Chapter XVI Greybeards and Dimple Chins
One Sabbath morn there came an unwonted message to me, as I sat lingering and idle in the armoury of Culzean. I had cleaned my own graith and oiled the pistols—which I regularly did on the Sabbath morning whenever I did not go to the kirk at Maybole. Now, this particular day of which I speak, I was idly conning the leaves of a song-book full of trifling, vain, and amatorious lilts and catches—some of them very pleasant, however, and taking to the mind. It ought to have been my psalm-book that I was at, God forgive me; but since ballad-book it was, why, even so will I set it down here.
And the message that came was by the mouth of a kind of jackal or lickpot of John Dick’s—who, for reasons of his own, hated me, chiefly because I took no share in the foulness of him and his subservient crew. This youth was of so little worth, that in all the transactions of this book he has not once come into the narrative—though as I now remember he was at the tulzie in Edinburgh, and also at the flitting of the sow. On both occasions he was the first to run.
The name of him was Colin Millar, an ill-favoured, envious, upsetting knave, compact of various ignorances and incapacities. And there needs no more to be said about him.
‘There is a man wanting to see you down at Sandy Allison’s, the Grieve’s,’ he said.
Then he looked at me with the cast in his eye as crooked as a paddock’s hind leg, and says he, ‘The tat will be in the fire now, I’m thinking. They tell me that it is the Minister!’
I knew very well what the ill-tongued hound meant. So right gladly without a word I set the knuckles of my hand, Sabbath morning though it was, against his ugly face in a way that would leave a mark for a day or two.
‘Take you that, dog,’ I said to him, ‘and learn to keep a more ruly member in your insolent head. Think not that you are John Dick, though you carry his dirty slanders. As the wild boar gnashes its tushes, so the little piglings squeak!’
And as he went away, lowering and snarling, I had a mind to go after him and give him something more than my knuckles. For the thing he meant was a lie of the devil, lighted at his furnace and spewed out of the reek of his pit.
But as I went to the door there came a poor lad from the stable with the same message—that there waited one for me at the house of Sandy Allison, the Grieve.
So I knew that the dog Millar had not invented the whole matter. Whereupon I looked carefully to my gear, did a new doublet upon me (because it was the Sabbath day) and girt me with a sash of blue, coft in Edinburgh and never before worn. Then setting my sword in its sheath, I went out through the woods, which were now grown leafless and songless.
There was a brisk air of winter, crisp without rawness, in the breeze, and I was glad to be out of doors; for since the matter of the meeting with Gilbert Kennedy, which by ill chance I had seen, both Marjorie and Nell came seldom my way. Which is, perhaps, why I looked so well to my apparelling ere I went to the Grieve’s house. For a lad wearies for the speech of women-folk, and if he gets not one kind—why, he will seek another.
But now, when I come to think of it, I need not have troubled so to deck myself. For after the corner is turned and the long lane leads straight to the garden of roses, a woman cares not whether a man be clothed in dishclouts or whether he glitters like a bridegroom in cloth of gold.
So when I came near to the house there issued forth to meet me Kate Allison, which seemed to me like ancient days come back, and my heart beat in a fashion I never thought to feel again. For a burnt stick is easily lighted, and Kate Allison was, without doubt, both bonny and kind. She was waiting for me at the corner of the barn like one that has an assignation. So when she came near me she put her hands roguishly behind her, and said, ‘Launce Kennedy, you are a false, deceitful lad, and no true lover. But think ye not that I care a pin, for I have gotten a braw lad of my own, and no thanks to you. Ye can get the Lady Marjorie to convoy hame next year from the Maybole Fair.’
And her speech made me glad, for she dropped me a courtesy and pretended to march off. So I knew full well that if she had not been heart-whole and at ease about all doubtful matters, she would have greeted me very differently. So, as I say, I was glad. Yet presently I liked it not so well as I expected, for though men are often false to their loves, they never understand how their loves can change from loving them. I knew well that Kate would, if not meddled with, immediately return to tell me what had befallen, and why it was that they had sent for me.
Which indeed was just what she did.
‘We have gotten a mighty grave man here with us, who came to our house last night at e’en. We wanted to send word to the castle to Sir Thomas; but the man said that he had had enough of the Kennedies to last him his lifetime, and that he would put up with us, if we could make shift to give him a bed. He is a man of a majestic and noble countenance, and when he had come within, he took a Bible from his wallet, and tairged us tightly on the histories of the wars of the Jews and on points of doctrine.’
‘Ye would be fit for that,’ said I to her, laughing, ‘for most of our discourse has been upon points of doctrine and practice—though I mind not that we touched upon the wars of the Jews. We had ever wars enough of our own. Was it not so, sweet Kate?’
And I would have taken her by the waist, for that is ever the way, as I have just been reading in my song-book, to punish a woman, when like a pretty scold, she slanders her love. So, as the London stage catch hath it, I forgave her for it. Yet for all she would by no means permit me to come near her—which I was mortally sorry for. Because though I wanted her to change, I desired her not to change so mightily as all that.
‘Na, na,’ she said, ‘and that’s by with. Kate Allison needs no general lovers. Wear you your own lady’s favours; I can get them that loe me and none other, to wear mine.’
I pursued the subject no further at that time, meaning, however, to return to it. For a man likes not to see the things which have been freely his slipping from him like corn through a wide-meshed riddle. It makes his mind linger after things long past, and he begins to think them sweeter than any favours that ever he had, even when all the garden was most fully his to wander in and cull at his lordly pleasure.
Too soon for my liking, therefore, we came to the door of the Grieve’s house, which was but a wide kitchen with two smaller rooms off it. I heard a voice uplifted as it seemed in prayer, and I bethought me with shame of my so late mean and earthly thoughts; but I looked at Kate Allison, and she was so pleasant to look upon that I found excuses for myself.
Then the prayer being done we went in, and they told the man in the inner room that that same Launcelot Kennedy, for whom he had inquired, was come.
So in a moment there came forth from the inner chamber, even as I had expected, Maister Robert Bruce. He wore his long, black cloak, and his fine, cloth coat showed soberly beneath it. His hat was on his head, which he doffed for a moment to Kate Allison and her mother, and then set on again. He bade them excuse him, for that he had much business to talk with me. I followed him out, and as I passed Kate, methought she looked disappointed that I should go thus soon. So, the corners of her mouth being down, and her mother’s back turned, I put my hand beneath her chin, and plucked at the loose slip-knot of her bonnet, which was a pretty quipsome thing that haymakers use, but prettier on her than on any of them. Whereat she flashed forth a great, sharp pin and set it spitefully in my arm, which also was a pleasing habit of hers. But all was innocent and friendly enough, and my only excuse for thinking more of daffing with Kate Allison than of listening to the grave converse of Maister Robert Bruce, is that then I was nearing nineteen years of my age—which, as you all do know, is a time when maids’ dimples are more moving than the wisdom of the sages.
That is all mine excuse, and, as well I wot, but a poor one. Yet when once Maister Bruce had me in the wood, taking me by the arm, the majesty of his countenance and the moving fervour of his voice so worked upon me that in good sooth I thought of naught but what he said.
He told me that he was resolved to depart out of this land of Carrick and Kyle, which might have been the Garden of Eden if it were not inhabited by devils. He had come no speed at reconciling the parties at feud, even as I could have told him before he began.
‘When I had thought,’ he said, ‘that I had made some way in softening the heart of Gilbert Kennedy, who vaunts himself to be sincerely attached to me—and I do believe it—I said to him that he ought, for the settling of the quarrel, to give in his submission to his liege lord, the Earl of Cassillis. In a moment comes the fire into his eyes, the anger grows black in his heart, and all my good words are undone. I think you Kennedies are all of you possessed with evil spirits, even as it was in the days of the Gadarene out of whom Christ cast many devils.’
He paused a moment, and then continued,—
‘So the name of the devils of Carrick is Legion, for they are very many!’
Then, being sorry that he should so speak of those who, after all, were my master’s kin and in a manner my own—for all the world knows that a blood feud is a thing acknowledged in the Bible, as one may see when David lay on his deathbed—I asked him how I could serve him, in order that I might stay his abuse of that which he did not understand.
‘You may wonder,’ he went on, ‘that I choose to speak in confidence to one that is but an esquire, and, I hear, as ready with his sword in the quarrel as any of them. But at least you are not like the rest, occupied entirely with the safety of your own skin, and unwilling to look the matter in the face.
I told him that I did not wonder at all that he was willing to speak to me, for that I could keep my counsel truly and well.
‘Faith, and I believe that,’ he cried, ‘if it were only your self-conceit of being able to do it.’
But I understood not at all what he meant, for if there is anything that I am conspicuously lacking in, it is this very quality of self-conceit.
‘Hear ye, then, and mark well my words,’ said the Minister of Edinburgh. ‘There is a man in this country who is at the root of all the blood and all the slaughter, and who, if he be not curbed, will yet do tenfold more mischief. Your master thinks that he can bribe him to friendship; well, I am no judge of men, if the man is to be bribed at any price beneath the sole power and sway of all this wild country of the west.’
‘It is Gilbert Kennedy of Bargany that you mean,’ said I, for I own I was jealous of his good name, enemy though he was.
‘Gilbert Kennedy is but a hammer in this man’s hand. Your good knight here at Culzean is but a spoon for him to sup with. And the only man that sees through him (and that but partially) is your joker-headed Earl, whose keen care for the merks, the duties, and the tacks, makes him somewhat clearer in the eye than the rest of you.’
‘And who is this plotter?’ said I.
He stopped and looked about him to see that none was listening. Then he laid his lips almost to my ear.
He whispered a name which, in this place, I must not write, though afterwards it will be plain enough.
‘It is simply not possible,’ said I; ‘the man you mention is but a bonnet laird, as one might say, with a peel-tower and a holding of half-a-dozen crofts. Why, my master could eat him up saltless, without turning out more than half a parish of his fighting men.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Robert Bruce, ‘that is the man who stands behind and makes the miracles work, as in Popish days the priests were wont to do behind the altar. Ye are but a set of jigging fools here in Carrick, and the man that pipes to you is the man I’ve told ye of!’
Then I thought over the matter—all that I knew of the man.
‘In truth,’ said I, ‘I am none so sure that you may not be right.’
Robert Bruce smiled as one that waxes aweary of a babe’s prattle.
‘For,’ said I, ‘I mind that I heard him endeavour to win one by promises to the side of Bargany—’
‘Pshaw,’ said the Minister, ‘he would as readily try to win Bargany to the Earl’s side, if it suited him to murder them both together. It is his plan to make them fight each other till there are none left—to cut off the heads of the taller poppies as in the ancient tale of Rome. I tell you this man has no side but his own, no desire but his own profit, no end but to make himself supreme in Carrick.’
‘And what can I, that am but a squire and a youth, do in the matter?’ said I.
‘You are on the spot, Launcelot,’ said the Minister, kindly. ‘I am in Edinburgh, and if things march as evilly as they have been doing of late, it is likely I shall be even further afield than Edinburgh. But you can watch—you can judge whom it boots to warn. You can put in a word—’
‘I shall put in a sword,’ said I, stamping my foot; ‘put it in deep—to think of such deceit and guile in a mere vassal and understrapper of my lord’s.’
‘Launcelot,’ said the Minister of Edinburgh, ‘you begin to make me sorry I trusted you. I should have spoken to a graver man.’
‘Nay, sir,’ I said, ‘you mistake me. I but mean that if it came to the bitter bite of iron, the time for words might go by.’
‘Ay,’ he replied thoughtfully, ‘there is some sense in that, but give not up the judicious words too early.’
So we betook ourselves gravely and staidly out of the wood, and at bidding him farewell I received his benediction, which he gave me with his right hand stretched out. And though I am tall and stand as erect as any man, yet the Minister of Edinburgh overtowered me by half a foot. But I minded that not in him.
So I went to the castle armoury to bethink me, for after what I had heard maids and bonnet strings were not to be more in my thought that day.