Lochinvar: A Novel

Maisie turned her about and caught her husband by the braid of his coat.

"Go you to him at once – you must! Tell him it is all our fault – we have been unhappy and to blame, Kate and I – ask him to forgive."

And, being overwrought and strained, she put her head down on Will Gordon's breast and wept aloud.

Kate went to her and took her hand gently. And to her Maisie instantly turned, setting her husband aside with a pathetic little gesture of renunciation, as something which has been proven untrustworthy. Then, still leaning on Kate's shoulder, she passed slowly from the room. As Kate McGhie opened the door she flashed one glance, quick with measureless anger and contempt, back upon the two men who stood gazing after her. Then she passed out.

There was a long silence between the provost-marshal and his host after the women had disappeared.

At last Barra broke in upon the awkward pause with a laugh of scorn which ended with something like a sigh.

"Oh, women! women," he cried. "From what pits will ye not dig the clay to make you your gods!"

"He had been our friend so long, and in such bitter passes and desperate ventures," said Will Gordon, excusingly, speaking of Wat in a hushed voice almost as one would speak of the dead.

Barra shrugged his shoulders to intimate that the whole sex was utterly impossible of comprehension.

"Nevertheless, you will give our poor cousin your best word and offices to-morrow?" Will Gordon went on, anxiously.

"I shall see the prince in person," answered Barra, promptly, "and I shall make my endeavor to arrange that the prisoner shall not be tried by court-martial – so that nothing summary may take place, and no sentence be hastily or vindictively carried out."

Will Gordon blanched at the word "summary," which in the severely disciplined army of the States-General had but one meaning.

He conducted his guest to the door in silence. The moonlight was casting deep shadows in the high-gabled street of Zaandpoort and glittering on the pole-axes and muskets of the provost's guard who stood without, stamping their feet impatiently and waiting the appearance of their leader.

"Till to-morrow, then!" said Will Gordon, as he parted.

"Till to-morrow!" replied the provost-marshal, more heartily than he had yet spoken, giving him his hand.

But as he walked down the street towards the camp he smiled a smile from under the thin, drooping mustache which showed his teeth. They glittered white in the moonlight like a dog's.

CHAPTER XII

THE PRISON OF AMERSFORT

The prison of the city of Amersfort stood at the corner of one of its most ancient streets, and the military portion of it exposed a long scarped wall to the public, broken only by a single line of small windows triply barred with iron stanchions of the thickness of a man's wrist. These windows were only separated from the street by a low wall and a strong but wide-meshed railing of wrought iron. In the large room of the jail, where only those prisoners were kept who were detained for slight offences, or who awaited trial, the unglazed squares of the window were large enough to admit of a pole and small basket being protruded, so that it should hang within reach of the passers-by. One of the inmates was appointed to stand with this curious fishing-rod in his hand, and the plaintive wail, "Remember the poor prisoners of the prince!" resounded all day along the ancient thoroughfare.

But Wat was too important a guest to be placed in this common room. By special direction of the provost-marshal he had a cell assigned to him in a tower only a few yards above the level of the street. His apartment had two windows, one of which being in the belly of the tower looked up and down the thoroughfare. He could see the passengers as they went to and fro, and if any had cared to stop he might even have spoken with them.

Wat paid little attention to the street for the first day or two which he passed in the cell. Mostly he sat on the low pallet bed with his head sunk deeply in his hands. He gave himself up completely to melancholy thoughts. During the first day he had expected every hour to be brought before a military tribunal. But the fact that the day passed without incident more discomposing than the visits of the turnkey with his scanty meals informed Wat that he was not to be tried by any summary method of jurisdiction, though in the angry state of the feelings of the army against the townsfolk of Amersfort, and especially smouldering hatred of the provost-marshal's men, this would doubtless have been Wat's best chance.

But his mortal enemy did not wish to run the risk of seeing his rival set free with but some slight penalty, and, being in a position of great influence, he had his will. Day by day passed in the prison, each wearier and grayer than the other. Finally, Wat took to his barred windows and watched the stream of traffic. As the poignancy of his regret dulled to a steady ache, he became deeply interested in the boys who sported in the gutters and sailed ships of wood and paper in every spate and thunder-shower. He watched for the rosy-cheeked maids, with their black, clattering sabots, who paused a moment to adjust their foot-gear with a swish of pleated skirts and a glimpse of dainty ankle; and then, having once stopped, stood a long time gossiping with their plain-visaged, flat-capped, broad-breeched lovers. Above all, Wat loved the vagrant dogs that wandered lazily about the shady corners and fought one another like yellow, whirling hoops in the dust.

Often he would leave his meagre meal untouched in order to watch them. One dog in particular interested him more than all the human beings in the Street of the Prison. He was a long, thin-bodied beast of a yellowish-gray color, of no particular ancestry, and certainly without personal charms of any kind, save as it might be those incident to phenomenal and unredeemed ugliness.

To this ignoble hound Wat daily devoted a large proportion of his dole of bread. It amused him to entice the beast each day nearer to the railings, and then, while other stouter and better-favored animals were for the moment at a distance, Wat would deftly propel a pellet of bread to this faithful attendant. At first, the pariah of the Street of the Prison suspected a trap. For during an eventful life he had on several occasions been taken in with pepper balls and second-hand mustard plasters by the brisk young men of the hospitals and of the Netherlands trading companies.

Now it chanced that while Wat thus played good Samaritan to a cur of the gutter, two women stood at the outer gate of the prison. It was not the first occasion they had been there, nor yet the first time they had been denied entrance.

Maisie and Kate, with women's generosity and swift repentance, still blaming themselves deeply for their hastiness, had gone to inquire for Lochinvar early on the morning after he had been put in prison.

But neither by persuasions nor yet with all their little store of money could they buy even a moment's interview. The jailer's orders were too imperative. Some one high in authority had given the sternest injunctions that no one was to be allowed to see the prisoner on any pretext. Will had accompanied them on one occasion in his new officer's uniform, and even discovered in the chief turnkey an old comrade of Groningen. But it was vain. Strict obedience to his instructions was the keeper's life, as well as his bread and his honor. Simply, he dared not, he said, permit any to see that particular prisoner.

But, had they known it, there was a way of access to Wat. As they came out of the prison gates they met Barra. The provost-marshal, with a gloomy countenance, informed them that the prince took a very serious view of the affair of their cousin. However, he was in hopes that the sentence, though severe and exemplary, would not in any case be death. Probably, however, it might involve a very long period of imprisonment.

"The prince and his council have resolved that an example must be made. There have been, they say, far too many of these brawls in the army. It is such occurrences which breed ill-blood betwixt the soldiers and the townsfolk."

"But in that case," said Maisie, "why not persuade the prince to make an example of somebody else – not, surely, of our cousin Wat?"

Barra shrugged his shoulders.

"I am afraid," he said, softly, "that we cannot always arrange matters so that the penalties shall fall on shoulders whose sufferings will not hurt us. But you, dear ladies, can wholly trust me to use all my influence, so that your friend may soon find himself again at liberty."

Thus talking, they had turned to the right, and were now walking down the Street of the Prison. Maisie went a little ahead with her hand on her husband's arm, thinking that perhaps if Kate were left to herself she might be able to move the provost-marshal to kindlier purposes. Barra lingered as much as he could, in order to separate Kate and himself as widely as possible from the pair in front.

They passed close to Wat's window, and the prisoner watched them go by with black despair in his heart.

As they reached the gloomy angle of the prison, Barra indicated, with a wave of his hand, a remarkable gargoyle in the shape of a devil's head, frowning from the battlements of the gray, beetling tower. Through the closed bars of his window Wat noticed the gesture, as Barra intended that he should.

"My God!" he cried aloud, to the deaf walls, "he has brought her this way to gloat with her over my prison-house!"

And he flew at the bars of his window, striking and shaking them till his hands were bruised and bleeding.

"Let me get out! God in heaven! Let me get out – that I may kill him!" he cried, in the madness of agony.

But the bars resisted his utmost endeavor. Not so much as a particle of mortar stirred, and after spending all his strength in vain, Wat fell back on his hard pallet utterly exhausted, and lay there for hours in a vague and dazed unconsciousness.

The sullen, tranced hours verged towards evening, and Wat still lay motionless.

The keeper had twice been to his cell with food. But finding on the occasion of his second visit the previous supply of bread and water untouched, he had merely laid down the small loaf of black bread which was served out to the prisoners every night, and so departed.

At intervals a low voice seemed to steal into Wat's cell through the silence of the prison.

"A friend would speak with you – a friend would speak with you."

The words came up from the street beneath. At the third or fourth repetition Wat rose wearily and, with a dull and hopeless heart, went to the window whence he was wont to feed the dog with pellets of bread in the morning. A girl, small and slim of body, plainly attired in a black dress, stood directly underneath. Wat was about to turn back again to his couch, thinking that the summons could not have been intended for him, when the maid eagerly beckoned him to remain.

"Do you not remember me?" she said; "I am the Little Marie. I have never gone back to the Hostel of the Coronation. I have been very wicked. I know I have brought you here. I know that you cannot forgive me; but tell me something – anything that I may do for you?"

"It is not at all your fault that I am here," replied Wat Gordon, "only that of my own mad folly. Do not reproach yourself, nor trouble yourself, I pray you. There is nothing at all that you can do for me – "

"No one you love to whom I could carry a message – a letter?" The girl looked wistfully up at him as she said this. "I would deliver it so safely, so secretly."

A little before, Wat would gladly, eagerly indeed, have accepted the offer, and sent her at once to the street of Zaandpoort, in spite of his dismissal. But now his eyes had seen.

"Nay, Little Marie," he said, smiling sadly. "There is no one whom I love, no one who cares in the least to hear of me or of my welfare."

The girl stood still, plucking at the lace on her black sleeve, and looking down.

"Run home now, Little Marie," said Wat, kindly. "I am glad you have left the Hostel of the Coronation. Do not go back there any more."

The girl stood still in her place beneath the window.

At last she said, without looking up, "There is one whom you do not love, who cares much that you are in prison and alone!"

"And who may that be, Marie – old Jack Scarlett, mayhap?"

The girl looked up for a moment – a sudden, flashing look through blinding tears.

"Only bad-hearted Little Marie – that would die for you!" she said, brokenly.

And without caring even to wipe away her tears, she walked slowly down the midst of the Street of the Prison, seeing no one at all, and answering none of the greetings that were showered upon her.

CHAPTER XIII

MY LORD OF BARRA'S VOW

Kate stood at her favorite window, looking down upon five little boys playing barley break in a solemn plantigrade Dutch fashion in the dust of Zaandpoort Street by the canal. Opposite her stood Barra. He was dressed in his customary close-fitting suit of black velvet, and his slim waist was belted by the orange sash of a high councillor, while by his side swung a splendid sword in a scabbard of gold. A light cape of black velvet was about his shoulders, and its orange lining of fine silk drooped gracefully over his arm.

"Listen to me, dear lady," he was saying. "I am a soldier, and not a courtier. I have not glozing words to woo you with. No more than a plain man's honest words. I love you, and from that I shall never change. At present I can offer you but a share of the exile's bitter bread. But when the prince comes to his own, there shall be none in broad Scotland able to count either men or money with Murdo, Earl of Barra and of the Small Isles."

"My Lord Barra," said Kate, "I thank you for your exceeding courtesy. I feel your surpassing condescension. But I cannot marry you now nor yet again. If I loved you at all I should be proud and glad to take you by the hand and walk out of the door with you into the wide world – for you renouncing friends, fame, wealth, all, as if they were so many dead leaves of the autumn. But since I do not and cannot love you, believe that the proffer of great honor and rank can never alter my decision. This, indeed, I have told you before."

"Well do I know," answered the high councillor, "that you have spoken, concerning me, words hard and cruel to be borne. But that was before either of us understood the depth of my devotion – before you knew that I desired, as I seek for salvation, to make you scarcely less in honor than the queen herself, among those isles of the sea, where true hearts abide. The cause of our religion is great. Help me to make of our Scotland a land of faith and freedom. Love me for the sake of the cause, Kate, if not for mine own most unworthy sake."

"The cause is indeed still great and precious to me. I have been honored to suffer the least things for it. Nevertheless the cause is not to be served by one doing wrong, but by many doing right. You are – I believe it – an honorable man, my Lord Barra. You will serve your master faithfully till that good day comes when Scotland shall again have freedom to worship under kirk-rigging or roof-tree, or an it liketh her under the broad span of the sky."

"But you carry in your heart the image of a traitor," said Barra, a little more fiercely – "a double traitor, one whom I have seen false both to his country and to you. Know you that only my bare word stands between your lover and death?"

"I know not whether Walter Gordon be dead or alive," replied Kate, gently. "I say not that I love him, nor yet that he loves me. I do not know. But I say that if he does love me, in the only way I care to be loved, he would rather die a thousand deaths than that, in order to preserve his life, his true love should wed a man whom she cares not for either as lover or as husband."

"Then you will not love me?" said he, bending his head towards her as if to look into her soul.

"I cannot, my Lord Barra," she made him answer; "love comes not like a careful man-servant. It runs not like a well-trained dog at the sounding of a whistle. One cannot draw back the arras of the heart and say to love, 'Hither and speedily!' The wind bloweth, say the preachers, where it listeth. And so love also comes not with observation. Rather, like a thunderstorm, it bears victoriously up against the wind. For just when the will is most set against love, then it takes completest possession of the heart."

"Could you have loved me," he asked, more calmly, "if you had known no other? If the other existed not?"

"That I know not," said Kate. "All my life long I have never loved man or woman where I wanted to love, or was bid to love. Whether, therefore, in this case or that one could have loved serves no purpose in the asking. Nor, indeed, can it be answered. For the only issue is, that of a surety I love you not. And do you, my lord, of your most gentle courtesy, take that answer as one frankly given by an honest maid, and so depart content. There are in this land and in our own country a thousand fairer, a thousand worthier than I."

"Kate," said Barra, more intently and tenderly than he had yet spoken, "some day, and in some isle of quiet bliss where all evil and untoward things are put behind us, I will yet make you love me. For never have I thus set all my fancy on any woman before. And by the word of Murdo, Lord of Barra, none but you will I wed, and, by the honor of my clan, no other shall have you but I!"

He held out his hand. Kate, desiring him to go, gave him hers a little reluctantly. He bent to it and kissed it fervently.

"On this hand I swear," he said, slowly and solemnly, "that while I live it shall be given in marriage to none other, but shall be mine alone. By the graves that are green on the Isle of Ashes and by the honor of the thirty chieftains of Barra – I swear it."

Kate took her hand quickly again to her.

"Ye have taken a vain oath, my lord," she said, "for marriage and the giving of a hand are not within the compulsion of one, but are the agreement of two. And if this hand is ever given to a man my heart shall go with it, or else Kate McGhie's marriage-bed shall be her resting-grave!"

* * * * *

It was but two years since the Little Marie had carried her first basket of flowers to the streets of Brussels. From an ancient farm nigh to the city she had come, bringing with her her fresh complexion, her beauty, her light, swift, confident, easily influenced spirit.

Then, while yet a child, she had been hunted down, petted, betrayed, and forsaken by the man who, being on a visit to Brussels, had first been attracted by her childish simplicity. It chanced that in the dark days of her despair she had found her way to Amersfort, and finally to the Hostel of the Coronation. She had been there but a bare week when Wat came into her life, and his words to the girl were the first of genuine, unselfish kindness she had listened to in that abode of smiling misery and radiant despair.

As a trampled flower raises its head after a gentle rain, so her scarcely dulled childish purity reawakened within her, and with it – all the more fiercely that it came too late – the love that suffereth all things and upbraideth not. Marie was suddenly struck to the heart by the agony of her position. She might love, but none could give her back true love in return. Her soul abode in blank distress after the fray had been quelled and Walter led away to prison. Without speech to any at the inn of the Coronation, Marie fled to the house of a decent woman of her own country, who undertook the washing and dressing of fine linen – dainty cobweb frilleries for the ladies of the city, and stiffer garmentry for the severe and sober court of the Princess of Orange.

For love had been a plant of swift growth in the lush and ill-tended garden of the girl's heart. Constantly after this both dawn and dusk found her beneath Wat's window. Marie contrived a little basket attached to a rope, which he let down from the window in the swell of the tower. She it was who instructed Wat how to make the first cord of sufficient length and strength by ravelling a stocking and replaiting the yarn. In this fashion Marie brought to Wat's prison-cell such fruits as the warehouses of the Nederlandish companies afforded – strange-smelling delicacies of the utmost Indies, and early dainties from gardens nearer home. Linen, too, fresh and clean, she brought him, and flowers – at all of which, for the consideration of a dole of gold, the jailer winked, so that Wat's heart was abundantly touched by the pathetic devotion of the girl. Scarce could she be induced to accept the money which Wat put into her basket when he let it down again. And even then Marie took the gold only that she might have the means of obtaining other delicacies for Wat – such as were beyond the reach of purchase out of the meagre stipend she received from the laundress of fine linen with whom her working-days were spent.

More seldom did Marie come to the Street of the Prison in the evening after the work of the day was done. For there were many who knew her moving to and fro in these early summer twilights, so that she feared that her mission might be observed and Wat moved to another cell, out of reach of the Street of the Prison.

But one afternoon of sullen clouds and murky weather, when few people were abroad upon the streets of Amersfort, Marie sickened of the hot steamy atmosphere of the laundry and the chatter of the maids of the quarter, in which she was allowed to have no part. She finished her work earlier than the others – perhaps for that reason – and stole quietly away to the tower of Wat's prison, where it jutted out over the cobble-stones of the pavement.

Wat was at his post, looking out, as usual, upon the slackening traffic and quickening pleasure-seeking of the street. He was truly glad to see the girl, and greeted her appearance with a kind smile.

"I had not expected you till the morning," he said. "But I have lived on the freshness of your flowers all day. I have also had my cell washed. Black Peter, my jailer, was inclined to be complaisant to me this morning. It is his birthday, he says."

Wat smiled as he said it. For he had bestowed one of his few remaining coins upon Peter; which, ever since, that worthy had been swallowing to his good health in the shape of pure Hollands. Indeed, at this moment there came from below the rollicking voice of jolly Black Peter, singing a song which ran through a catalogue of camp pleasures and soldierly delights, such as certainly could not all have been enjoyed within the grim precincts of the prison of Amersfort.

"You are sure that there is no friend I can take a message to?" asked the Little Marie, for the fiftieth time; "no beloved mistress to whom I can carry a letter?"

"None," said Wat, smiling sadly. "But there," he continued, pointing quickly across the Street of the Prison at a man hurrying out of sight, "is one whom, an it please you, you may take note of. I am not able to show you a friend. But yonder goes my heart's enemy. There at the corner – the dark man in the suit of velvet, with the orange-lined cloak and the sword hilted with gold."

The Little Marie darted across the street in a moment, and threaded her way deftly among the boisterous traffic of the huxters' stalls. Presently she came back. There was a new and dangerous excitement in her eye.

"I know him," she said; "it is my Lord Barra, the provost-marshal. He is your enemy, you say. It is well. But he was my enemy before he was yours. Sleep sound," she continued, looking up at him with an eye as clear and peaceful as a cloistered nun's. "Take no thought for your enemy, but only, ere you sleep, say a prayer to your Scottish God for the sinful soul of the Little Marie that loves you better than her life."

CHAPTER XIV

MAISIE'S NIGHT QUEST

In the street of Zaandpoort, upon a certain evening, it had grown early dark. The sullen, sultry day had broken down at the gloaming into a black and gurly night of rain, which came in fierce dashes, alternating with fickle, veering flaws and yet stranger lulls and stillnesses. Anon, when the rain slackened, the hurl of the storm overhead could be heard, while up aloft every chimney in Amersfort seemed to shriek aloud in a different key. Maisie had gone down an hour ago and barred the outer door with a stout oaken bolt, hasping the crossbar into its place as an additional precaution. She would sit up, she said, till William returned from duty, and then she would be sure to hear him approach. On a still night she could distinguish his footsteps turning out of the wide spaces of the Dam into the echoing narrows of the street of Zaandpoort.