Crockett Samuel Rutherford
Lochinvar: A Novel
CHAPTER XIII
MY LORD OF BARRA'S VOW
Kate stood at her favorite window, looking down upon five little boys playing barley break in a solemn plantigrade Dutch fashion in the dust of Zaandpoort Street by the canal. Opposite her stood Barra. He was dressed in his customary close-fitting suit of black velvet, and his slim waist was belted by the orange sash of a high councillor, while by his side swung a splendid sword in a scabbard of gold. A light cape of black velvet was about his shoulders, and its orange lining of fine silk drooped gracefully over his arm.
"Listen to me, dear lady," he was saying. "I am a soldier, and not a courtier. I have not glozing words to woo you with. No more than a plain man's honest words. I love you, and from that I shall never change. At present I can offer you but a share of the exile's bitter bread. But when the prince comes to his own, there shall be none in broad Scotland able to count either men or money with Murdo, Earl of Barra and of the Small Isles."
"My Lord Barra," said Kate, "I thank you for your exceeding courtesy. I feel your surpassing condescension. But I cannot marry you now nor yet again. If I loved you at all I should be proud and glad to take you by the hand and walk out of the door with you into the wide world – for you renouncing friends, fame, wealth, all, as if they were so many dead leaves of the autumn. But since I do not and cannot love you, believe that the proffer of great honor and rank can never alter my decision. This, indeed, I have told you before."
"Well do I know," answered the high councillor, "that you have spoken, concerning me, words hard and cruel to be borne. But that was before either of us understood the depth of my devotion – before you knew that I desired, as I seek for salvation, to make you scarcely less in honor than the queen herself, among those isles of the sea, where true hearts abide. The cause of our religion is great. Help me to make of our Scotland a land of faith and freedom. Love me for the sake of the cause, Kate, if not for mine own most unworthy sake."
"The cause is indeed still great and precious to me. I have been honored to suffer the least things for it. Nevertheless the cause is not to be served by one doing wrong, but by many doing right. You are – I believe it – an honorable man, my Lord Barra. You will serve your master faithfully till that good day comes when Scotland shall again have freedom to worship under kirk-rigging or roof-tree, or an it liketh her under the broad span of the sky."
"But you carry in your heart the image of a traitor," said Barra, a little more fiercely – "a double traitor, one whom I have seen false both to his country and to you. Know you that only my bare word stands between your lover and death?"
"I know not whether Walter Gordon be dead or alive," replied Kate, gently. "I say not that I love him, nor yet that he loves me. I do not know. But I say that if he does love me, in the only way I care to be loved, he would rather die a thousand deaths than that, in order to preserve his life, his true love should wed a man whom she cares not for either as lover or as husband."
"Then you will not love me?" said he, bending his head towards her as if to look into her soul.
"I cannot, my Lord Barra," she made him answer; "love comes not like a careful man-servant. It runs not like a well-trained dog at the sounding of a whistle. One cannot draw back the arras of the heart and say to love, 'Hither and speedily!' The wind bloweth, say the preachers, where it listeth. And so love also comes not with observation. Rather, like a thunderstorm, it bears victoriously up against the wind. For just when the will is most set against love, then it takes completest possession of the heart."
"Could you have loved me," he asked, more calmly, "if you had known no other? If the other existed not?"
"That I know not," said Kate. "All my life long I have never loved man or woman where I wanted to love, or was bid to love. Whether, therefore, in this case or that one could have loved serves no purpose in the asking. Nor, indeed, can it be answered. For the only issue is, that of a surety I love you not. And do you, my lord, of your most gentle courtesy, take that answer as one frankly given by an honest maid, and so depart content. There are in this land and in our own country a thousand fairer, a thousand worthier than I."
"Kate," said Barra, more intently and tenderly than he had yet spoken, "some day, and in some isle of quiet bliss where all evil and untoward things are put behind us, I will yet make you love me. For never have I thus set all my fancy on any woman before. And by the word of Murdo, Lord of Barra, none but you will I wed, and, by the honor of my clan, no other shall have you but I!"
He held out his hand. Kate, desiring him to go, gave him hers a little reluctantly. He bent to it and kissed it fervently.
"On this hand I swear," he said, slowly and solemnly, "that while I live it shall be given in marriage to none other, but shall be mine alone. By the graves that are green on the Isle of Ashes and by the honor of the thirty chieftains of Barra – I swear it."
Kate took her hand quickly again to her.
"Ye have taken a vain oath, my lord," she said, "for marriage and the giving of a hand are not within the compulsion of one, but are the agreement of two. And if this hand is ever given to a man my heart shall go with it, or else Kate McGhie's marriage-bed shall be her resting-grave!"
* * * * *
It was but two years since the Little Marie had carried her first basket of flowers to the streets of Brussels. From an ancient farm nigh to the city she had come, bringing with her her fresh complexion, her beauty, her light, swift, confident, easily influenced spirit.
Then, while yet a child, she had been hunted down, petted, betrayed, and forsaken by the man who, being on a visit to Brussels, had first been attracted by her childish simplicity. It chanced that in the dark days of her despair she had found her way to Amersfort, and finally to the Hostel of the Coronation. She had been there but a bare week when Wat came into her life, and his words to the girl were the first of genuine, unselfish kindness she had listened to in that abode of smiling misery and radiant despair.
As a trampled flower raises its head after a gentle rain, so her scarcely dulled childish purity reawakened within her, and with it – all the more fiercely that it came too late – the love that suffereth all things and upbraideth not. Marie was suddenly struck to the heart by the agony of her position. She might love, but none could give her back true love in return. Her soul abode in blank distress after the fray had been quelled and Walter led away to prison. Without speech to any at the inn of the Coronation, Marie fled to the house of a decent woman of her own country, who undertook the washing and dressing of fine linen – dainty cobweb frilleries for the ladies of the city, and stiffer garmentry for the severe and sober court of the Princess of Orange.
For love had been a plant of swift growth in the lush and ill-tended garden of the girl's heart. Constantly after this both dawn and dusk found her beneath Wat's window. Marie contrived a little basket attached to a rope, which he let down from the window in the swell of the tower. She it was who instructed Wat how to make the first cord of sufficient length and strength by ravelling a stocking and replaiting the yarn. In this fashion Marie brought to Wat's prison-cell such fruits as the warehouses of the Nederlandish companies afforded – strange-smelling delicacies of the utmost Indies, and early dainties from gardens nearer home. Linen, too, fresh and clean, she brought him, and flowers – at all of which, for the consideration of a dole of gold, the jailer winked, so that Wat's heart was abundantly touched by the pathetic devotion of the girl. Scarce could she be induced to accept the money which Wat put into her basket when he let it down again. And even then Marie took the gold only that she might have the means of obtaining other delicacies for Wat – such as were beyond the reach of purchase out of the meagre stipend she received from the laundress of fine linen with whom her working-days were spent.
More seldom did Marie come to the Street of the Prison in the evening after the work of the day was done. For there were many who knew her moving to and fro in these early summer twilights, so that she feared that her mission might be observed and Wat moved to another cell, out of reach of the Street of the Prison.
But one afternoon of sullen clouds and murky weather, when few people were abroad upon the streets of Amersfort, Marie sickened of the hot steamy atmosphere of the laundry and the chatter of the maids of the quarter, in which she was allowed to have no part. She finished her work earlier than the others – perhaps for that reason – and stole quietly away to the tower of Wat's prison, where it jutted out over the cobble-stones of the pavement.
Wat was at his post, looking out, as usual, upon the slackening traffic and quickening pleasure-seeking of the street. He was truly glad to see the girl, and greeted her appearance with a kind smile.
"I had not expected you till the morning," he said. "But I have lived on the freshness of your flowers all day. I have also had my cell washed. Black Peter, my jailer, was inclined to be complaisant to me this morning. It is his birthday, he says."
Wat smiled as he said it. For he had bestowed one of his few remaining coins upon Peter; which, ever since, that worthy had been swallowing to his good health in the shape of pure Hollands. Indeed, at this moment there came from below the rollicking voice of jolly Black Peter, singing a song which ran through a catalogue of camp pleasures and soldierly delights, such as certainly could not all have been enjoyed within the grim precincts of the prison of Amersfort.
"You are sure that there is no friend I can take a message to?" asked the Little Marie, for the fiftieth time; "no beloved mistress to whom I can carry a letter?"
"None," said Wat, smiling sadly. "But there," he continued, pointing quickly across the Street of the Prison at a man hurrying out of sight, "is one whom, an it please you, you may take note of. I am not able to show you a friend. But yonder goes my heart's enemy. There at the corner – the dark man in the suit of velvet, with the orange-lined cloak and the sword hilted with gold."
The Little Marie darted across the street in a moment, and threaded her way deftly among the boisterous traffic of the huxters' stalls. Presently she came back. There was a new and dangerous excitement in her eye.
"I know him," she said; "it is my Lord Barra, the provost-marshal. He is your enemy, you say. It is well. But he was my enemy before he was yours. Sleep sound," she continued, looking up at him with an eye as clear and peaceful as a cloistered nun's. "Take no thought for your enemy, but only, ere you sleep, say a prayer to your Scottish God for the sinful soul of the Little Marie that loves you better than her life."
CHAPTER XIV
MAISIE'S NIGHT QUEST
In the street of Zaandpoort, upon a certain evening, it had grown early dark. The sullen, sultry day had broken down at the gloaming into a black and gurly night of rain, which came in fierce dashes, alternating with fickle, veering flaws and yet stranger lulls and stillnesses. Anon, when the rain slackened, the hurl of the storm overhead could be heard, while up aloft every chimney in Amersfort seemed to shriek aloud in a different key. Maisie had gone down an hour ago and barred the outer door with a stout oaken bolt, hasping the crossbar into its place as an additional precaution. She would sit up, she said, till William returned from duty, and then she would be sure to hear him approach. On a still night she could distinguish his footsteps turning out of the wide spaces of the Dam into the echoing narrows of the street of Zaandpoort.
She and Kate sat between the newly lighted lamp and the fire of wood which Maisie had insisted on making in order to keep out the gusty chills of the night. A cosier little upper-room there was not to be found in all Amersfort.
But there had fallen a long silence between the two. Maisie, as usual, was thinking of William. It troubled her that her husband had that day gone abroad without his blue military overcoat, and she declared over and over that he would certainly come home wet from head to foot. Kate's needle paused, lagged, and finally stopped altogether. Her dark eyes gazed long and steadily into the fire. She saw a black and gloomy prison-cell with the wind shrieking into the glassless windows. She heard it come whistling and hooting through the bars as though they were infernal harp-strings. And she thought, at once bitterly and tenderly, of one who might be even then lying upon the floor without either cloak or covering.
A sharp, hard sob broke into Maisie's pleasant revery. She went quickly over to the girl, and sat down beside her.
"Be patient, Kate," she said; "it will all come right if you bide a little. They cannot kill him, for none of the men who were wounded are dead – though for their own purposes his enemies have tried to make the prince believe so."
Kate lifted her head and looked piteously at Maisie.
"But even if he comes from prison, he will never forgive me. It was my fault – my fault," she said, and let her head fall again on Maisie's shoulder.
"Nay," said Maisie; "but I will go to him and own to him that the fault was mine – tell him that he was not gone a moment before I was sorry and ran after him to bring him back. He may be angry with me if he likes; but, at least, he shall understand that you were free from blame."
But this consolation, perhaps because it was now repeated for the fiftieth time, somehow failed to bring relief to Kate's troubled heart.
"He will never come back, I know," she said; "for I sent him away! Oh, how I wish I had not sent him away! Why – why did you let me?"
Maisie's mouth dropped to a pathetic pout of despair. It was so much easier comforting a man, she thought, than a girl. Now, if it had been William —
But at that moment a loud and continuous knocking was heard at the outer door, which had been so carefully barred against the storm.
"It is my dear!" cried Maisie, jumping eagerly to her feet, "and I had not heard his footstep turn into the street."
And she looked reproachfully at Kate, as though in this instance she had been entirely to blame.
"It is the first time that I ever missed hearing that," she said, and ran quickly down the stairs. As she threw open the fastenings a noisy gust of wind rioted in, and slammed all the doors with claps like thunder.
"William!" she cried, "dear lad, forgive me; I could not hear your foot for the noise of the wind, though I was listening. Believe me that – "
But it was the face of an unknown man which confronted her. He was clad in a blue military mantle, under which a uniform was indistinctly seen.
"Your pardon, madam," he said, looking down upon her, "are you not Mistress Gordon, the wife of Captain William Gordon, of the regiment of the Covenant?"
"I am indeed his wife," said Maisie, with just pride; "what of him?"
"I am bidden to say that he urgently requires your presence at the guard-house."
Maisie felt all the warm blood ebb from about her heart. But she only bit her lip, and set her hand hard over her breast.
"He is ill – he is dead!" she panted, scarcely knowing what she said.
"Nay," said the man, "not ill, and not dead. But he sends you word that he needs you urgently."
"You swear to me that he is not dead?" she said, seizing him fiercely by the wet cuff of his coat. For the man had laid his hand upon the edge of the wind-blown door to keep it steady as he talked, or perhaps in fear lest it should be shut in his face before his errand was accomplished.
Without waiting for another word besides the man's reiterated assurance, Maisie fled up-stairs, and telling Kate briefly that her husband needed her and had sent for her to the guard-room, she thrust a sheathed dagger into her bosom, and ran back down to the outer door.
"Bide a moment, and I will come with you!" cried Kate, after her.
"No, no," answered Maisie, "stay you and keep the house. I shall not be long away. Keep the water hot against William's return."
So saying, she shut the outer door carefully behind her, and hurried into the night.
Maisie had expected that the man who had brought the message would be waiting to guide her, but he had vanished. The long street of Zaandpoort was bare and dark from end to end, lit only by the lights within the storm-beaten houses where the douce burghers of Amersfort were sitting at supper or warming their toes at an early and unwonted fire.
Then for the first time it occurred to Maisie that she did not know whether her husband would be found at the guard-house of the palace, or at that by the city port, where was the main entrance to the camp. She decided to try the palace first.
With throbbing heart the young wife ran along the rain-swept streets. She had thrown her husband's cloak over her arm as she came out, with the idea of making him put it on when she found him. But she was glad enough, before she had ventured a hundred paces into the dark, roaring night, to drawn it closely over her own head and wrap herself from head to foot in it.
As she turned out upon the wide spaces of the Dam of Amersfort, into which Zaandpoort Street opened, she almost ran into the arms of the watch. An officer, who went first with a lantern, stopped her.
"Whither away so fast and so late, maiden?" he said; "an thou give not a fitting answer we must have thee to the spinning-house."
"I am the wife of a Scottish officer," said Maisie, nothing daunted. "And he being, as I think, taken suddenly ill, has sent for me by a messenger, whom in the darkness I have missed."
"Your husband's name and regiment?" demanded the leader of the watch, abruptly, yet not unkindly.
"He is called William Gordon," she said, "and commands to-night at the guard-house. He is a captain in the Scots regiment, called that of the Covenant."
The officer turned to his band.
"What regiments are on guard to-night?"
"The Scots psalm-singers at the palace – Van Marck's Frisians at the port of the camp," said a voice out of the dark. "And if it please you, I know the lady. She is a main brave one, and her husband is a good man. He carried the banner at Ayrsmoss, a battle in Scotland where many were slain, and after which he was the only man of the hill folk left alive."
"Go with her, thou, then," commanded the officer, "and bring her in safety to her husband. It is not fitting, madam, that you should be on the streets of the city at midnight and alone. Good-night and good speed to you, lady. Men of the city guard, forward!"
And with that the watch swung briskly up the street, the light of their leader's lantern flashing this way and that across the darkling road, as it dangled in his hand or was swayed by the fitful wind.
It seemed but a few minutes before Maisie's companion was challenging the soldiers of the guard at the palace.
"Captain William Gordon? Yea, he bides within," said a stern-visaged sergeant, in the gusty outer port. "Who might want him at this time of night?"
"His wife," said the soldier of the watch, indicating Maisie with his hand.
The sergeant bent his brows, as if he thought within him that this was neither hour nor place for the domesticities. Nevertheless, he opened an inner door, saluted upon the threshold, spoke a few words, and waited.
Will Gordon himself came out almost instantly in full uniform. One cheek was somewhat ruddy with sitting before the great fire, which cast pleasant gleams through the doorway into the outer hall of the guard.
"Why, Maisie!" he cried, "what do you here, lassie?"
He spoke in the kindly Scots of their Galloway Hills.
Maisie started back in apprehensive astonishment.
"Did you not send for me, William? A messenger brought me word an hour ago, or it may be less, that you needed me most urgently. I thought you had been sick, or wounded, at the least. So I spared not, but hasted hither alone, running all the way. But I came on the watch, and the officer sent this good man with me."
Will Gordon laughed.
"Some one hath been playing April-fool overly late in the day. If I catch him I will swinge him tightly therefor. He might have put thee in great peril, little one."
"I had a dagger, William," said Maisie, determinedly, putting her hand on her breast; "and had I a mind I could speak bad words also, if any had dared to meddle with me."
"Well, in a trice I shall be relieved," he said. "Come in by the fire. 'Tis not exactly according to the general's regulations. But I will risk the prince coming on such a night – or what would be worse, Mr. Michael Shields, who is our regimental chaplain and preceptor-general in righteousness."
Presently they issued forth, Maisie and her husband walking close together. His arm was about her, and the one blue military cloak proved great enough for two. They walked along, talking right merrily, to the street of Zaandpoort. At the foot of the stair they stopped with a gasp of astonishment. The door stood open to the wall.
"It hath been blown open by the wind," said Will Gordon.
They went up-stairs, Maisie first, and her husband standing a moment to shake the drops of rain from the cloak.
"Kate, Kate, where are you?" cried Maisie, as she reached the landing-place a little out of breath, as at this time was her wont.
But she recoiled from what she saw in the sitting-room. The lamp burned calmly and steadily upon its ledge. But the chairs were mostly overturned. The curtain was torn down, and flapped in the gusts through the window, which stood open towards the canal. Kate's Bible lay fluttering its leaves on the tiles of the fireplace. The floor was stained with the mud of many confused footmarks. A scrap of lace from Kate's sleeve hung on a nail by the window. But in all the rooms of the house in the street of Zaandpoort there was no sign of the girl herself. She had completely vanished.
Pale to the lips, and scarce knowing what they did, Will Gordon and his wife sat down at opposite sides of the table, and stared blankly at each other without speech or understanding.
