Lochinvar: A Novel

"Here, Kate," said Maisie, as she entered holding her friend by the hand, "is our cousin Wat, come in on us to bid farewell. He goes a far road and on a heavy adventure. He would say good-bye to the friends who are with him in this strange land before he departs, and of these you are one, are you not, my Kate?"

As soon as Mistress Maisie loosened her hand the girl went directly to the window-seat, where she stood leaning gracefully with her cheek laid softly against the shutter. She turned a little and shivered at her friend's pointed appeal.

"If Walter Gordon says it, it must be so," she answered, with certain quiet bitterness.

Lochinvar was deeply stung by her words. He came somewhat nearer to her, clasping his hands nervously before him, his face set and pale as it had never been in the presence of an enemy.

"Kate," he said, "I ask you again, wherein have I so grievously offended you that, on your coming to this land of exile, you should treat me like a dog – yes, worse than a wandering cur-dog. It is true that once long ago I was foolish – to blame, blackly and bitterly in the wrong, if you will. But now all humbly I ask you to forgive me ere I go, it may be to my death."

The girl looked at him with a strange light in her eyes – scorn, pity, and self-will struggling together for the mastery.

At last, in a hard, dry voice, she said, "There is nothing to forgive. If there had been I should have forgiven you. As it is, I have only forgotten."

Maisie had left the room and there was deep silence in it and about, save for the distant crying of the staid Dutch children late at their plays on the canal-sides of Amersfort, and the clatter of the home-returning wooden shoon on the pavemented streets. The young man drew himself up till his height towered above the girl like a watch-tower over a city wall. His eyes rested steadfastly on her the while. She had a feeling that a desperate kind of love was in the air, and that for aught she knew he might be about to clasp her fiercely in his arms. And it had, perhaps, been well for both if he had, for at that moment she raised her eyes and her heart wavered within her. He looked so tall and strong. She was sure that her head would come no higher upon his breast than the blue ribbon of his cavalry shoulder-knot. She wondered if his arms would prove as strong as they looked, if she suddenly were to find herself folded safe within them.

"Kate," he said, wistfully, coming nearer to her.

Now Wat Gordon ought not to have spoken. The single word in the silence of the room brought the girl back to herself. Instinctively she put out her hand, as though to ward off something threatening or overpowering. The gulf yawned instantly between them, and the full flood-tide of Wat Gordon's opportunity ebbed away as rapidly as it had flowed.

Yet when a moment later the girl lifted her long, dark lashes and revealed her eyes shining shyly glorious beneath them, Wat Gordon gazed into their depths till his breath came quick and short through his nostrils, and a peal of bells seemed to jangle all out of tune in his heart. He stood like some shy woodland beast new taken in a trap.

"Well?" she said, inquiringly, yet somewhat more softly than she had yet spoken.

Wat clinched his fist. In that single syllable the girl seemed to lay all the burden of blame, proof, explanation of the past upon him alone, and the hopeless magnitude of the task cut him to the quick.

"Kate!" he cried, "I will not again ask you to forgive me; but if I do not come back, at least believe that I died more worthily than perhaps I have lived – though neither have I ever lived so as to shame you, even had you seen me at my worst. And, ere I go, give me at least a love-token that I may carry it with me till I die."

Kate's lips parted as though she had somewhat to answer if she would, but she kept a faintly smiling silence instead, and only looked casually about the room. A single worn glove lay on the top of a little cabinet of dark oak. She lifted it and handed it to Wat. The young man eagerly seized the glove, pressed it with quick passion to his lips, and then thrust it deep into the bosom of his military coat. He would have taken the hand which gave him the gift, but a certain malicious innocence in the girl's next words suddenly dammed his gratitude at the fountain-head.

"I have nothing of my own to give," she said, "for I have just newly come off the sea. But this glove of Maisie's will mayhap serve as well. Besides which, I heard her say yestreen that she had some time ago lost its marrow in the market-place of Amersfort."

With a fierce hand Wat Gordon tore the glove from his bosom and threw it impulsively out of the window into the canal. Then he squared his shoulders and turned him about in order to stride haughtily and indignantly from the room.

But even as he went he saw a quaintly subtle amusement shining in the girl's eyes – laughter made lovely by the possibility of indignant tears behind it, and on her perfectest lips that quick petulant pout which had seemed so adorable to him in the old days when he had laid so many ingenious snares to bring it out. Wat was intensely piqued – more piqued perhaps than angry. He who had wooed great ladies, and on whom in the ante-chambers of kings kind damsels all too beautiful had smiled till princes waxed jealous, was now made a mock of by a slim she-slip compact of mischievous devices. He looked again and yet more keenly at the girl by the window. Certainly it was so. Mischief lurked quaintly but unmistakably under the demure, upward curl of those eyelashes. A kind of still, calm fury took him, a set desperation like that of battle.

"I will take my own love-token," he cried, striding suddenly over to her.

And so, almost but not quite, ere Kate was aware, he had stooped and kissed her.

Then, in an instant, as soon indeed as he had realized his deed, all his courage went from him. His triumph of a moment became at once flat despair, and he stood before her ashamed, abject as a dog that is caught in a fault and trembles for the lash.

Without a word the girl pointed to the door. And such was the force of her white anger and scorn upon him that Wat Gordon, who was about to ride carelessly to face death as he had often done before, slunk through it cowering and speechless.

Maisie was coming along the little boarded passage as he passed out.

"Farewell, cousin," she said to him. "Will you not bid me good-bye again ere you go, if only for the old sake's sake?"

But Wat Gordon went past her as though he had not heard, trampling stupidly down the narrow stairs like a bullock in the market-place, the spring all gone out of his foot, the upstanding airy defiance fallen away from his carriage.

Then in a moment more there came up from the street front the sound of trampling horses and the ring of accoutrement, as three or four riders set spurs to their horses and rode clattering over the cobbles towards the city gates.

Maisie went quickly into the sitting-room to her friend.

"What have you been doing to my Wat?" she asked, grasping her tightly by the arm. "Have you quarrelled with him?"

Kate was standing behind the shutter, looking down the street along which the four riders were rapidly vanishing. At the corner where they turned one of the horses shied and reared, bringing down its iron-shod hoofs sharply on the pavement with a little jet of sparks, and almost throwing its rider. Instinctively the girl uttered a little cry, and set her hand against her side.

"What said Wat to you, dearest Kate," asked Maisie, again, altering the form of her question, "that you sent him thus speechless and dumfoundered away? He passed me at the stair-head as if he knew me not."

Finding Kate still absorbed and silent, Maisie sat down in her own chair and waited. Presently, with a long sigh, the girl sank on her knees beside her, and, taking her friend's hand, set it on her head. With sympathetic and well-accustomed fingers Maisie, as was her custom, softly smoothed and caressed the dark tangle of curls. She did not utter a word till she heard a quick sob catch at the bottom of Kate's throat. Then she spoke very low, leaning forward till she could lay her cheek against the girl's brow.

"What said he? Tell me, dearest, if you can; tell your gossip, Maisie," she whispered.

It was a voice that not many could resist when it pleaded thus – most like a dove cooing to its mate in the early summer mornings.

There fell a silence for a while in the little upper room; but Maisie the wise one did not again speak. She only waited.

"Oh, I hate him!" at last said Kate McGhie, lifting her head with centred intensity of expression.

Maisie smiled a little, indulgently, leaning back so that her friend's dark eyes should not notice it. She smiled as one who is in the things of love at least a thousand years older, and who in her day has seen and tasted bread sweet and bread bitter.

"And certainly you do well to hate him, my Kate," this cunning Mistress Maisie said, very gently, her hand continuing to run softly through the meshes of Kate's curls; "nevertheless, for all that you are glad that he kissed you."

The girl lifted her head as quickly from its resting-place as though a needle had pricked her unawares. She eyed her friend with a grave, shocked surprise.

"You were listening!" she said.

And the censure in her tone might have been that of a General Assembly of the Kirk, so full of weighty rebuke was it.

"No, Kate," said her friend, quietly. "I was in the kitchen all the time, putting the bone in the broth for William's supper. I heard no single word of your talk. But, Kate, my lassie, I am not so very ignorant concerning these things which you stand on the brink of. Come, what had you been saying to him to provoke him to kiss you?"

"He but asked me for a love-token to take with him to the wars – which I gave him, and how could I tell?" said the girl, a little plaintively. Things had not gone as they ought, and now her own familiar friend was about to blame her for it.

Maisie waited a moment discreetly, hoping that Kate would go on; but she appeared to consider that she had said enough. She only pillowed her head lower on her gossip's knee, and submitted contentedly to the loving hand which caressed her ringlets.

"And you gave him the love-token?" queried her friend, quietly.

"I told him that I had nothing of my own to give him, because my baggage had not yet arrived; and it chanced that I saw one of your old marrowless gloves lying there on the cabinet – so I gave him that. I thought," she added, plaintively, after a pause, "that it would do just as well."

At which conclusion Maisie laughed helplessly, rocking to and fro; then she checked herself, and began again. Kate raised her head and looked at her in new surprise.

"You are the strangest girl!" at last Maisie said. "You have sundry passages with a gallant youth. You smile not unkindly upon him. You quarrel and are separated. After years you meet in a distant land. He asks you for a gage to carry with him to the wars, a badge fragrant of his lady and his love, and you give him – an odd glove of his cousin's wife's. Truly an idea most quaint and meritorious!"

"And Maisie," said Kate, solemnly, looking up at her with her head still on her hands, "would you believe it? He stamped his foot and threw the glove out of the window there into the canal! He ought not to have done that, ought he?"

"My Kate," said her friend, "do not forget that I am no longer a girl, but a woman wedded – "

"Six months," interrupted Kate McGhie, a little mischievously.

"And when I see the brave lass with whom, in another and a dearer land, I came through so many perils, in danger of letting foolish anger wrong both herself and another, you will forgive me if I have a word to say. I speak because I have come in peace to the goal of my own loving. Wat loves you. I am sure of that. Can you not tell me what it is that you have against him? No great matter, surely; for, though reckless and headstrong beyond most, the lad is yet honest, up-standing, true."

Kate McGhie was silent for a while, only leaning her head a little harder against the caressing hand.

Then, with her face bent down, she spoke, softly:

"In Scotland he loved me not, but only the making of love. If so be that Wat Gordon will love me here in the Lowlands of Holland, he must do it like one that loves for death or life; not like a gay gallant that makes love to every maid in town, all for dalliance in a garden pleasaunce on a summer's day."

The girl drew herself up nearer to her friend's face. Maisie Lennox, on her part, quietly leaned over and laid her cheek against Kate's. It was damp where a cherry-great tear had rolled down it. Maisie understood, but said nothing. She only pressed her gossip a little closer and waited. In a while Kate's arms went gently round about her neck, and her face drew yet a little nearer to the listening ear.

"Once," she whispered, "I feared that I was in danger of loving him first and most – and that he but played with me. I feared it much," she went on, with a little return of the low sob, which caused her friend's arms to clasp themselves more tightly about her, "I feared that I might learn to love him too soon. So that is the reason – why —I hate him now!"

CHAPTER III

THE BULL, THE CALF, AND THE KILLER

Wat Lochinvar rode out of the city of Amersfort with anger humming fierce in his heart, the Black Horseman riding pickaback behind him. He paid little attention to the three cutthroat-looking knaves who had been provided as his escort, till the outer port of the city gates had closed behind him and the chill airs of the outlands, unwarmed by friendly civic supper-fires, met him shrilly in the teeth.

He had been played with, tricked, betrayed, so he told himself. Never more would he think of her – the light trifler with men's hearts. She might gang her own wilful gait for him; but there was one thing he was well assured of – never more would Wat Gordon trust any woman born of woman, never speak a word of love to one of the fickle breed again. On this he was resolved like steel. For him, henceforth, only the stern elation of combat, the clatter of harness, the joy of the headlong charge – point to point, eye to eye, he would meet his man, when neither would be afraid of aught, save of yielding or craving a favor. From that day forth his sword should be his love, his regiment his married wife, his cause and king his family; while his faithful charger, nuzzling against his breast, would bestow on him the only passionate caresses he would ever know, until on some stricken field it was his fate to fill a soldier's grave.

Almost could Walter Gordon have wept in his saddle to think of his wrongs, and death seemed a sweet thing to him beside the fickle favors of any woman. He bethought him of his cousin Will with something of a pitying smile.

"Poor fool!" he said to himself; "he is married. He thinks himself happy. How much better had it been to live for glory!"

But even as he battered himself into a conviction of his own rooted indifference to the things of love, he began to wonder how long his present adventure would detain him. Could he be back in time on the morrow to hear the first trip of a light foot on the stairs in Zaandpoort Street, as she came from her sleeping-room, fresh as though God had made her all anew that morning?

For this is a quality of the wisdom of man, that thinking upon a maid ofttimes makes it vain – especially if the man be very brave or very wise, and the maid exceeding fair. Gradually, however, the changing clatter of the dozen hoofs behind Lochinvar forced itself upon his hearing, and he remembered that he was not alone.

He turned to his followers, and, curbing his horse a little, waited for them to come up. They ranged themselves two on one side of him and one on the other. Lochinvar eyed them with surprising disfavor.

"You are surely the last scourings of the camp," he said, brusquely, for it was too little his habit to beat about the bush; "what may you have been doing with yourselves? You could not all three have been made so unhallowedly ugly as that. After all, God is a good God, and kind to the evil and to the good."

The fellow on Lochinvar's left was a great red-faced man with an immense scar, where (as it appeared) one side of his face had been cut away wellnigh to the cheek-bone – a wound which had healed unevenly in ridges and weals, and now remained of a deep plum-color.

"What is your name?" said Lochinvar to this man.

"I am called Haxo the Bull," he answered, "and I am of the retinue of my Lord of Barra."

"And how came you by your English?" asked Lochinvar.

"My mother always declared that my father was of that nation," answered the man, readily enough.

"To conclude," continued Wat, who was impatient of further conference with such rank knaves, "what might be your distinguished rank in the service of my Lord of Barra?"

"I am his camp butcher," said the man, laying his hand on a long, keen knife which swung at his belt on the opposite side from his sword.

"And these other two gentlemen, your honorable companions?" queried Wat, indicating them over his shoulder with contemptuous thumb.

The hulking fellow of the scar made a gesture with his shoulders, which said as plain as might be, "They are of age; ask themselves."

But the nearer of the two did not wait to be asked. He was a hairless, flaccid-faced rogue of a pasty gray complexion, and even uglier than the plum-colored Bull, with a certain intact and virgin hideousness of his own.

"I, for my part, am called Haxo's Calf, and I am not ashamed of the name!" he said.

And, thinking this an excellent jest, he showed a row of teeth like those of a hungry dog when he snatches a bone from a comrade not his equal in the fray.

"And, I doubt not, a fit calf of such a sire," quoth Lochinvar, looking from one to the other.

"He is my apprentice, not my son – praise to the Virgin and all the saints!" said Haxo, looking at the Calf quite as scornfully as Wat himself.

Lochinvar now transferred his attention to the third. He wore a small round cap on the top of his head, and his narrow and meagre forehead ran back shining and polished to the nape of his neck. His lack-lustre eyes were set curiously at different angles in his head. He had thin lips, which parted nervously over black, gaping teeth, and his nose was broken as if with a blow of a hammer.

"And is this gentleman also of Monsieur Haxo's gallant company, and in the suite of his Excellency my Lord of Barra?"

Haxo nodded his head with some appreciation of Wat's penetration.

"He is, indeed," he said; "he is my chief slaughterman, and a prince at his business."

"He is called 'The Killer,'" interjected the Calf, smacking his lips with unction. "It is a good name for him."

Wat Gordon urged his horse onward with great and undisguised disgust. To be sent on a dangerous mission with three such arrant rascals told him the value that his employers set upon his life. And if he had chanced at that moment to turn him about in his saddle, the evil smile of triumph which passed simultaneously over the faces of his companions might have told him still more.

The small cavalcade of four went clattering on through the dusky coolness of night, across many small wooden bridges and over multitudinous canals. It passed through villages, in which the inhabitants were already snoring behind their green blinds the unanimous antiphonal bass of the rustic just – though, as yet, it was little past nine of the clock on the great kirk tower of Amersfort, and in the city streets and in the camp every one was at the height of merriment and enjoyment.

Wafts of balmy country scents blew across the by-ways along which they went; and through the limpid gray coolness where the young leaves of the sparse hedgerow trees brushed his face, Wat could see that he was passing countless squares of parti-colored bloom. Miles of hyacinth, crocus, and narcissus gardens stretched away on either hand beyond the low, carefully cut Dutch hedges. Haxo the Bull rode first, showing them the way to the inn of Brederode, silently, save that every now and then he would cry a word over his shoulder, either to one of his ill-favored retinue or to an unseen watcher at some lonely cross-road.

Wat followed sullenly and fiercely, without caring much about the direction in which he was being taken. His mind, however, was preternaturally busy, going carefully over all the points of his interview with Kate, and very soon from the heights of justified indignation he fell to accusing himself of rude stupidity.

"I fear she will never look kindly on me again," he said, aloud. "This time I have certainly offended her forever."

And the thought troubled him more than all the traitorous Barras and ill-conditioned Bull Haxos in the world.

A breath of perfume blew fresh across the way from a field of dark purple bloom, and with an overpowering rush there came back to him the sweet scent of Kate's hair as for a moment he had bent over her by the window. He let the reins fall on his horse's neck, and almost cried aloud in agony at the thought of losing so great a treasure.

"And shall I never see her more," he said, "never watch the responsive blood spring redly to her cheek, never see the anger flash proudly in her eye, never (were it but for once) touch the sweet tangle of her hair?"

Wat's love-lorn melancholy might have driven him to further and yet wilder utterance had he not been conscious of a slight metallic click behind him, which certainly did not come from the hoofs of the horses. He turned sharply at the sound and caught Haxo's Calf with a pistol in his right hand, and the Killer with his long butcher's knife bare and uplifted. Haxo himself was riding unconcernedly on in front. Wat quickened the pace of his horse, and rode alongside the Bull.

"Sir Butcher," he said, calmly, "do your men behind there wish to have their weapons ready in case of meeting the enemy, or do they perchance desire to flesh them in my back? It may seem a trifling matter to trouble you with, and of no great consequence, nevertheless I should somewhat like to ascertain their intentions."

Haxo glanced behind him. The Calf and the Killer were closing in upon Wat.

"Varlets," cried Haxo, in a terrible voice, "put your weapons in your belts, ride wide apart and far behind, or I will send you both quick to hell!"

The men fell asunder at the words, and for a mile or two only the sound of the horses' feet pounding the hard paven road came to Wat's ears. But he did not again return to that entrancing dream of Kate, her beauty, and her hard-heartedness which had so nearly led to his destruction. Yet, nevertheless, whatever he said or did, he remained through all that followed conscious of his love for her, and for the remainder of the night the desire of getting back to Amersfort in order to see her sharpened every faculty and kept every sense on the alert.

More than once during the night Haxo endeavored to enter into conversation, but Wat, indignant at the cowardly attempt on his life (for so he was bound to consider it), waved him peremptorily aside.

"Do your duty without further words," he said; "lead on directly to the inn of Brederode."

It was long past the gloaming, and already wearing nigh to the watershed of the night, before the perfectly flat country of marsh and polder through which they had been riding gave place to a district in which the undulations of the surface were distinctly felt beneath the horses' feet. Here, also, the hard-baked, dusty roads gave place to softer and more loosely knit tracks of sand, on which the iron-shod hoofs made no sound. They were, in fact, fast approaching that broad belt of dunes which shuts off the rich, flower-covered nurseries of Haarlem from the barren, heathy wastes along the borders of the Northern Sea.

On their right they passed the dark walls of the castle of Brederode, and pursued their way to the very edge of the lofty dunes, which at this point are every year encroaching upon the cultivated fields. Presently they came to a long, low, white building surrounded by dark hedges, which in the coolness of the night sent out a pleasant odor of young beech leaves. The court-yard was silent, the windows black. Not a ray of light was visible anywhere.