The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 675

Beschreibung

Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novels of travel, romance and adventure. The Master of Ballantrae takes a deep, disturbing turn after Kidnapped and Catriona, with its tale of rival brothers caught in a web of hatred, obsession, love and betrayal which draws them to adventures in frozen wastes of North America. Stevenson's fascination with the divided nature of the human self, so famously demonstrated in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, recurs in Weir of Hermiston with its awful father-son confrontation.

Leseprobe

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) was the only child of an affluent family who lived in Edinburgh's New Town. His devoted nurse, Alison Cunningham (Cummy), told the boy stories from the Bible and Scottish history which would later inspire his own writing.

His poor health and a preference for the bohemian life prevented him entering the family's engineering business, and he qualified instead as an advocate, although he never practised. He knew that he wanted to become a writer.

Stevenson was happiest away from the ‘meteorological purgatory’ of Edinburgh and, in 1878, he undertook a journey through the Cévennes, a mountain range in southern France. This trip inspired his famous travelogue Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1878). In Grez, he met Fanny Vandegrift Osborne, an American divorcee with two children. When Fanny returned to the United States in 1879, Stevenson followed her on impulse and they later married. He travelled in the United States for a year and wrote of his experiences in Across the Plains (1892), The Amateur Emigrant (1895) and The Silverado Squatters (1883).

In the summer of 1881, while holidaying in Braemar, he wrote Treasure Island, his most popular work, which has never been out of print since its publication in 1883. When his health deteriorated dramatically in 1884, he settled in Bournemouth and set to work on writing what would become Kidnapped (1886). During this time the idea of The Strange Case ofDr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) came to him in a dream. Stevenson's other great Scottish works included: The Master of Ballantrae (1889), Catriona (1893) and Weir of Hermiston (1896), which was unfinished at the time of his death.

Stevenson was intrigued by the Pacific Islands, and in 1888 he headed to the South Seas. He settled in Samoa, building a house at Vailima, and was much loved by the islanders, who called him ‘Tusitala’ (storyteller). In December 1894, Stevenson died of a brain haemorrhage, aged only forty-four.

This eBook edition published in 2013 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

Introduction © John Burnside, 2008

This edition first published by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-84697-060-3 eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-707-3

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Master of Ballantrae & Weir of Hermiston: An Introduction

John Burnside

In 1953, Errol Flynn returned to England, after years of swashbuckling success, unapologetic decadence and a slow, but steady decline in Hollywood. Over the previous decade, this notorious playboy – who once famously remarked, ‘I like my whisky old and my women young’ – had only just survived a statutory rape charge, had run up considerable debts and had fallen badly in arrears with his taxes and alimony payments, yet he seemed untroubled by all that as he began work on his new film, an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae. Flynn – who had also famously remarked ‘I do what I like’ – seemed the perfect choice to play the Master and, had he been permitted to bring his own complex and troubled personality to the role, the film might have done some kind of justice to its subject. In many ways, Flynn was a latter-day Master: charming, daring, deceitful, self-willed, charismatic, a free spirit who never feared controversy and was always ready for a fight, he was the ideal actor to say the lines ‘Mr Bally’ delivers to Mackellar:

‘Had I been the least petty chieftain in the Highlands, had I been the least king of naked negroes in the African desert, my people would have adored me. A bad man, am I? Ah! but I was born for a good tyrant! Ask Secundra Dass; he will tell you I treat him like a son. Cast in your lot with me tomorrow, become my slave, my chattel, a thing I can command as I command the powers of my own limbs and spirit – you will see no more that dark side that I turn upon the world in anger. I must have all or none. But where all is given, I give it back with usury. I have a kingly nature; there is my loss!’

It was not to be, however. Though elements of the Master's character remain, his ‘dark side’ is sanitised, and his character loses so much of its complexity and ambiguity that the film is little more than Robin Hood in tweeds, presumably because the producers, and perhaps Flynn himself, felt the public would not be happy with the morally and philosophically challenging figure that Stevenson had created. As played by Flynn, the Master is a more or less good man betrayed by a cold and calculating brother, and the audience cannot help but will him on, in his quest for justice. Thus, Stevenson's masterpiece was reduced to a mere entertainment, another star vehicle aimed at giving the public what the studio bosses thought it wanted.

Flynn can hardly be blamed for this, of course. His star was in decline – in his recent Hollywood films he had looked unfit and seedy, a boozy shadow of his 30s self – and he needed a success. Not long after this routine outing, he won widespread praise for his role in The Sun Also Rises – playing, as it happened, a run-down alcoholic playboy, poignantly reminiscent of the figure he himself had become, both in his day-to-day life and in the eyes of many of the critics. ‘It's not what they say about you,’ he once remarked, ‘it's what they whisper’ – and this complex, ambiguous man had been whispered into a sad parody of himself by the time he died, in 1959 (his last words, which could so easily have been uttered by Jamie Durisdeer, were ‘I shall return’). It is an irony that would not have been lost on Stevenson, who so often returns to the reductive power of hearsay and rumour as key tools in enforcing social and religious conventions and dares us to think beyond that narrow code to a freer, and more challenging existence.

* * *

If people only would admit in practice (what they are so ready to assert in theory) that a man has a right to judge for himself; and is culpable if he do not exercise that right – why, it would have been better for a number of people – better for Wycliffe and Servetus and even Whitefield, nay and even me.

So writes Stevenson in a letter to Charles Baxter, in 1873. He is lamenting – among other things – the family and social pressures that prevented him from making his own choices in regard to love and marriage, pressures very similar to those that Archie is so aware of when he finds himself drawn to the socially inferior Kirstie, in Weir of Hermiston. As is so often the case with Stevenson, the role of the whisper is critical in setting the scene for a tragedy, and he who can manipulate public opinion is always more powerful than he who keeps his own counsel. It may be Archie's outburst against his father over the seemingly cruel treatment of Duncan Jopp that causes him to be sent down to the country, but it is Frank Innes’ gossip-mongering and slanders that lead to the bloody denouement:

In the early stages I am persuaded there was no malice. He talked but for the pleasure of airing himself. He was essentially glib, as becomes the young advocate, and essentially careless of the truth, which is the mark of the young ass; and so he talked at random. There was no particular bias, but that one which is indigenous and universal, to flatter himself and to please and interest the present friend. And by thus milling air out of his mouth, he had presently built up a presentation of Archie which was known and talked of in all corners of the county. Wherever there was a residential house and a walled garden, wherever there was a dwarfish castle and a park, wherever a quadruple cottage by the ruins of a peel-tower showed an old family going down, and wherever a handsome villa with a carriage approach and a shrubbery marked the coming up of a new one – probably on the wheels of machinery – Archie began to be regarded in the light of a dark, perhaps a vicious mystery, and the future developments of his career to be looked for with uneasiness and confidential whispering.

Gossip and innuendo play a similar role in blackening the image of Henry Durie in The Master of Ballantrae and the Master himself is a master of suggestion in all his dealings, whether with the pirates, or in his campaign against Henry and his family. In every instance, public opinion is fickle, easily manipulated and almost always ill-founded, but its power is indisputable. Again and again – in these novels, and elsewhere in Stevenson's work – people are prevented from judging for themselves and are constantly betrayed or diminished by gossip and rumour. It is regard for public opinion that sets up the tragedy in Weir of Hermiston: Archie's father, as a judge, is obliged to act when his son criticises him publicly – as he says to Archie, ‘You couldna even steik your mouth on the public street’ – and it is fear of a scandal that keeps the Duries at the mercy of the Master for so long. Indeed, Stevenson returns throughout his work to the limitations imposed by social convention, which empowers the narrow-minded and the cunning, while preventing good people from living as fully as they might, and he challenges his reader to question those conventions.

Yet what happens when a character throws off social convention and allows his secret, inner, possibly darker self to emerge? When Dr Jekyll achieves ‘a solution of the bonds of obligation’ he only succeeds in unloosing ‘an unknown but not innocent freedom of the soul’, and the Master, as self-willed a character as any in literature, is perversely destructive in his campaign against his brother. So – after all his railing against convention, is Stevenson saying that a release from social constraints simply gives birth to a Hyde, or a Mr Bally? Or is some other kind of freedom possible, a freedom that recognises some higher power than self-will? It is hard to know what Stevenson might have done with Weir of Hermiston had he lived (one rather hopes that he might have abandoned the proposed happy ending, with Archie and Kirstie escaping to a new life in America), but there is enough in what we have of the book to suggest that, even as tragedy rises out of the earth of Hermiston, there is also something else, something ancient and perhaps pagan, that reveals another path than either blind adherence to convention or perversity. It is something that Archie detects, when he first comes into the country:

The grey, Quakerish dale was still only awakened in places and patches from the sobriety of its winter colouring; and he wondered at its beauty; an essential beauty of the old earth it seemed to him, not resident in particulars but breathing to him from the whole . . . His heart perhaps beat in time to some vast in-dwelling rhythm of the universe. By the time he came to a corner of the valley and could see the kirk, he had so lingered by the way that the first psalm was finishing. The nasal psalmody, full of turns and trills and graceless graces, seemed the essential voice of the kirk itself upraised in thanksgiving. ‘Everything's alive,’ he said; and again cries it aloud, ‘Thank God, everything's alive!’

Kirstie is also aware of this pagan essence in the land, but for her it is darker and more threatening, an impersonal and potentially destructive force:

So that torn page had riveted her attention on what might have been but little, and perhaps too soon forgotten; while the ominous words of Dandie – heard, but not heeded, and still remembered – had lent to her thoughts, or rather to her mood a cast of solemnity, and that idea of Fate – a pagan Fate, uncontrolled by an Christian deity, obscure, lawless, and august – moving indissuadably in the affairs of Christian men. Thus even that phenomenon of love at first sight, which is so rare and seems so simple and violent, like a disruption of life's tissue, may be decomposed into a sequence of accidents happily concurring.

Thus the social niceties are consistently undermined by our deeper selves, and by some force in the world that can cause, in the last words to appear in this unfinished masterpiece, ‘a wilful convulsion of brute nature’. In truth, the earth is both more beautiful and more cruel than we dream of in our philosophy – everything is alive, and that recognition can sometimes come as a happy surprise, but it is all driven by impulses and powers that we do not understand and cannot control. Even the god we have invented to supervise this world cannot control it, and the older, truer gods continue, in the earth and in our selves, to unfold the music of what happens.

* * *

What Stevenson seems to be saying, then – in a more graceful, and less formal way than that old Freudian ‘conscious versus subconscious’ paradigm – is that what we know is not always what we know we know. As Mackellar notes, after a brief rest on the journey from Ballantrae to America: ‘I must have been at work even in the deepest of my sleep; and at work with at least a measure of intelligence.’ In other words, the self – the soul, perhaps – is far deeper than we think, and all manner of things may be raised up from those depths. No writer, I think, is more suggestive of the potentiality of human existence: the ‘old maid’ Mackellar can draw upon his ‘unconscious’ mind when necessary, Dr Jekyll can give birth to a Hyde, Adam Weir, if he would but acknowledge it, is capable of a love that might be the salvation of his hot-headed son, just as he was to be capable, it seems, of sending that son to the gallows. Stevenson is always on the alert for possibilities – both of sin and of salvation – and he is a writer who constantly reminds us of the need to see beyond the limitations imposed by manners and mores. In a late letter to Sidney Colvin, he makes this simple, yet oddly heartening observation:

It is the proof of intelligence, the proof of not being a barbarian, to be able to enter into something outside of oneself, something that does not touch one's next neighbour in the city omnibus. [My italics]

This is the heart of the matter, I think, when it comes to considering Stevenson's characters. The Master – for all his brilliance and evident bravery – cannot enter into anything outside of himself; Adam Weir cannot go beyond the law and so allow himself a moment's compassion for the hapless Duncan Jopp; the gossips and scandalmongers of the neighbourhoods of Hermiston and Ballantrae are concerned only with what touches themselves and their next neighbours in the market place and the kirk, and so harm comes into their world. It may be, as Kirstie divines, that we are fated to suffer harm anyhow, but that does not mean we should call it down upon our own heads – and perhaps this is one possible definition of sin, in Stevenson's world: that we do harm, not out of ambition or passion, but because we cannot see further than ourselves, or what touches our next neighbour on the city omnibus.

John BurnsideAugust 2008

THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE

A Winter's Tale

Dedication

TO SIR PERCY FLORENCE AND LADY SHELLEY

Here is a tale which extends over many years and travels into many countries. By a peculiar fitness of circumstance the writer began, continued it, and concluded it among distant and diverse scenes. Above all, he was much upon the sea. The character and fortune of the fraternal enemies, the hall and shrubbery of Durrisdeer, the problem of Mackellar's homespun and how to shape it for superior flights; these were his company on deck in many star-reflecting harbours, ran often in his mind at sea to the tune of slatting canvas, and were dismissed (something of the suddenest) on the approach of squalls. It is my hope that these surroundings of its manufacture may to some degree find favour for my story with seafarers and sealovers like yourselves.

And at least here is a dedication from a great way off: written by the loud shores of a subtropical island near upon ten thousand miles from Boscombe Chine and Manor: scenes which rise before me as I write, along with the faces and voices of my friends.

Well, I am for the sea once more; no doubt Sir Percy also. Let us make the signal B.R.D.!

R.L.S. Waikiki, May 17th, 1889

Contents

Preface

I.

Summary of Events during the Master's Wanderings

II.

Summary of Events (continued)

III.

The Master's Wanderings: From the Memoirs of the Chevalier de Burke

IV.

Persecutions endured by Mr Henry

V.

Account of all that passed on the Night of February 27th, 1757

VI.

Summary of Events during the Master's Second Absence

VII.

Adventure of Chevalier Burke in India: Extracted from his Memoirs

VIII.

The Enemy in the House

IX.

Mr Mackellar's Journey with the Master

X.

Passages at New York

XI.

The Journey in the Wilderness

XII.

The Journey in the Wilderness (continued)

Preface

Although an old, consistent exile, the editor of the following pages revisits now and again the city of which he exults to be a native; and there are few things more strange, more painful, or more salutary, than such revisitations. Outside, in foreign spots, he comes by surprise and awakens more attention than he had expected; in his own city, the relation is reversed, and he stands amazed to be so little recollected. Elsewhere he is refreshed to see attractive faces, to remark possible friends; there he scouts the long streets, with a pang at heart, for the faces and friends that are no more. Elsewhere he is delighted with the presence of what is new, there tormented by the absence of what is old. Elsewhere he is content to be his present self; there he is smitten with an equal regret for what he once was and for what he once hoped to be.

He was feeling all this dimly, as he drove from the station, on his last visit; he was feeling it still as he alighted at the door of his friend Mr Johnstone Thomson, W.S., with whom he was to stay. A hearty welcome, a face not altogether changed, a few words that sounded of old days, a laugh provoked and shared, a glimpse in passing of the snowy cloth and bright decanters and the Piranesis on the dining-room wall, brought him to his bedroom with a somewhat lightened cheer, and when he and Mr Thomson sat down a few minutes later, cheek by jowl, and pledged the past in a preliminary bumper, he was already almost consoled, he had already almost forgiven himself his two unpardonable errors, that he should ever have left his native city or ever returned to it.

‘I have something quite in your way,’ said Mr Thomson. ‘I wished to do honour to your arrival; because, my dear fellow, it is my own youth that comes back along with you; in a very tattered and withered state, to be sure, but – well! – all that's left of it.’

‘A great deal better than nothing,’ said the editor. ‘But what is this which is quite in my way?’

‘I was coming to that,’ said Mr Thomson: ‘Fate has put it in my power to honour your arrival with something really original by way of dessert. A mystery.’

‘A mystery?’ I repeated.

‘Yes,’ said his friend, ‘a mystery. It may prove to be nothing, and it may prove to be a great deal. But in the meanwhile it is truly mysterious, no eye having looked on it for near a hundred years; it is highly genteel, for it treats of a titled family; and it ought to be melodramatic, for (according to the superscription) it is concerned with death.’

‘I think I rarely heard a more obscure or a more promising annunciation,’ the other remarked. ‘But what is it?’

‘You remember my predecessor's, old Peter M'Brair’s business?’

‘I remember him acutely; he could not look at me without a pang of reprobation, and he could not feel the pang without betraying it. He was to me a man of a great historical interest, but the interest was not returned.’

‘Ah well, we go beyond him,’ said Mr Thomson. ‘I daresay old Peter knew as little about this as I do. You see, I succeeded to a prodigious accumulation of old lawpapers and old tin boxes, some of them of Peter's hoarding, some of his father's, John, first of the dynasty, a great man in his day. Among other collections, were all the papers of the Durrisdeers.’

‘The Durrisdeers!’ cried I. ‘My dear fellow, these may be of the greatest interest. One of them was out in the ‘Forty-five; one had some strange passages with the devil – you will find a note of it in Law's ‘“Memorials,” I think; and there was an unexplained tragedy, I know not what, much later, about a hundred years ago—’

‘More than a hundred years ago,’ said Mr Thomson. ‘In 1783.’

‘How do you know that? I mean some death.’

‘Yes, the lamentable deaths of my Lord Durrisdeer and his brother, the Master of Ballantrae (attainted in the troubles),’ said Mr Thomson with something the tone of a man quoting. ‘Is that it?’

‘To say truth,’ said I, ‘I have only seen some dim reference to the things in memoirs; and heard some traditions dimmer still, through my uncle (whom I think you knew). My uncle lived when he was a boy in the neighbourhood of St Bride's; he has often told me of the avenue closed up and grown over with grass, the great gates never opened, the last lord and his old maid sister who lived in the back parts of the house, a quiet, plain, poor, humdrum couple it would seem – but pathetic too, as the last of that stirring and brave house – and, to the country folk, faintly terrible from some deformed traditions.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Thomson. ‘Henry Graeme Durie, the last lord, died in 1820; his sister, the Honourable Miss Katharine Durie, in ‘Twenty-seven; so much I know; and by what I have been going over the last few days, they were what you say, decent, quiet people, and not rich. To say truth, it was a letter of my lord's that put me on the search for the packet we are going to open this evening. Some papers could not be found; and he wrote to Jack M'Brair suggesting they might be among those sealed up by a Mr Mackellar. M'Brair answered, that the papers in question were all in Mackellar's own hand, all (as the writer understood) of a purely narrative character; and besides, said he, ‘“I am not bound to open them before the year 1889.” You may fancy if these words struck me: I instituted a hunt through all the M'Brair repositories; and at last hit upon that packet which (if you have had enough wine) I propose to show you at once.’

In the smoking-room, to which my host now led me, was a packet, fastened with many seals and enclosed in a single sheet of strong paper thus endorsed:

Papers relating to the lives and lamentable death of the late Lord Durisdeer, and his elder brother James, commonly called Master of Ballantrae, attained in the troubles: entrusted into the hands of John M'Brair in the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh, W.S.; this 20th day of September Anno Domini 1789; by him to be kept secret until the revolution of one hundred years complete, or until the 20th day of September 1889: the same compiled and written by me,

EPHRAIM MACKELLAR,

For near forty years Land Steward on the estates of his Lordship.

As Mr Thomson is a married man, I will not say what hour had struck when we laid down the last of the following pages; but I will give a few words of what ensued.

‘Here,’ said Mr Thomson, ‘is a novel ready to your hand: all you have to do is to work up the scenery, develop the characters, and improve the style.’

‘My dear fellow,’ said I, ‘they are just the three things that I would rather die than set my hand to. It shall be published as it stands.’

‘But it's so bald,’ objected Mr Thomson.

‘I believe there is nothing so noble as baldness,’ replied I, ‘and I am sure there is nothing so interesting. I would have all literature bald, and all authors (if you like) but one.’

‘Well, well,’ said Mr Thomson, ‘we shall see.’

CHAPTER 1

Summary of Events during the Master's Wanderings

The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for, and public curiosity is sure to welcome. It so befell that I was intimately mingled with the last years and history of the house; and there does not live one man so able as myself to make these matters plain, or so desirous to narrate them faithfully. I knew the Master; on many secret steps of his career I have an authentic memoir in my hand; I sailed with him on his last voyage almost alone; I made one upon that winter's journey of which so many tales have gone abroad; and I was there at the man's death. As for my late Lord Durrisdeer, I served him and loved him near twenty years; and thought more of him the more I knew of him. Altogether, I think it not fit that so much evidence should perish; the truth is a debt I owe my lord's memory; and I think my old years will flow more smoothly, and my white hair lie quieter on the pillow, when the debt is paid.

The Duries of Durrisdeer and Ballantrae were a strong family in the south-west from the days of David First. A rhyme still current in the countryside –

Kittle folk are the Durrisdeers, They ride wi’ ower mony spears—

bears the mark of its antiquity; and the name appears in another, which common report attributes to Thomas of Ercildoune himself – I cannot say how truly, and which some have applied – I dare not say with how much justice – to the events of this narration:

Twa Duries in Durrisdeer,

Ane to tie and ane to ride.

An ill day for the groom

And a waur day for the bride.

Authentic history besides is filled with their exploits, which (to our modern eyes) seem not very commendable: and the family suffered its full share of those ups and downs to which the great houses of Scotland have been ever liable. But all these I pass over, to come to that memorable year 1745, when the foundations of this tragedy were laid.

At that time there dwelt a family of four persons in the house of Durrisdeer, near St Bride's, on the Solway shore; a chief hold of their race since the Reformation. My old lord, eighth of the name, was not old in years, but he suffered prematurely from the disabilities of age; his place was at the chimney-side; there he sat reading, in a lined gown, with few words for any man, and wry words for none: the model of an old retired housekeeper; and yet his mind very well nourished with study, and reputed in the country to be more cunning than he seemed. The Master of Ballantrae, James in baptism, took from his father the love of serious reading; some of his tact, perhaps, as well; but that which was only policy in the father became black dissimulation in the son. The face of his behaviour was merely popular and wild: he sat late at wine, later at the cards; had the name in the country of ‘an unco man for the lasses’; and was ever in the front of broils. But for all he was the first to go in, yet it was observed he was invariably the best to come off; and his partners in mischief were usually alone to pay the piper. This luck or dexterity got him several ill-wishers, but with the rest of the country enhanced his reputation; so that great things were looked for in his future, when he should have gained more gravity. One very black mark he had to his name; but the matter was hushed up at the time, and so defaced by legends before I came into these parts that I scruple to set it down. If it was true, it was a horrid fact in one so young; and if false, it was a horrid calumny. I think it notable that he had always vaunted himself quite implacable, and was taken at his word; so that he had the addition among his neighbours of ‘an ill man to cross.’ Here was altogether a young nobleman (not yet twenty-four in the year ‘Forty-five) who had made a figure in the country beyond his time of life. The less marvel if there were little heard of the second son, Mr Henry (my late Lord Durrisdeer), who was neither very bad nor yet very able, but an honest, solid sort of lad, like many of his neighbours. Little heard, I say; but indeed it was a case of little spoken. He was known among the salmon fishers in the firth, for that was a sport that he assiduously followed; he was an excellent good horse-doctor besides; and took a chief hand, almost from a boy, in the management of the estates. How hard a part that was, in the situation of that family, none knows better than myself; nor yet with how little colour of justice a man may there acquire the reputation of a tyrant and a miser. The fourth person in the house was Miss Alison Graeme, a near kinswoman, an orphan, and the heir to a considerable fortune which her father had acquired in trade. This money was loudly called for by my lord's necessities; indeed, the land was deeply mortgaged; and Miss Alison was designed accordingly to be the Master's wife, gladly enough on her side; with how much goodwill on his is another matter. She was a comely girl, and in those days very spirited and self-willed; for the old lord having no daughter of his own, and my lady being long dead, she had grown up as best she might.

To these four came the news of Prince Charlie's landing, and set them presently by the ears. My lord, like the chimney-keeper that he was, was all for temporising. Miss Alison held the other side, because it appeared romantical; and the Master (though I have heard they did not agree often) was for this once of her opinion. The adventure tempted him, as I conceive; he was tempted by the opportunity to raise the fortunes of the house, and not less by the hope of paying off his private liabilities, which were heavy beyond all opinion. As for Mr Henry, it appears he said little enough at first; his part came later on. It took the three a whole day's disputation before they agreed to steer a middle course, one son going forth to strike a blow for King James, my lord and the other staying at home to keep in favour with King George. Doubtless this was my lord's decision; and, as is well known, it was the part played by many considerable families. But the one dispute settled, another opened. For my lord, Miss Alison, and Mr Henry all held the one view: that it was the cadet's part to go out; and the Master, what with restlessness and vanity, would at no rate consent to stay at home. My lord pleaded, Miss Alison wept, Mr Henry was very plain spoken: all was of no avail.

‘It is the direct heir of Durrisdeer that should ride by his King's bridle,’ says the Master.

‘If we were playing a manly part,’ says Mr Henry, ‘there might be sense in such talk. But what are we doing? Cheating at cards!’

‘We are saving the house of Durrisdeer, Henry,’ his father said.

‘And see, James,’ said Mr Henry, ‘if I go, and the Prince has the upper hand, it will be easy to make your peace with King James. But if you go, and the expedition fails, we divide the right and the title. And what shall I be then?’

‘You will be Lord Durrisdeer,’ said the Master. ‘I put all I have upon the table.’

‘I play at no such game,’ cries Mr Henry. ‘I shall be left in such a situation as no man of sense and honour could endure. I shall be neither fish nor flesh!’ he cried. And a little after he had another expression, plainer perhaps than he intended. ‘It is your duty to be here with my father,’ said he. ‘You know well enough you are the favourite.’

‘Ay?’ said the Master. ‘And there spoke Envy! Would you trip up my heels – Jacob?’ said he, and dwelled upon the name maliciously.

Mr Henry went and walked at the low end of the hall without reply; for he had an excellent gift of silence. Presently he came back.

‘I am the cadet, and I should go,’ said he. ‘And my lord here is the master, and he says I shall go. What say ye to that, my brother?’

‘I say this, Harry,’ returned the Master, ‘that when very obstinate folk are met, there are only two ways out: Blows – and I think none of us could care to go so far; or the arbitrament of chance – and here is a guinea piece. Will you stand by the toss of the coin?’

‘I will stand and fall by it,’ said Mr Henry. ‘Heads, I go; shield, I stay.’

The coin was spun, and it fell shield. ‘So there is a lesson for Jacob,’ says the Master.

‘We shall live to repent of this,’ says Mr Henry, and flung out of the hall.

As for Miss Alison, she caught up that piece of gold which had just sent her lover to the wars, and flung it clean through the family shield in the great painted window.

‘If you loved me as well as I love you, you would have stayed,’ cried she.

‘ “I could not love you, dear, so well, loved I not honour more,” ’ sang the Master.

‘O!’ she cried, ‘you have no heart – I hope you may be killed!’ and she ran from the room, and in tears, to her own chamber.

It seems the Master turned to my lord with his most comical manner, and says he, ‘This looks like a devil of a wife.’

‘I think you are a devil of a son to me,’ cried his father, ‘you that have always been the favourite, to my shame be it spoken. Never a good hour have I gotten of you since you were born; no, never one good hour,’ and repeated it again the third time. Whether it was the Master's levity, or his insubordination, or Mr Henry's word about the favourite son, that had so much disturbed my lord, I do not know: but I incline to think it was the last, for I have it by all accounts that Mr Henry was more made up to from that hour.

Altogether it was in pretty ill blood with his family that the Master rode to the North; which was the more sorrowful for others to remember when it seemed too late. By fear and favour he had scraped together near upon a dozen men, principally tenants’ sons; they were all pretty full when they set forth, and rode up the hill by the old abbey, roaring and singing, the white cockade in every hat. It was a desperate venture for so small a company to cross the most of Scotland unsupported; and (what made folk think so the more) even as that poor dozen was clattering up the hill, a great ship of the King's navy, that could have brought them under with a single boat, lay with her broad ensign streaming in the bay. The next afternoon, having given the Master a fair start, it was Mr Henry's turn; and he rode off, all by himself, to offer his sword and carry letters from his father to King George's Government. Miss Alison was shut in her room, and did little but weep, till both were gone; only she stitched the cockade upon the Master's hat, and (as John Paul told me) it was wetted with tears when he carried it down to him.

In all that followed, Mr Henry and my old lord were true to their bargain. That ever they accomplished anything is more than I could learn; and that they were anyway strong on the King's side, more than I believe. But they kept the letter of loyalty, corresponded with my Lord President, sat still at home, and had little or no commerce with the Master while that business lasted. Nor was he, on his side, more communicative. Miss Alison, indeed, was always sending him expresses, but I do not know if she had many answers. Macconochie rode for her once, and found the Highlanders before Carlisle, and the Master riding by the Prince's side in high favour; he took the letter (so Macconochie tells), opened it, glanced it through with a mouth like a man whistling, and stuck it in his belt, whence, on his horse passageing, it fell unregarded to the ground. It was Macconochie who picked it up; and he still kept it, and indeed I have seen it in his hands. News came to Durrisdeer of course, by the common report, as it goes travelling through a country, a thing always wonderful to me. By that means the family learned more of the Master's favour with the Prince, and the ground it was said to stand on: for by a strange condescension in a man so proud – only that he was a man still more ambitious – he was said to have crept into notability by truckling to the Irish. Sir Thomas Sullivan, Colonel Burke, and the rest, were his daily comrades, by which course he withdrew himself from his own country-folk. All the small intrigues he had a hand in fomenting; thwarted my Lord George upon a thousand points; was always for the advice that seemed palatable to the Prince, no matter if it was good or bad; and seems upon the whole (like the gambler he was all through life) to have had less regard to the chances of the campaign than to the greatness of favour he might aspire to, if, by any luck, it should succeed. For the rest, he did very well in the field; no one questioned that: for he was no coward.

The next was the news of Culloden, which was brought to Durrisdeer by one of the tenants’ sons – the only survivor, he declared, of all those that had gone singing up the hill. By an unfortunate chance John Paul and Macconochie had that very morning found the guinea piece – which was the root of all the evil – sticking in a holly bush; they had been ‘up the gait,’ as the servants say at Durrisdeer, to the change-house; and if they had little left of the guinea, they had less of their wits. What must John Paul do but burst into the hall where the family sat at dinner, and cry the news to them that ‘Tam Macmorland was but new lichtit at the door, and – wirra, wirra – there were nane to come behind him’?

They took the word in silence like folk condemned; only Mr Henry carrying his palm to his face, and Miss Alison laying her head outright upon her hands. As for my lord, he was like ashes.

‘I have still one son,’ says he. ‘And, Henry, I will do you this justice – it is the kinder that is left.’

It was a strange thing to say in such a moment; but my lord had never forgotten Mr Henry's speech, and he had years of injustice on his conscience. Still it was a strange thing, and more than Miss Alison could let pass. She broke out and blamed my lord for his unnatural words, and Mr Henry because he was sitting there in safety when his brother lay dead, and herself because she had given her sweetheart ill words at his departure, calling him the flower of the flock, wringing her hands, protesting her love, and crying on him by his name – so that the servants stood astonished.

Mr Henry got to his feet, and stood holding his chair. It was he that was like ashes now.

‘O!’ he burst out suddenly, ‘I know you loved him.’

‘The world knows that, glory be to God!’ cries she; and then to Mr Henry: ‘There is none but me to know one thing – that you were a traitor to him in your heart.’

‘God knows,’ groans he, ‘it was lost love on both sides.’

Time went by in the house after that without much change; only they were now three instead of four, which was a perpetual reminder of their loss. Miss Alison's money, you are to bear in mind, was highly needful for the estates; and the one brother being dead, my old lord soon set his heart upon her marrying the other. Day in, day out, he would work upon her, sitting by the chimney-side with his finger in his Latin book, and his eyes set upon her face with a kind of pleasant intentness that became the old gentleman very well. If she wept, he would condole with her like an ancient man that has seen worse times and begins to think lightly even of sorrow; if she raged, he would fall to reading again in his Latin book, but always with some civil excuse; if she offered, as she often did, to let them have her money in a gift, he would show her how little it consisted with his honour, and remind her, even if he should consent, that Mr Henry would certainly refuse. Non vi sed sæpe cadendo was a favourite word of his; and no doubt this quiet persecution wore away much of her resolve; no doubt, besides, he had a great influence on the girl, having stood in the place of both her parents; and, for that matter, she was herself filled with the spirit of the Duries, and would have gone a great way for the glory of Durrisdeer; but not so far, I think, as to marry my poor patron, had it not been – strangely enough – for the circumstance of his extreme unpopularity.

This was the work of Tam Macmorland. There was not much harm in Tam; but he had that grievous weakness, a long tongue; and as the only man in that country who had been out – or, rather, who had come in again – he was sure of listeners. Those that have the underhand in any fighting, I have observed, are ever anxious to persuade themselves they were betrayed. By Tam's account of it, the rebels had been betrayed at every turn and by every officer they had; they had been betrayed at Derby, and betrayed at Falkirk; the night march was a step of treachery of my Lord George's; and Culloden was lost by the treachery of the Macdonalds. This habit of imputing treason grew upon the fool, till at last he must have in Mr Henry also. Mr Henry (by his account) had betrayed the lads of Durrisdeer; he had promised to follow with more men, and instead of that he had ridden to King George. ‘Ay, and the next day!’ Tam would cry. ‘The puir bonny Master, and the puir kind lads that rade wi’ him, were hardly ower the scaur or he was aff – the Judis! Ay, weel – he has his way o't: he's to be my lord, nae less, and there's mony a cold corp amang the Hieland heather!’ And at this, if Tam had been drinking, he would begin to weep.

Let any one speak long enough, he will get believers. This view of Mr Henry's behaviour crept about the country by little and little; it was talked upon by folk that knew the contrary, but were short of topics; and it was heard and believed and given out for gospel by the ignorant and the ill-willing. Mr Henry began to be shunned; yet a while, and the commons began to murmur as he went by, and the women (who are always the most bold because they are the most safe) to cry out their reproaches to his face. The Master was cried up for a saint. It was remembered how he had never any hand in pressing the tenants; as, indeed, no more he had, except to spend the money. He was a little wild perhaps, the folk said; but how much better was a natural, wild lad that would soon have settled down, than a skinflint and a sneckdraw, sitting with his nose in an account book to persecute poor tenants! One trollop, who had had a child to the Master, and by all accounts been very badly used, yet made herself a kind of champion of his memory. She flung a stone one day at Mr Henry.

‘Whaur's the bonny lad that trustit ye?’ she cried.

Mr Henry reined in his horse and looked upon her, the blood flowing from his lip. ‘Ay, Jess,’ says he. ‘You too? And yet ye should ken me better.’ For it was he who had helped her with money.

The woman had another stone ready, which she made as if she would cast; and he, to ward himself, threw up the hand that held his riding rod.

‘What, would ye beat a lassie, ye ugly—?’ cries she, and ran away screaming as though he had struck her.

Next day word went about the country like wildfire that Mr Henry had beaten Jessie Broun within an inch of her life. I give it as one instance of how this snowball grew, and one calumny brought another; until my poor patron was so perished in reputation that he began to keep the house like my lord. All this while, you may be very sure, he uttered no complaints at home; the very ground of the scandal was too sore a matter to be handled; and Mr Henry was very proud, and strangely obstinate in silence. My old lord must have heard of it, by John Paul, if by no one else; and he must at least have remarked the altered habits of his son. Yet even he, it is probable, knew not how high the feeling ran; and as for Miss Alison, she was ever the last person to hear news, and the least interested when she heard them.

In the height of the ill-feeling (for it died away as it came, no man could say why) there was an election forward in the town of St Bride's, which is the next to Durrisdeer, standing on the Water of Swift; some grievance was fermenting, I forget what, if ever I heard: and it was currently said there would be broken heads ere night, and that the sheriff had sent as far as Dumfries for soldiers. My lord moved that Mr Henry should be present, assuring him it was necessary to appear, for the credit of the house. ‘It will soon be reported,’ said he, ‘that we do not take the lead in our own country.’

‘It is a strange lead that I can take,’ said Mr Henry; and when they had pushed him further, ‘I tell you the plain truth,’ he said: ‘I dare not show my face.’

‘You are the first of the house that ever said so,’ cries Miss Alison.

‘We will go all three,’ said my lord; and sure enough he got into his boots (the first time in four years – a sore business John Paul had to get them on), and Miss Alison into her riding coat, and all three rode together to St Bride's.

The streets were full of the riff-raff of all the countryside, who had no sooner clapped eyes on Mr Henry than the hissing began, and the hooting, and the cries of ‘Judas!’ and ‘Where was the Master?’ and ‘Where were the poor lads that rode with him?’ Even a stone was cast; but the more part cried shame at that, for my old lord's sake, and Miss Alison's. It took not ten minutes to persuade my lord that Mr Henry had been right. He said never a word, but turned his horse about, and home again, with his chin upon his bosom. Never a word said Miss Alison; no doubt she thought the more; no doubt her pride was stung, for she was a bone-bred Durie; and no doubt her heart was touched to see her cousin so unjustly used. That night she was never in bed; I have often blamed my lady – when I call to mind that night I readily forgive her all; and the first thing in the morning she came to the old lord in his usual seat.

‘If Henry still wants me,’ said she, ‘he can have me now.’ To himself she had a different speech: ‘I bring you no love, Henry; but God knows, all the pity in the world.’

June the 1st, 1748, was the day of their marriage. It was December of the same year that first saw me alighting at the doors of the great house; and from there I take up the history of events as they befell under my own observation, like a witness in a court.

CHAPTER 2

Summary of Events (continued)

I made the last of my journey in the cold end of December, in a mighty dry day of frost, and who should be my guide but Patey Macmorland, brother of Tam! For a tow-headed, bare-legged brat of ten, he had more ill tales upon his tongue than ever I heard the match of; having drunken betimes in his brother's cup. I was still not so old myself; pride had not yet the upper hand of curiosity; and indeed it would have taken any man, that cold morning, to hear all the old clashes of the country, and be shown all the places by the way where strange things had fallen out. I had tales of Claverhouse as we came through the bogs, and tales of the devil as we came over the top of the scaur. As we came in by the abbey I heard somewhat of the old monks, and more of the freetraders, who use its ruins for a magazine, landing for that cause within a cannon-shot of Durrisdeer; and along all the road the Duries and poor Mr Henry were in the first rank of slander. My mind was thus highly prejudiced against the family I was about to serve, so that I was half surprised when I beheld Durrisdeer itself, lying in a pretty, sheltered bay, under the Abbey Hill; the house most commodiously built in the French fashion, or perhaps Italianate, for I have no skill in these arts; and the place the most beautified with gardens, lawns, shrubberies, and trees I had ever seen. The money sunk here unproductively would have quite restored the family; but as it was, it cost a revenue to keep it up.

Mr Henry came himself to the door to welcome me: a tall dark young gentleman (the Duries are all black men) of a plain and not cheerful face, very strong in body, but not so strong in health; taking me by the hand without any pride, and putting me at home with plain kind speeches. He led me into the hall, booted as I was, to present me to my lord. It was still daylight; and the first thing I observed was a lozenge of clear glass in the midst of the shield in the painted window, which I remember thinking a blemish on a room otherwise so handsome, with its family portraits, and the pargeted ceiling with pendants, and the carved chimney, in one corner of which my old lord sat reading in his Livy. He was like Mr Henry, with much the same plain countenance, only more subtle and pleasant, and his talk a thousand times more entertaining. He had many questions to ask me, I remember, of Edinburgh College, where I had just received my mastership of arts, and of the various professors, with whom and their proficiency he seemed well acquainted; and thus, talking of things that I knew, I soon got liberty of speech in my new home.

In the midst of this came Mrs Henry into the room; she was very far gone, Miss Katharine being due in about six weeks, which made me think less of her beauty at the first sight; and she used me with more of condescension than the rest; so that, upon all accounts, I kept her in the third place of my esteem.

It did not take long before all Patey Macmorland's tales were blotted out of my belief, and I was become, what I have ever since remained, a loving servant of the house of Durrisdeer. Mr Henry had the chief part of my affection. It was with him I worked; and I found him an exacting master, keeping all his kindness for those hours in which we were unemployed, and in the steward's office not only loading me with work, but viewing me with a shrewd supervision. At length one day he looked up from his paper with a kind of timidness, and says he, ‘Mr Mackellar, I think I ought to tell you that you do very well.’ That was my first word of commendation; and from that day his jealousy of my performance was relaxed; soon it was ‘Mr Mackellar’ here, and ‘Mr Mackellar’ there, with the whole family; and for much of my service at Durrisdeer I have transacted everything at my own time, and to my own fancy, and never a farthing challenged. Even while he was driving me, I had begun to find my heart go out to Mr Henry; no doubt, partly in pity, he was a man so palpably unhappy. He would fall into a deep muse over our accounts, staring at the page or out of the window; and at those times the look of his face, and the sigh that would break from him, awoke in me strong feelings of curiosity and commiseration. One day, I remember, we were late upon some business in the steward's room. This room is in the top of the house, and has a view upon the bay, and over a little wooded cape, on the long sands; and there, right over against the sun, which was then dipping, we saw the free-traders, with a great force of men and horses, scouring on the beach. Mr Henry had been staring straight west, so that I marvelled he was not blinded by the sun; suddenly he frowns, rubs his hand upon his brow, and turns to me with a smile.

‘You would not guess what I was thinking,’ says he. ‘I was thinking I would be a happier man if I could ride and run the danger of my life with these lawless companions.’

I told him I had observed he did not enjoy good spirits; and that it was a common fancy to envy others and think we should be the better of some change; quoting Horace to the point, like a young man fresh from college.

‘Why, just so,’ said he. ‘And with that we may get back to our accounts.’

It was not long before I began to get wind of the causes that so much depressed him. Indeed, a blind man must have soon discovered there was a shadow on that house, the shadow of the Master of Ballantrae. Dead or alive (and he was then supposed to be dead) that man was his brother's rival: his rival abroad, where there was never a good word for Mr Henry, and nothing but regret and praise for the Master; and his rival at home, not only with his father and his wife, but with the very servants.

They were two old serving men that were the leaders. John Paul, a little, bald, solemn, stomachy man, a great professor of piety and (take him for all in all) a pretty faithful servant, was the chief of the Master's faction. None durst go so far as John. He took a pleasure in disregarding Mr Henry publicly, often with a slighting comparison. My lord and Mrs Henry took him up, to be sure, but never so resolutely as they should; and he had only to pull his weeping face and begin his lamentations for the Master – ‘his laddie,’ as he called him – to have the whole condoned. As for Henry, he let these things pass in silence, sometimes with a sad and sometimes with a black look. There was no rivalling the dead, he knew that; and how to censure an old serving man for a fault of loyalty was more than he could see. His was not the tongue to do it.