The Marquis of Lossie

CHAPTER XLVI: PORTLAND PLACE

The latter part of the journey was not so pleasant: it rained. It was not cold, however, and the ladies did not mind it much. It accorded with Clementina's mood; and as to Florimel, but for the thought of meeting Caley, her fine spirits would have laughed the weather to scorn. Malcolm was merry. His spirits always rose at the appearance of bad weather, as indeed with every show of misfortune a response antagonistic invariably awoke in him. On the present occasion he had even to repress the constantly recurring impulse to break out in song. His bosom's lord sat lightly in his throne. Griffith was the only miserable one of the party. He was tired, and did not relish the thought of the work to be done before getting home. They entered London in a wet fog, streaked with rain, and dyed with smoke. Florimel went with Clementina for the night, and Malcolm carried a note from her to Lady Bellair, after which, having made Kelpie comfortable, he went to his lodgings.

When he entered the curiosity shop, the woman received him with evident surprise, and when he would have passed through to the stair, stopped him with the unwelcome information that, finding he did not return, and knowing nothing about himself or his occupation, she had, as soon as the week for which he had paid in advance was out, let the room to an old lady from the country.

"It is no great matter to me," said Malcolm, thoughtful over the woman's want of confidence in him, for he had rather liked her, "only I am sorry you could not trust me a little."

"It's all you know, young man," she returned. "People as lives in London must take care of theirselves – not wait for other people to do it. They'd soon find theirselves nowheres in partic'lar. I've took care on your things, an' laid 'em all together, an' the sooner you find another place for 'em the better, for they do take up a deal o' room."

His personal property was not so bulky, however, but that in ten minutes he had it all in his carpet bag and a paper parcel, carrying which he re-entered the shop.

"Would you oblige me by allowing these to lie here till I come for them?" he said.

The woman was silent for a moment.

"I'd rather see the last on 'em," she answered. "To tell the truth, I don't like the look on 'em. You acts a part, young man. I'm on the square myself. But you'll find plenty to take you in. – No, I can't do it. Take 'em with you."

Malcolm turned from her, and with his bag in one hand and the parcel under the other arm, stepped from the shop into the dreary night. There he stood in the drizzle. It was a bystreet into which gas had not yet penetrated, and the oil lamps shone red and dull through the fog. He concluded to leave the things with Merton, while he went to find a lodging.

Merton was a decent sort of fellow – not in his master's confidence, and Malcolm found him quite as sympathetic as the small occasion demanded.

"It ain't no sort o' night," he said, "to go lookin' for a bed. Let's go an' speak to my old woman: she's a oner at contrivin'."

He lived over the stable, and they had but to go up the stair. Mrs Merton sat by the fire. A cradle with a baby was in front of it. On the other side sat Caley, in suppressed exultation, for here came what she had been waiting for – the first fruits of certain arrangements between her and Mrs Catanach. She greeted Malcolm distantly, but neither disdainfully nor spitefully.

"I trust you've brought me back my lady, MacPhail," she said; then added, thawing into something like jocularity, "I shouldn't have looked to you to go running away with her."

"I left my lady at Lady Clementina Thornicroft's an hour ago" answered Malcolm.

"Oh, of course! Lady Clem's everything now."

"I believe my lady's not coming home till tomorrow," said Malcolm.

"All the better for us," returned Caley. "Her room ain't ready for her. – But I didn't know you lodged with Mrs Merton, MacPhail," she said, with a look at the luggage he had placed on the floor.

"Lawks, miss!" cried the good woman, "wherever should we put him up, as has but the next room?"

"You'll have to find that out, mother," said Merton. "Sure you've got enough to shake down for him! With a truss of straw to help, you'll manage it somehow – eh, old lady? – I'll be bound!" And with that he told Malcolm's condition.

"Well, I suppose we must manage it somehow," answered his wife, "but I'm afraid we can't make him over comfortable."

"I don't see but we could take him in at the house," said Caley, reflectively. "There is a small room empty in the garret, I know. It ain't much more than a closet, to be sure, but if he could put up with it for a night or two, just till he found a better, I would run across and see what they say."

Malcolm wondered at the change in her, but could not hesitate. The least chance of getting settled in the house was a thing not to be thrown away. He thanked her heartily. She rose and went, and they sat and talked till her return. She had been delayed, she said, by the housekeeper; "the cross old patch" had objected to taking in anyone from the stables.

"I'm sure," she went on, "there ain't the ghost of a reason why you shouldn't have the room, except that it ain't good enough. Nobody else wants it, or is likely to. But it's all right now, and if you'll come across in about an hour, you'll find it ready for you. One of the girls in the kitchen – I forget her name – – offered to make it tidy for you. Only take care – I give you warning: she's a great admirer of Mr MacPhail."

Therewith she took her departure, and at the appointed time Malcolm followed her. The door was opened to him by one of the maids whom he knew by sight, and in her guidance he soon found himself in that part of a house he liked best – immediately under the roof. The room was indeed little more than a closet in the slope of the roof with only a skylight. But just outside the door was a storm window, from which, over the top of a lower range of houses, he had a glimpse of the mews yard. The place smelt rather badly of mice, while, as the skylight was immediately above his bed, and he had no fancy for drenching that with an infusion of soot, he could not open it. These, however, were the sole faults he had to find with the place. Everything looked nice and clean, and his education had not tended to fastidiousness. He took a book from his bag, and read a good while; then went to bed, and fell fast asleep.

In the morning he woke early, as was his habit, sprang at once on the floor, dressed, and went quietly down. The household was yet motionless. He had begun to descend the last stair, when all at once he turned deadly sick, and had to sit down, grasping the balusters. In a few minutes he recovered, and made the best speed he could to the stable, where Kelpie was now beginning to demand her breakfast.

But Malcolm had never in his life before felt sick, and it seemed awful to him. Something that had appeared his own, a portion – hardly a portion, rather an essential element of himself; had suddenly deserted him, left him a prey to the inroad of something that was not of himself, bringing with it faintness of heart, fear and dismay. He found himself for the first time in his life trembling; and it was to him a thing as appalling as strange. While he sat on the stair he could not think; but as he walked to the mews he said to himself:

"Am I then the slave of something that is not myself – something to which my fancied freedom and strength are a mockery? Was my courage, my peace, all the time dependent on something not me, which could be separated from me, and but a moment ago was separated from me, and left me as helplessly dismayed as the veriest coward in creation? I wonder what Alexander would have thought if, as he swung himself on Bucephalus, he had been taken as I was on the stair."

Afterwards, talking the thing over with Mr Graham, he said:

"I saw that I had no hand in my own courage. If I had any courage, it was simply that I was born with it. If it left me, I could not help it: I could neither prevent nor recall it; I could only wait until it returned. Why, then, I asked myself, should I feel ashamed that, for five minutes, as I sat on the stair, Kelpie was a terror to me, and I felt as if I dared not go near her? I had almost reached the stable before I saw into it a little. Then I did see that if I had had nothing to do with my own courage, it was quite time I had something to do with it. If a man had no hand in his own nature, character, being, what could he be better than a divine puppet – a happy creature, possibly – a heavenly animal, like the grand horses and lions of the book of the Revelation – but not one of the gods that the sons of God, the partakers of the divine nature, are? For this end came the breach in my natural courage – that I might repair it from the will and power God had given me, that I might have a hand in the making of my own courage, in the creating of myself. Therefore I must see to it."

Nor had he to wait for his next lesson, namely, the opportunity of doing what he had been taught in the first. For just as he reached the stable, where he heard Kelpie clamouring with hoofs and teeth, after her usual manner when she judged herself neglected, the sickness returned, and with it such a fear of the animal he heard thundering and clashing on the other side of the door, as amounted to nothing less than horror. She was a man eating horse! – a creature with bloody teeth, brain spattered hoofs, and eyes of hate! A flesh loving devil had possessed her and was now crying out for her groom that he might devour him.

He gathered, with agonized effort, every power within him to an awful council, and thus he said to himself:

"Better a thousand times my brain plastered the stable wall than I should hold them in the head of a dastard. How can God look at me with any content if I quail in the face of his four footed creature! Does he not demand of me action according to what I know, not what I may chance at any moment to feel? God is my strength, and I will lay hold of that strength and use it, or I have none, and Kelpie may take me and welcome."

Therewith the sickness abated so far that he was able to open the stable door; and, having brought them once into the presence of their terror, his will arose and lorded it over his shrinking quivering nerves, and like slaves they obeyed him. Surely the Father of his spirit was most in that will when most that will was Malcolm's own! It is when a man is most a man, that the cause of the man, the God of his life, the very Life himself the original life-creating Life, is closest to him, is most within him. The individual, that his individuality may blossom, and not soon be "massed into the common clay," must have the vital indwelling of the primary Individuality which is its origin. The fire that is the hidden life of the bush will not consume it.

Malcolm tottered to the corn bin, staggered up to Kelpie, fell up against her hind quarters as they dropped from a great kick, but got into the stall beside her. She turned eagerly, darted at her food, swallowed it greedily, and was quiet as a lamb while he dressed her.

CHAPTER XLVII: PORTLOSSIE AND SCAURNOSE

Meantime things were going rather badly at Portlossie and Scaurnose; and the factor was the devil of them. Those who had known him longest said he must be fey, that is doomed, so strangely altered was his behaviour. Others said he took more counsel with his bottle than had been his wont, and got no good from it. Almost all the fishers found him surly, and upon some he broke out in violent rage, while to certain whom he regarded as Malcolm's special friends, he carried himself with cruel oppression. The notice to leave at midsummer clouded the destiny of Joseph Mair and his family, and every householder in the two villages believed that to take them in would be to call down the like fate upon himself. But Meg Partan at least was not to be intimidated. Her outbursts of temper were but the hurricanes of a tropical heart – not much the less true and good and steadfast that it was fierce. Let the factor rage as he would, Meg was absolute in her determination that, if the cruel sentence was carried out, which she hardly expected, her house should be the shelter of those who had received her daughter when her severity had driven her from her home. That would leave her own family and theirs three months to look out for another abode. Certain of Blue Peter's friends ventured a visit of intercession to the factor, and were received with composure and treated with consideration until their object appeared, when his wrath burst forth so wildly that they were glad to escape without having to defend their persons: only the day before had he learned with certainty from Miss Horn that Malcolm was still in the service of the marchioness, and in constant attendance upon her when she rode. It almost maddened him. He had for some time taken to drinking more toddy after his dinner, and it was fast ruining his temper: his wife, who had from the first excited his indignation against Malcolm, was now reaping her reward. To complete the troubles of the fisher folk, the harbour at Portlossie had, by a severe equinoctial storm, been so filled with sand as to be now inaccessible at lower than half tide, nobody as yet having made it his business to see it attended to.

But, in the midst of his anxieties about Florimel and his interest in Clementina, Malcolm had not been forgetting them. As soon as he was a little settled in London, he had written to Mr Soutar, and he to architects and contractors, on the subject of a harbour at Scaurnose. But there were difficulties, and the matter had been making but slow progress. Malcolm, however, had insisted, and in consequence of his determination to have the possibilities of the thing thoroughly understood, three men appeared one morning on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff on the west side of the Nose. The children of the village discovered them, and carried the news; whereupon, the men being all out in the bay, the women left their work and went to see what the strangers were about. The moment they were satisfied that they could make nothing of their proceedings, they naturally became suspicious. To whom the fancy first occurred, nobody ever knew, but such was the unhealthiness of the moral atmosphere of the place, caused by the injustice and severity of Mr Crathie, that, once suggested, it was universally received that they were sent by the factor – and that for a purpose only too consistent with the treatment Scaurnose, they said, had invariably received ever since first it was the dwelling of fishers! Had not their fathers told them how unwelcome they were to the lords of the land? And what rents had they not to pay! and how poor was the shelter for which they did so much – without a foot of land to grow a potato in! To crown all, the factor was at length about to drive them in a body from the place – Blue Peter first, one of the best as well as the most considerable men among them! His notice to quit was but the beginning of a clearance. It was easy to see what those villains were about – on that precious rock, their only friend, the one that did its best to give them the sole shadow of harbourage they had, cutting off the wind from the northeast a little, and breaking the eddy round the point of the Nose! What could they be about but marking the spots where to bore the holes for the blasting powder that should scatter it to the winds, and let death and destruction, and the wild sea howling in upon Scaurnose, that the cormorant and the bittern might possess it, the owl and the raven dwell in it? But it would be seen what their husbands and fathers would say to it when they came home! In the meantime they must themselves do what they could. What were they men's wives for, if not to act for their husbands when they happened to be away?

The result was a shower of stones upon the unsuspecting surveyors, who forthwith fled, and carried the report of their reception to Mr Soutar at Duff Harbour. He wrote to Mr Crathie, who till then had heard nothing of the business; and the news increased both his discontent with his superiors, and his wrath with those whom he had come to regard as his rebellious subjects. The stiff necked people of the Bible was to him always now, as often he heard the words, the people of Scaurnose and the Seaton of Portlossie. And having at length committed this overt outrage, would he not be justified by all in taking more active measures against them?

When the fishermen came home and heard how their women had conducted themselves, they accepted their conjectures, and approved of their defence of the settlement. It was well for the land loupers, they said, that they had only the women to deal with.

Blue Peter did not so soon hear of the affair as the rest, for his Annie had not been one of the assailants. But when the hurried retreat of the surveyors was described to him in somewhat graphic language by one of those concerned in causing it, he struck his clenched fist in the palm of his other hand, and cried,

"Weel saired! There! that's what comes o' yer new –"

He had all but broken his promise, as he had already broken his faith to Malcolm, when his wife laid her hand on his mouth and stopped the issuing word. He started with sudden conviction and stood for a moment in absolute terror at sight of the precipice down which he had been on the point of falling, then straightway excusing himself to his conscience on the ground of non intent, was instantly angrier with Malcolm than before. He could not reflect that the disregarded cause of the threatened sin was the greater sin of the two. The breach of that charity which thinketh no evil maybe a graver fault than a hasty breach of promise.

Peter had not been improving since his return from London. He found less satisfaction in his religious exercises; was not unfrequently clouded in temper, occasionally even to sullenness; referred things oftener than formerly to the vileness of the human nature, but was far less willing than before to allow that he might himself be wrong; while somehow the Bible had no more the same plenitude of relation to the wants of his being, and he rose from the reading of it unrefreshed. Men asked each other what had come to Blue Peter, but no one could answer the question. For himself, he attributed the change, which he could not but recognise, although he did not understand it, to the withdrawing of the spirit of God, in displeasure that he had not merely allowed himself to be inveigled into a playhouse, but, far worse, had enjoyed the wickedness he saw there. When his wife reasoned that God knew he had gone in ignorance, trusting his friend, he cried,

"What 's that to him wha judges richteous judgment? What's a' oor puir meeserable excuzes i' the een 'at can see throu' the wa's o' the hert! Ignorance is no innocence."

Thus he lied for God! pleading his cause on the principles of hell. But the eye of his wife was single, and her body full of light; therefore to her it was plain that neither the theatre nor his conscience concerning it was the cause of the change: it had to do with his feelings towards Malcolm. He wronged his Friend in his heart, half knew it, but would not own it. Fearing to search himself, he took refuge in resentment, and to support his hard judgment, put false and cruel interpretations on whatever befell. So that, with love and anger and wrong acknowledged, his heart was full of bitterness.

"It 's a' the drumblet (muddied, troubled) luve o' 'im!" said Annie to herself. "Puir fallow! gien only Ma'colm wad come hame, an' lat him ken he 's no the villain he taks him for. I'll no believe mysel' 'at the laad I kissed like my ain mither's son afore he gaed awa' wad turn like that upo' 's 'maist the meenute he was oot o' sicht, an' a' for a feow words aboot a fulish play actin'. Lord bliss us a'! markises is men.

"We'll see, Peter, my man," she said, when the neighbour took her leave, "whether the wife, though she hasna' been to the ill place, an' that's surely Lon'on, canna tell the true frae the Cause full better nor her man, 'at kens sae muckle mair nor she wants to ken? Lat sit an' lat see."

Blue Peter made no reply; but perhaps the deepest depth in his fall was that he feared his wife might be right, and he have one day to stand ashamed before both her and his friend. But there are marvellous differences in the quality of the sins of different men, and a noble nature like Peter's would have to sink far indeed to be beyond redemption. Still there was one element mingling with his wrongness whose very triviality increased the difficulty of long delaying repentance: he had been not a little proud at finding himself the friend of a marquis. From the first they had been friends, when the one was a youth and the other a child, and had been out together in many a stormy and dangerous sea. More than once or twice, driven from the churlish ocean to the scarce less inhospitable shore, they had lain all night in each other's arms to keep the life awake within their frozen garments. And now this marquis spoke English to him! It rankled!

All the time Blue Peter was careful to say nothing to injure Malcolm in the eyes of his former comrades. His manner when his name was mentioned, however, he could not honestly school to the conveyance of the impression that things were as they had been betwixt them. Folk marked the difference, and it went to swell the general feeling that Malcolm had done ill to forsake a seafaring life for one upon which all fishermen must look down with contempt. Some in the Seaton went so far in their enmity as even to hint at an explanation of his conduct in the truth of the discarded scandal which had laid Lizzy's child at his door.

But amongst them was one who, having wronged him thus, and been convinced of her error, was now so fiercely his partisan as to be ready to wrong the whole town in his defence: that was Meg Partan, properly Mistress Findlay, Lizzy's mother. Although the daughter had never confessed, the mother had yet arrived at the right conclusion concerning the father of her child – how, she could hardly herself have told, for the conviction had grown by accretion; a sign here and a sign there, impalpable save to maternal sense, had led her to the truth; and now, if anyone had a word to say against Malcolm, he had better not say it in the hearing of the Partaness.

One day Blue Peter was walking home from the upper town of Portlossie, not with the lazy gait of the fisherman off work, poised backwards, with hands in trouser pocket, but stooping care laden with listless swinging arms. Thus Meg Partan met him – and of course attributed his dejection to the factor.

"Deil ha'e 'im for an upsettin' rascal 'at hasna pride eneuch to haud him ohn lickit the gentry's shune! The man maun be fey! I houp he may, an' I wuss I saw the beerial o' 'im makin' for the kirkyaird. It's nae ill to wuss weel to a' body 'at wad be left! His nose is turnt twise the colour i' the last twa month. He'll be drinkin' byous. Gien only Ma'colm MacPhail had been at hame to haud him in order!"

Peter said nothing, and his silence, to one who spake out whatever came, seemed fuller of restraints and meanings than it was. She challenged it at once.

"Noo, what mean ye by sayin' naething, Peter? Guid kens it's the warst thing man or woman can say o' onybody to haud their tongue. It's a thing I never was blamed wi' mysel', an' I wadna du't."

"That's verra true," said Peter.

"The mair weicht's intill't whan I lay 't to the door o' anither," persisted Meg. "Peter, gien ye ha'e onything again' my freen' Ma'colm MacPhail, oot wi' 't like a man, an' no playac' the gunpoother plot ower again. Ill wull's the warst poother ye can lay i' the boddom o' ony man's boat. But say at ye like, I s' uphaud Ma'colm again' the haill poustie o' ye. Gien he was but here! I say't again, honest laad!"

But she could not rouse Peter to utterance, and losing what little temper she had, she rated him soundly, and sent him home saying with the prophet Jonah, "Do I not well to be angry?" for that also he placed to Malcolm's account. Nor was his home any more a harbour for his riven boat, seeing his wife only longed for the return of him with whom his spirit chode: she regarded him as an exiled king, one day to reappear, and justify himself in the eyes of all, friends and enemies.