John Splendid Part 18

"Will they hang together, do you think?" asked his lordship, fingering a crystal bottle for essence that lay on the 'scrutoire.

"I mis...o...b.. it," said M'Iver. "You know the stuff, MacCailein? He may have his Irish still; but I'll wager the MacDonalds, the Stewarts, and all the rest of that reiving crowd are off to their holds, like the banditty they are, with their booty. A company of pikes on the rear of him, as like as not, would settle his business."

The Marquis, besides his dishevelment, was looking very lean and pale. I am wrong if I had not before me a man who had not slept a sound night's sleep in his naked bed since the point of war beat under his castle window.

"Your arm, my lord "--I said in a pause of his conversation with Mlver, "is it a fashious injury? You look off your ordinary."

"I do," he said. "I daresay I do, and I wish to G.o.d it was only this raxed arm that was the worst of my ailment."

His face burned up red in the candle-light, his nostrils swelled, and he rose in his chair. A small table was between us. He put his uninjured hand on it to steady himself, and leaned over to me to make his words more weighty for my ear.

"Do you know," he added, "I'm Archibald, Marquis of Argile, and under the cope and canopy of heaven this January night there's not a creature of G.o.d's making more down in the heart and degraded than I? If the humblest servant in my house pointed a scornful finger at me and cried 'Coward,' I would bow my head. Ay, ay! it's good of you, sir, to shake a dissenting head; but I'm a chief discredited. I know it, man. I see it in the faces about me. I saw it at Rosneath, when my very gardener fumbled, and refused to touch his bonnet when I left. I saw it to-night at my own table, when the company talked of what they should do, and what my men should do, and said never a word of what was to be expected of MacCailein Mor."

"I think, my lord," I cried "that you're exaggerating a very small affair."

"Small affair!" he said (and he wetted his lips with his tongue before the words came). "Small affair! h.e.l.l's flame! is there anything smaller than the self-esteem of a man who by some infernal quirk of his nature turns his back on his most manifest duty--leaves the blood of his blood and the skin of his skin to perish for want of his guidance and encouragement, and wakens at morning to find it no black nightmare but the horrible fact? Answer me that, Elrigmore!"

"Tut, tut," said M'Iver, pouring his cousin a gla.s.s; "you're in the vapours, and need a good night's sleep. There's no one in Argile dare question your spirit, whatever they may think of your policy."

Argile relapsed into his chair, and looked with a pitiful eye at his kinsman.

"My good Iain," he said, "do you ken the old Lochow wife's story of the two daws? 'Thou didst well,' said the one, 'though thy wings _are_ cut; thou didst well to do as I told thee.' I'm not blaming you; you are a brave man of your own hands, and a middling honest man too, as honesty goes among mercenaries; but your tongue's plausible, plausible, and you are the devil's counsellor to any other man who slackens his will by so much as a finger-length."

M'Iver took on a set stern jaw, and looked his chief very dourly in the face.

"My Lord of Argile," he said, "you're my cousin-ger-man, and you're in a despondent key, and small blame to you with your lands smoking about you from Cruachan to Kilmartin; but if you were King Tearlach himself, I would take no insult from you. Do you charge me with any of your misfortunes?"

"I charge you with nothing, John," said Argile, wearily. "I'm only saying that at a time of stress, when there's a conflict in a man's mind between ease and exertion, you're not the best of consciences. Are we two going to quarrel about a phrase while our clansmen's blood is crying from the sod? Sit down, sir; sit down, if it please you," he said more sternly, the scowl that gave him the _gruamach_ reputation coming on his face; "sit down, if it please you, and instead of ruffling up like the bubbly-jock over words, tell me, if you can, how to save a reputation from the gutter. If it was not that I know I have your love, do you think I should be laying my heart bare here and now? You have known me some time now, M'Iver--did you ever find me without some reserve in my most intimate speech? Did you ever hear me say two words that I had not a third in the background to bring forward if the policy of the moment called for it?"

M'Iver laughed slyly, and hesitated to make any answer.

"It's a simple question," said the Marquis; "am I to think it needs too straightforward an answer for John Splendid to give it?"

"I'm as frank as my neighbours," said M'Iver.

"Well, sir, do not check the current of my candour by any picking and choosing of words. I ask if you have ever found me with the babbling and unbridled tongue of a fool in my mouth, giving my bottom-most thought to the wind and the street?"

"You were no Gael if you did, my lord. That's the sin of the shallow wit. I aye kept a bit thought of my own in the corner of my vest."

MacCailein sighed, and the stem of the beaker he was fingering broke in his nervous fingers. He threw the fragments with an impatient cry into the fireplace.

"It's the only weakness of our religion (G.o.d pardon the sin of hinting at any want in that same!) that we have no chance of laying the heart bare to mortal man. Many a time I could wish for the salving influence of the confessional, even without the absolution to follow."

"I think," said John Splendid, "it would be a strange day when MacCailein Mor, Marquis of Argile, would ask or need shriving from anything or any one. There was never a priest or vicar in the shire you couldn't twist the head off!"

The Marquis turned to me with a vexed toss of his shoulder. "It's a hopeless task to look for a pagan's backbone," said he. "Come, I'll confess. I dare not hint at my truant thought to Auchinbreac or before any of these fiery officers of mine, who fear perhaps more than they love me. At the black tale of my weakness they would make no allowance for my courage as the same was shown before."

"Your courage, sir," said I, "has been proved; it is the inheritance of your race. But I dare not strain my conscience, my lord, much as I love and honour your house, to say I could comprehend or concur in the extraordinary retirement you made from these parts when our need for your presence was the sorest."

"I thank you for that, Elrigmore," said his lordship, cordially. "You say no more now than you showed by your face (and perhaps said too) on the night the beacon flamed on Dunchuach. To show that I value your frankness--that my kinsman here seems to fancy a flaw ol character--I'll be explicit on the cause of my curious behaviour in this crisis. When I was a boy I was brought up loyally to our savage Highland tradition, that feuds were to carry on, and enemies to confound, and that no logic under heaven should keep the claymore in its sheath while an old grudge was to wipe out in blood or a wrong to right."

"A most sensible and laudable doctrine!" cried M'Iver. "With that and no more of a principle in life--except paying your way among friends--a good man of his hands could make a very snug and reputable progress through the world."

"Some men might," said Argile, calmly; "I do not know whether to envy or pity their kind. But they are not my kind. I think I bore myself not ungracefully in the Cabinet, in the field too, so long as I took my father's logic without question. But I have read, I have pondered----"

"Just so," whispered M'Iver, not a bit abashed that a sneer was in his interjection and his master could behold it.

"--And I have my doubts about the righteousness of much of our warfare, either before my day or now. I have brought the matter to my closet I have prayed----"

"Pshaw!" exclaimed M'Iver, but at once he asked pardon.

"--I am a man come--or wellnigh come--to the conclusion that his life was never designed by the Creator to be spent in the turmoil of faction and field. There is, I allow, a kind of man whom strife sets off, a middling good man in his way, perhaps, with a call to the sword whose justice he has never questioned. I have studied the philosophies; I have reflected on life--this unfathomable problem--and 'fore G.o.d I begin to doubt my very right to wear a breastplate against the poignard of fate.

Dubiety plays on me like a flute."

To all this I listened soberly, at the time comprehending that this was a gentleman suffering from the disease of being unable to make up his mind. I would have let him go on in that key while he pleasured it, for it's a vein there's no remedy for at the time being; but M'Iver was not of such tolerant stuff as I. He sat with an amazed face till his pa.s.sion simmered over into a torrent of words.

"MacCailein!" said he, "I'll never call you coward, but I'll call you mad, book mad, closet mad! Was this strong fabric your house of Argile (John M'Iver the humblest of its members) built up on doubt and whim and shillyshally hither and yond? Was't that made notable the name of your ancestor Cailein Mor na Sringe, now in the clods of Kilchrenan, or Cailein Iongataich who cooled his iron hide in Linne-na-luraich; or your father himself (peace with him!), who did so gallantly at Glenlivet?"

"----And taught me a little of the trade of slaughter at the Western Isles thirty years ago come Candlemas," said the Marquis. "How a man ages! Then--then I had a heart like the bird of spring."

"He could have taught you worse! I'm your cousin, and I'll say it to your beard, sir! Your glens and howes are ruined, your cattle are houghed and herried, your clan's name is a bye-word this wae day in all Albainn, and you sit there like a chemist weighing the wind on your stomach."

"You see no farther than your nose, John," said the Marquis, petulantly, the candle-light turning his eyes blood-red.

"Thank G.o.d for that same!" said Mlver, "if it gives me the wit to keep an enemy from striking the same. If the nose was Argile's, it might be twisted off his face while he debated upon his right to guard it."

"You're in some ways a lucky man," said the Marquis, still in the most sad and tolerant humour. "Did you never have a second's doubt about the right of your side in battle?"

"Here's to the doubt, sir!" said M'Iver. "I'm like yourself and every other man in a quandary of that kind, that thinking on it rarely brought me a better answer to the guess than I got from my instinct to start with."

Argile put his fingers through his hair, clearing the temples, and shutting wearied eyes on a perplexing world.

"I have a good deal of sympathy with John's philosophy," I said, modestly. "I hold with my father that the sword is as much G.o.d's scheme as the ca.s.sock. What are we in this expedition about to start but the instruments of Heaven's vengeance on murtherers and unbelievers?"

"I could scarcely put it more to the point myself," cried M'Iver. "A soldier's singular and essential duty is to do the task set him with such art and accomplishment as he can--in approach, siege, trench, or stronghold."

"Ay, ay! here we are into our dialectics again," said his lordship, laughing, with no particular surrender in his merriment. "You gentlemen make no allowance for the likelihood that James Grahame, too, may be swearing himself Heaven's chosen weapon. 'Who gave Jacob to the spoil and Israel to the robbers--did not I, the Lord?' Oh, it's a confusing world!"

"Even so, MacCailein; I'm a plain man," said M'Iver, "though of a good family, brought up roughly among men, with more regard to my strength and skill of arm than to book-learning; but I think I can say that here and in this crisis I am a man more fit, express, and appropriate than yourself. In the common pa.s.sions of life, in hate, in love, it is the simple and confident act that quicker achieves its purpose than the cunning ingenuity. A man in a swither is a man half absent, as poor a fighter as he is indifferent a lover; the enemy and the girl will escape him ere he has throttled the doubt at his heart There's one test to my mind for all the enterprises of man--are they well contrived and carried to a good conclusion? There may be some unco quirks to be performed, and some sore hearts to confer at the doing of them, but Heaven itself, for all its puissance, must shorten the pigeon's wing that the gled of the wood may have food to live on."

"Upon my word, M'Iver," said Argile, "you beat me at my own trade of debate, and--have you ever heard of a fellow Machiavelli?"

"I kent a man of that name in a corps we forgathered with at Mentz--a 'provient schriever,' as they called him. A rogue, with a hand in the sporran of every soldier he helped pay wage to."

"This was a different person; but no matter. Let us back to the beginning of our argument--why did you favour my leaving for Dunbarton when Montrose came down the Glen?"

The blood swept to M'Iver's face, and his eye quailed.