “there is too much probability in all that you have said and thought. I am a stupendous ass, Mr. MacKellar, and you are a very clever man.”
“Not at all, not at all!” he protested hurriedly. “I have just some natural Hielan' interest in affairs of intrigue, and you have not (by your leave) had my advantages of the world, for I have seen much of the evil as well as the good of it, and never saw a woman's hand in aught yet but I wondered what mischief she was planning. There's much, I'm telling you, to be learned about a place like Fontainebleau or Versailles, and I advantaged myself so well of my opportunities there that you could not drive a hole but I would put a nail in it, as the other man said.”
“Well,” said I, “my hope is that I may never meet the woman again, and that's without a single angry feeling to her.”
“You need not fear about that,” said he. “The thing that does not lie in your road will never break your leg, as the other man said, and I'll be surprised if she puts herself in your way again now that her need for you is done. A score of your friends in Dunkerque could have told you that she was daft about him. I might be vexed for you if I did not know from your own mouth of the other one in Mearns.”
“We'll say nothing about that,” I says, “for that's a tale that's by wi'. She's lost to me.”
He gave a little chuckle and had that turn in the eye that showed he had a curious thought.
“What are you laughing at?” I asked. “Oh, just an old word we have in the Language, that with a two-deer stag-hound it will be happening often that a stag's amissing.”
“There's another thing I would like you to tell me out of your experience,” I said, “and that is the reason for the Prince's doing me a good turn with the one hand and a bad one with the other; using his efforts to get me the lieutenancy and at the same time putting a man on my track to quarrel with me?”
“It's as plain as the nose on your face,” he cried. “It was no great situation he got you when it was in the Regiment d'Auvergne, as you have discovered, but it would be got I'll warrant on the pressure of the Walkinshaw one. Just because she had that interest in you to press him for the post, and you were in the trim to keep up a correspondence with her (though in his own interest, as he must know, so far as she was concerned), he would want you out of the road. Love is like lairdship, Hazel Den, and it puts up very poorly with fellowship, as the other man said.”
I thought of the occasions when his Royal Highness had seen me at night in front of a certain window in the Rue de la Boucherie, and concluded that Kilbride in this too had probably hit the mark.
And so we passed through Holland in many changes of weather that finally turned to a black frost, which covered the canals with ice whereon skated the Dutch folks very pleasantly, but we were the losers, as the rest of our journey had to be made by post.
It was well on in the winter when we got to Helvoetsluys.
The priest, poor man! aged a dozen years by his anxieties since I had seen him last, was dubious of his senses when I entered where he lodged, and he wept like a bairn to see my face again.
“Scotland! Scotland! beshrew me, child, and I'd liefer have this than ten good dinners at Verray's!” cried he, and put his arms about my shoulders and buried his face in my waistcoat to hide his uncontrollable tears.
He was quartered upon a pilot of the Schelde and Hollands Deep, whose only child he made a shift to tutor in part payment of his costs, and the very moment that we had come in upon him he was full of a matter that had puzzled him for weeks before we came to Helvoetsluys. 'Twas a thing that partly hurt his pride, though that may seem incredible, and partly gave him pleasure, and 'twas merely that when he had at last found his concealment day and night in the pilot's house unendurable, and ventured a stroll or two upon the dunes in broad sunshine, no one paid any attention to him. There were soldiers and sailors that must have some suspicions of his identity, and he had himself read his own story and description in one of the gazettes, yet never a hand was raised to capture him.
“Ma foi!Paul,” he cried to me in a perplexity. “I am the most marvellous priest unfrocked, invisible to the world as if I had Mambrino's helmet. Sure it cannot be that I am too stale quarry for their hunting! Myamour proprebaulks at such conclusion. I that have—heaven help me!—loaded pistols against the Lord's anointed, might as well have gone shooting sparrows for all the infamy it has gained me. But yesterday I passed an officer of the peace that cried 'Bon jour, father,' in villainous French with a smile so sly I could swear he knew my history from the first breeching. I avow that my hair stirred under my hat when he said it.”
MacKellar stood by contemptuous of the priest's raptures over his restored secretary.
“Goodness be about us!” he said, “what a pity the brock should be hiding when there's nobody hunting him! The first squirt of the haggis is always the hottest, as the other man said. If they were keen on your track at the start of it—and it's myself has the doubt of that same—you may warrant they are slack on it now. It's Buhot himself would be greatly put about if you went to the jail and put out your hands for the manacles.”
Father Hamilton looked bewildered.
“Expiscate, good Monsieur MacKellar,” said he.
“Kilbride just means,” said I, “that you are in the same case as myself, and that orders have gone out that no one is to trouble you.”
He believed it, and still he was less cheerful than I looked for. “Indeed, 'tis like enough,” he sighed. “I have put my fat on a trap for a fortnight back to catch my captors and never a rat of them will come near me, but pass with sniffing noses. And yet on my word I have little to rejoice for. My friends have changed coats with my enemies because they swear I betrayed poor Fleuriau. I'd sooner die on the rack——”
“Oh, Father Hamilton!” I could not help crying, with remorse upon my countenance. He must have read the story in a single glance at me, for he stammered and took my hand.
“What! there too, Scotland!” he said. “I forswear the company of innocence after this. No matter, 'tis never again old Dixmunde parish for poor Father Hamilton that loved his flock well enough and believed the best of everybody and hated the confessional because it made the world so wicked. My honey-bees will hum next summer among another's flowers, and my darling blackbirds will be all starving in this pestilent winter weather. Paul, Paul, hear an old man's wisdom—be frugal in food, and raiment, and pleasure, and let thy ambitions flutter, but never fly too high to come down at a whistle. But here am I, old Pater Dull, prating on foolish little affairs, and thou and our honest friend here new back from the sounding of the guns. Art a brave fighter, lad? I heard of thee in the grenadier company of d'Auvergne.”
“We did the best part of our fighting with our shanks, as the other man said,” cried Kilbride. “But Mr. Greig came by a clout that affected his mind and made him clean forget the number of his regiment, and that is what for the lowlands of Holland is a very pleasant country just now.”
“Wounded!” cried the priest, disturbed at this intelligence. “Had I known on't I should have prayed for thy deliverance.”
“I have little doubt he did that for himself,” said Kilbride. “When I came on him after Rosbach he was behind a dyke, that is not a bad alternative for prayer when the lead is in the air.”
We made up our minds to remain for a while at Helvoet, but we had not determined what our next step should be, when in came the priest one day with his face like clay and his limbs trembling.
“Ah, Paul!” he cried, and fell into a chair; “here's Nemesis, daughter of Nox, a scurvy Italian, and wears a monkish cowl. I fancied it were too good to be true that I should be free from further trials.”
“Surely Buhot has not taken it into his head to move again,” I cried. “That would be very hirpling justice after so long an interval. And in any case they could scarcely hale you out of the Netherlands.”
“No, lad, not Buhot,” said he, perspiring with his apprehensions, “but the Society. There's one Gordoletti, a pretended Lutheran that hails from Jena, that has been agent between the Society and myself before now, and when I was out there he followed me upon the street with the eyes of a viper. I'll swear the fellow has a poignard and means the letting of blood. I know how 'twill be—a watch set upon this building, Gordoletti upon the steps some evening; a jostle, a thrust, and a speeding shade. A right stout shade too! if spirits are in any relation of measure to the corporeal clay. Oh, lad, what do I say? my sinner's wit must be evincing in the front of doom itself.”
I thought he simply havered, but found there was too real cause for his distress. That afternoon the monk walked up and down the street without letting his eyes lose a moment's sight of the entrance to the pilot's house where Father Hamilton abode. I could watch him all the better because I shared a room with Kilbride on the same side of the street, and even to me there was something eerie in the sight of this long thin stooping figure in its monkish garment, slouching on the stones or hanging over the parapet of the bridge, his eyes, lambent black and darting, over his narrow chafts. Perhaps it was but fancy, yet I thought I saw in the side of his gown the unmistakable bulge of a dagger. He paced the street for hours or leaned over the parapet affecting an interest in the barges, and all the time the priest sat fascinated within, counting his sentence come.
“Oh, by my faith and it is not so bad as that,” I protested on returning to find him in this piteous condition. “Surely there are two swords here that at the worst of it can be depended on to protect you.”
He shook his head dolefully. “It is no use, Paul,” he cried. “The poignard or the phial—'tis all the same to them or Gordoletti, and hereafter I dare not touch a drop of wine or indulge in a meagre soup.”
“But surely,” I said, “there may be a mistake, and this Gordoletti may have nothing to do with you.”
“The man wears a cowl—a monkish cowl—and that is enough for me. A Jesuit out of his customarysoutaneis like the devil in dancing shoes—be sure his lordship means mischief. Oh! Paul, I would I were back in Bicêtre and like to die there cleaner than on the banks of a Dutch canal. I protest I hate to think of dying by a canal.”
Still I was incredulous that harm was meant to him, and he proceeded to tell me the Society of Jesus was upon the brink of dissolution, and desperate accordingly. The discovery of Fleuriau's plot against the Prince had determined the authorities upon the demolition and extinction of the Jesuits throughout the whole of the King's dominion. Their riches and effects and churches were to be seized to the profit and emolument of the Crown; the reverend Fathers were to be banished furth of France for ever. Designs so formidable had to be conducted cautiously, and so far the only evidence of a scheme against the Society was to be seen in the Court itself, where the number of priests of the order was being rapidly diminished.
I thought no step of the civil power too harsh against the band of whom the stalking man in the cowl outside was representative, and indeed the priest at last half-infected myself with his terrors. We sat well back from the window looking out upon the street till it was dusk. There was never a moment when the assassin (as I still must think him) was not there, his interest solely in the house we sat in. And when it was wholly dark, and a single lamp of oil swinging on a cord across the thoroughfare lit the passage of the few pedestrians that went along the street, Gordoletti was still close beneath it, silent, meditating, and alert.
MacKellar came in from his coffee-house. We sat in darkness, except for the flicker of a fire of peat. He must have thought the spectacle curious.
“My goodness!” cried he, “candles must be unco dear in this shire when the pair of you cannot afford one between you to see each other yawning. I'm of a family myself that must be burning a dozen at a time and at both ends to make matters cheery, for it's a gey glum world at the best of it.”
He stumbled over to the mantel-shelf where there was customarily a candle; found and lit it, and held it up to see if there was any visible reason for our silence.
The priest's woebegone countenance set him into a shout of laughter. His amusement scarcely lessened when he heard of the ominous gentleman in the cowl.
“Let me see!” he said, and speedily devised a plan to test the occasion of Father Hamilton's terrors. He arranged that he should dress himself in the priest's garments, and as well as no inconsiderable difference in their bulk might let him, simulate the priest by lolling into the street.
“A brave plan verily,” quo' the priest, “but am I a bowelless rogue to let another have my own particular poignard? No, no, Messieurs, let me pay for my ownpots cassésand run my own risks in my ownsoutane.”
With that he rose to his feet and was bold enough to offer a trial that was attended by considerable hazard.
It was determined, however, that I should follow close upon the heels of Kilbride in his disguise, prepared to help him in the case of too serious a surprise.
The night was still. There were few people in the street, which was one of several that led down to the quays. The sky had but a few wan stars. When MacKellar stepped forth in the priest's hat and cloak, he walked slowly towards the harbour, ludicrously imitating the rolling gait of his reverence, while I stayed for a little in the shelter of the door. Gordoletti left his post upon the bridge and stealthily followed Kilbride. I gave him some yards of law and followed Gordoletti.
Our footsteps sounded on the stones; 'twas all that broke the evening stillness except the song of a roysterer who staggered upon the quays. The moment was fateful in its way and yet it ended farcically, for ere he had gained the foot of the street Kilbride turned and walked back to meet the man that stalked him. We closed upon the Italian to find him baffled and confused.
“Take that for your attentions!” cried Kilbride, and buffeted the fellow on the ear, a blow so secular and telling from a man in a frock that Gordoletti must have thought himself bewitched, for he gave a howl and took to his heels. Kilbride attempted to stop him, but the cassock escaped his hands and his own unwonted costume made a chase hopeless. As for me, I was content to let matters remain as they were now that Father Hamilton's suspicions seemed too well founded.
It did not surprise me that on learning of our experience the priest should determine on an immediate departure from Helvoetsluys. But where he was to go was more than he could readily decide. He proposed and rejected a score of places—Bordeaux, Flanders, the Hague, Katwyk farther up the coast, and many others—weighing the advantages of each, enumerating his acquaintances in each, discovering on further thought that each and every one of them had some feature unfavourable to his concealment from the Jesuits.
“You would be as long tuning your pipes as another would be playing a tune,” said Kilbride at last. “There's one thing sure of it, that you cannot be going anywhere the now without Mr. Greig and myself, and what ails you at Dunkerque in which we have all of us acquaintances?”
A season ago the suggestion would have set my heart in flame; but now it left me cold. Yet I backed up the proposal, for I reflected that (keeping away from the Rue de la Boucherie) we might there be among a good many friends. Nor was his reverence ill to influence in favour of the proposal.
The next morning saw us, then, upon a hoy that sailed for Calais and was bargained to drop us at Dunkerque.