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Mary Johnston - Foes

M >> Mary Johnston >> Foes




Wade was to one side with his army, and now there loomed ahead the
Duke of Cumberland and ten thousand English troops. Battle seemed
imminent, yet again the Scots force pushed by. The 4th of December
found this strange wedge, of no great mass, but of a tested,
rapier-like keenness and hardness, at the town of Derby, with London
not a hundred and thirty miles away. And still no English rising for
the rightful King! Instead Whig armies, and a slow Whiggish buzzing
beginning through all the country.

The Duke of Cumberland and Marshal Wade, two jaws opening for Jacobite
destruction, had between them twenty thousand men. Spies brought
report of thirty thousand drawn up before London, on Finchley Common.
The Prince might have so many lions of the desert in his Highlanders,
but multitude will make a net that lions cannot break. At Derby also
they had news from that Scotland now so dangerously far behind them.
Royal Scots had landed from France, the Irish brigade from the same
country was on the seas, and French regiments besides. Lord John
Drummond had in Scotland now at least three thousand men and good
promise of more. The Prince held council with the Duke of Perth, Lord
George Murray, Lord Nairn, the many chiefs and leading voices. Return
to Scotland, make with these newly gathered troops and with others a
greater army, expect aid from France, stand in a gained kingdom the
onslaught from Hanoverian England? Or go on--go on toward London?
Encounter, defeat, with half his number, the Duke of Cumberland's ten
thousand, keep Wade from closing in behind them, meet the Finchley
Common thousands, come to the enemy's capital of half a million souls?
Return where there were friends? Go on where false-promising friends
hugged safety? Go on to London, still hoping, trusting still to the
glamour and outcry that ran before them, to extraordinary events
called miracles? Hot was the debate! But on the 6th of December the
Jacobite army turned back toward Scotland.

It began its homeward march long before dawn. Not all nor most had
been told the decision. Even the changed direction, eyes upon
slow-descending not upon climbing stars, did not at first enlighten.
It might mean some detour, the Duke being out-maneuvered. But at last
rose the winter dawn and lit remembered scene after scene. The news
ran. The army was in retreat.

Ian Rullock, riding with a kinsman, Gordon, heard, up and down, an
angry lamenting sound. "Little do the clans like turning back!"

"Hark! The chieftains are telling them it is for the best."

"Is it for the best? I do not like this month or aught that is done in
it!"

A week later they were at Lancaster; three days after that at Kendal.
Here Wade might have fallen upon them, but did not. A day or two and
the main column approached Penrith. The no great amount of artillery
was yet precious. Heavy to drag over heavy roads, the guns and
straining horses were left in the rear. Four companies of Lowland
infantry, Macdonald of Glengarry and his five hundred Highlanders, a
few cavalrymen, and Lord George Murray himself tarried with the guns.
The main column disappeared, lost among mountains and hills; this
detached number had the wild country, the forbidding road, the
December day to themselves. To get the guns and ammunition-wagons
along proved a snail-and-tortoise business. Guns and escort fell
farther and farther behind.

Ian Rullock, acting still as aide, rode from the Prince nearing
Penrith to Lord George Murray, now miles to the rear. Why was the
delay? and 'ware the Duke of Cumberland, certainly close at hand! The
delay was greater, the distance between farther, than the Prince had
supposed. Rullock rode through the late December afternoon by huge
frozen waves of earth, under a roof of pallid blue, in his ears a
small complaining wind like a wailing child. He rode till nightfall,
and only then came to his objective, finding needed rest in the
village of Shap. Here he sought Lord George Murray, gave information
and was given it in turn, ate, drank, and then turned back through the
December night to the Prince.

He rode and the huge winter stars seemed to watch him with at once a
glittering intentness and a disdain of his pygmy being. Once he looked
up to them with a gesture of his head. "Are we so far apart and so
different?" he asked of Orion.

He was several miles upon his way to Penrith. Before him appeared a
crossroad, noted by him in the afternoon. A great salient of a hill
overhung it, and on the near side a fir wood crept close. He looked
about him, and as he rode kept his hand upon his pistol. He did not
think to meet an enemy in strength, but there might be lurkers, men of
the countryside ready to fall upon stragglers from the army that had
passed that way. He had left behind the crossroad when from in front,
around the jut of the hill, came four horsemen. He turned his head.
Others had started from the wood. He made to ride on as though he were
of their kindred and cause, but hands were laid upon his bridle.

"Courier, no doubt--"

All turned into the narrow road. Half an hour's riding brought in
sight a substantial farm-house and about it the dimly flaring lights
of a considerable camp, both cavalry and infantry. Rullock supposed it
to be a detachment of Wade's, though it was possible that the Duke of
Cumberland might have thrust advance troops thus far. He wished quite
heartily that something might occur to warn Lord George Murray, the
Macdonalds and the Prince's guns, asleep at Shap. For himself, he
might, if he chose, pick out among the glittering constellations a
shape like a scaffold.

When he dismounted he was brought past a bivouac fire and a coming and
going of men afoot and on horseback, into the farm-house, where two or
three officers sat at table. Questioned, threatened, and
re-questioned, he had of course nothing to divulge. The less pressure
was brought in that these troops were in possession of the facts which
the moment desired. His name and rank he gave, it being idle to
withhold them. In the end he was shut alone into a small room of the
farm-house, behind a guarded door. He saw that there was planned an
attack upon the detachment that with dawn would move from Shap. But
this force of Wade's or of the Duke's was itself a detachment and
apparently of no great mass. He could only hope that Lord George and
the Macdonalds would move warily and when the shock came be found
equal. All that was beyond his control. In the chill darkness he
turned to the consideration of his own affair, which seemed desperate
enough. He found, by groping, a bench against the wall. Wrapping
himself in his cloak, he lay down upon this and tried to sleep, but
could not. With all his will he closed off the future, and then as
best he might the immediately environing present. After all, these
armies--these struggles--these eery ambitions.... The feeling of _out
of it_ crept over him. It was an unfamiliar perception, impermanent.
Yet it might leave a trace to work in the under-consciousness, on a
far day to emerge, be revalued and added to.

This December air! Fire would be good--and with that thought he seemed
to catch a gleam through the small-paned, small window, and in a
moment through the opening door. He rose from the bench. A man in a
long cloak entered the room, behind him a soldier bearing a lantern
which he set upon a shelf above a litter of boards and kegs.
Dismissed by a gesture, he went out, shutting the door behind him.
The first man dropped his cloak, drew a heavy stool from the
thrust-aside lumber, and sat down beneath the lantern. He spoke:

"Of all our many meeting-places, this looks most like the old cave in
the glen!"

Ian moistened his lips. He resumed his seat against the wall. "I
wondered, after Prestonpans, if you went home."

"Did you?"

"No, you are right. I did not."

"At all times it is the liar's wont still to lie. Small things or
great--use or no use!"

"I am a prisoner and unarmed. You are the captor. To insult lies in
your power."

"That is a jargon that may be dropped between us. Yet I, too, am bound
by conventions! Seeing that you are a prisoner, and not my prisoner
only, I cannot give you your sword or pistols, and we cannot fight....
The fighting, too, is a convention. I see that, and that it is not
adequate. Yet so do I hold you in hatred that I would destroy you in
this poor way also!"

The two sat not eight feet apart. Time was when either, finding
himself in deadly straits, would have seen in the other a sure
rescuer, or a friend to perish with him. One would have come to the
other in a burst of light and warmth. So countless were the
associations between them, so much knowledge, after all, did they have
of each other, that even now, if they hated and contended, it must be,
as it were, a contention within an orb. To each hemisphere, repelling
the other, must yet come in lightning flashes the face of the whole.

Glenfernie, under the lantern-light, looked like the old laird his
father. "No long time ago," he said, "'revenge,' 'vengeance,' seemed
to me words of a low order! It was not so in my boyhood. Then they
were often to me passionate, immediate, personal, and vindicated
words! But it grew to be that they appeared words of a low order. It
is not so now. As far as that goes I am younger than I was a year ago.
I stand in a hot, bright light where they are vindicated. If fate sets
you free again, yet I do not set you free! I shall be after you. I
entered this place to tell you that."

"Do as you will!" answered Ian. Scorn mounted in his voice. "I shall
withstand the shock of you!"

The net of name and form hardened, grew more iron and closer meshed.
Each _I_ contracted, made its carapace thicker. Each _I_ bestrode,
like Apollyon, the path of the other.

"Why should I undertake to defend myself?" said Ian. "I do not
undertake to do so! So at least I shall escape the hypocrite! It is in
the nature of man to put down other kings and be king himself!"

"Aye so? The prime difficulty in that is that the others, too, are
immortal." Glenfernie rising, his great frame seemed to fill the
little room. "Sooner may the Kelpie's Pool sink into the earth than I
forego to give again to you what you have given! What is now all my
wish? It is to seem to you, here and hereafter, the avenger of blood
and fraud! Remember me so!"

He stood looking at the sometime friend with a dark and working face.
Then, abruptly turning, he went away. The door of the small room
closed behind him. Ian heard the bolt driven.

The night went leadenly by. At last he slept, and was waked by
trumpets blowing. He saw through the window that it was at faintest
dawn. Much later the door opened and a man brought him a poor
breakfast. Rullock questioned him, but could gain nothing beyond the
statement that to-day at latest the "rebels" would be wiped from the
face of the earth. When he was gone Ian climbed to the small window
that, even were it open and unguarded, was yet too small for his body
to pass. But, working with care, he managed to loosen and draw inward
without noise one of the round panes. Outside lay a trampled
farm-yard. A few soldiers, apparently invalided, lounged about, but
there was no such throng such as he had passed through when they
brought him here. He supposed that the attack upon the force at Shap
might be in progress. If the Duke of Cumberland's whole power was at
hand the main column might be set upon. All around him the hills, the
farm inclosure, and these petty walls cut off the outer world. The
hours, the day, limped somehow by. He walked to keep himself warm.
Back and forth and to and fro. December--December--December! How cold
was the Kelpie's Pool? Poisoned love--poisoned friendship--ambition in
ruin--bells ringing for executions! To and fro--to and fro. He had
always felt life as sensuous, rich, and warm, with garlands and
colors. It had been large and aglow, with a profusion of arabesques of
imagination and emotion. Thought had not lacked, but thought, too,
bore a personal, passional cast, and was much interested in a golden
world of sense. Just this December day the world seemed the ocean-bed
of life, where dull creatures moved slowly in cold, thick ooze, and
annihilation was much to be desired.... The day went by. The same man
brought him supper. There seemed to be triumph in his face. "They'll
be bringing in more prisoners--unless we don't make prisoners!"
Nothing more could be gained from that quarter. In the night it began
to rain. He listened to its dash against the window. Black Hill came
into mind, and the rain against his windows there. He was cold, and he
tried, with the regressive sense, to feel himself in that old, warm
nest. His Black Hill room rose about him, firelit. The fire lighted
that Italian painting of a city of refuge and a fleeing man, behind
whom ran the avenger of blood.... Then it was July, and he was in the
glen with Elspeth Barrow. He fought away from the recollection of
that, for it involved a sickness of the soul.... Italy! Think of
Italy. Venice, and a month that he had spent there alone--Old
Steadfast being elsewhere. It had been a warm season, warm and rich,
sun-kissed and languorous, like the fruit, like the Italian women....
Leave out the women, but try to feel again the sun of Venice!

He tried, but the cold of his prison fought with the sun. Then
suddenly sprang clamor without. The uproar increased. He rose, he
heard the bolts open, the door open. In came light and voices.
"Captain Rullock! We beat them at Clifton! We learned that you were
here! Lord George sent us back for you...."

Three days later Scotch earth was again beneath their feet. They
marched to Glasgow; they marched to Stirling; they fought the battle
of Falkirk and again there was Jacobite victory. And now there was an
army of eight thousand.... And then began a time of poor policy,
mistaken moves. And in April befell the battle of Culloden and
far-resounding ruin.




CHAPTER XXI


The green May rolled around and below the Highland shelter where Ian
lay, fugitive, like thousands of others, after Culloden. The Prince
had stayed to give an order to his broken army. _Sauve qui peut!_ Then
he, too, became a fugitive, passing from one fastness to another of
these glens and the mountains that overtowered them. The Stewart hope
was sunk in the sea of dead hopes. Cumberland, with for the time and
place a great force and with an ugly fury, hunted all who had been in
arms against King George.

Ian Rullock couched high upon a mountain-side, in a shelter of stone
and felled tree built in an angle of crag, screened by a growth of
birch and oak, made long ago against emergencies. A path, devious and
hidden, connected it first with a hut far below, and then, at several
miles' distance, with the house of a chieftain, now a house of terror,
with the chieftain in prison and his sons in hiding, and the women
watching with hard-beating hearts. Ian, a kinsman of the house, had
been given, _faute de mieux_, this old, secret hold, far up, where at
least he could see danger if it approached. Food had been stored for
him here and sheepskins given for bedding. He was so masked by
splintered and fallen pieces of rock that he might, with great
precautions, kindle a fire. A spring like a fairy cup gave him water.
More than one rude comfort had been provided. He had even a book or
two, caught up from his kinsman's small collection. He had been here
fourteen days.

At first they were days and nights of vastly needed rest. Bitter had
been the fatigue, privation, wandering, immediately after Culloden!
Now he was rested.

He was by nature sanguine. When the sun had irretrievably blackened
and gone out he might be expected at least to attempt to gather
materials and ignite another. He was capable of whistling down the wind
those long hopes of fame and fortune that had hung around the Stewart
star. And now he was willing to let go the old half-acknowledged boyish
romance and sentiment, the glamour of the imagination that had dressed
the cause in hues not its own. Two years of actual contact with the
present incarnations of that cause had worn the sentiment threadbare.

Seated or lying upon the brown earth by the splintered crag, alone
save for the wheeling birds and the sound of wind and water and the
sailing clouds, he had time at last for the rise into mind, definitely
shaped and visible, of much that had been slowly brewing and forming.
He was conscious of a beginning of a readjustment of ideas. For a long
time now he had been pledged to personal daring, to thought forced to
become supple and concentrated, to hard, practical planning, physical
hardship and danger. In the midst of this had begun to grow up a
criticism of all the enterprises upon which he was engaged. Scope--in
many respects the Jacobite character, generally taken, was amiable and
brave, but its prime exhibit was not scope! Somewhat narrow, somewhat
obsolete; Ian's mind now saw Jacobitism in that light. As he sat
without his rock fortress, in the shadow of birch-trees, with lower
hills and glens at his feet, he had a pale vision of Europe, of the
world. Countries and times showed themselves contiguous. "Causes,"
dynastic wars, political life, life in other molds and hues, appeared
in chords and sequences and strokes of the eye, rather than in the old
way of innumerable, vivid, but faintly connected points. "I begin to
see," thought Ian, "how things travel together, like with like!" His
body was rested, recovered, his mind invigorated. He had had with him
for long days the very elixir of solitude. Relations and associations
that before had been banked in ignorance came forth and looked at him.
"You surely have known us before, though you had forgotten that you
knew us!" He found that he was taking delight in these expansions of
meaning. He thought, "If I can get abroad out of this danger, out of
old circles, I'll roam and study and go to school to wider plans!" He
suddenly thought, "This kind of thing is what Old Steadfast meant when
he used to say that I did not see widely enough." He moved sharply. A
hot and bitter flood seemed to well up within him. "He himself is
seeing narrowly now--Alexander Jardine!"

He left the crag and went for a scrambling and somewhat dangerous walk
along the mountain-side. There was peril in leaving that one
rock-curtained place. Two days before he had seen what he thought to
be signs of red-coated soldiers in the glen far below. But he must
walk--he must exercise his body, note old things, not give too much
time to new perceptions! He breathed the keen, sweet mountain air;
with a knife that he had he fell to making a staff from a young oak;
he watched the pass below and the shadows of the clouds; he climbed
fairly to the mountain-top and had a great view; he sang an old song,
not aloud, but under his breath; and at last he must come back with
solitude to his fastness. And here was brooding thought again!

Two more days passed. The man from the hut below in the pass came at
dusk with food carefully sent from the chieftain's hall. Redcoats had
gone indeed through the glen, but they could never find the path to
this place! They might return or they might not; they were like the
devil who rose by your side when you were most peaceful! Angus went
down the mountain-side. The sound of his footstep died away. Ian had
again Solitude herself.

Another day and night passed. He watched the sun climb toward noon,
and as the day grew warm he heard a step upon the hidden path. With a
pistol in either hand he moved, as stealthily, as silently as might
be, to a platform of rock that overhung the way of the intruder. In
another moment the latter was in sight--one man climbing steadily the
path to the old robber fastness. He saw that it was Glenfernie. No one
followed him. He came on alone.

Rullock put by his pistols and, moving to a chair of rock, sat there.
The other's great frame rose level with him, stepped upon the rocky
floor. Ian had been growing to feel an anger at solitude. When he saw
Alexander he had not been able to check an inner movement of welcome.
He felt an old--he even felt a new--affection for the being upon whom,
certainly, he had leaned. There flowed in, in an impatient wave, the
consideration that he must hate....

But Glenfernie hated. Ian rose to face him.

"So you've found your way to my castle? It is a climb! You had best
sit and rest yourself. I have my sword now, and I will give you
satisfaction."

Glenfernie nodded. He sat upon a piece of fallen rock. "Yes, I will
rest first, thank you! I have searched since dawn, and the mountain is
steep. Besides, I want to talk to you."

Ian brought from his cupboard oat-cake and a flask of brandy. The
other shook his head.

"I had food at sunrise, and I drank from a spring below."

"Very good!"

The laird of Glenfernie sat looking down the mountain-sides and over
to far hills and moving clouds, much as he used to sit in the crook of
the old pine outside the broken wall at Glenfernie. There was a trick
of posture when he was at certain levels within himself. Ian knew it
well.

"Perhaps I should tell you," said Alexander, "that I came alone
through the pass and that I have been alone for some days. If there
are soldiers near I do not know of them."

"It is not necessary," answered Ian. While he spoke he saw in a flash
both that his confidence was profound that it was not necessary, and
that that incapacity to betray that might be predicated of Old
Steadfast was confined to but one of the two upon this rock. The
enlightenment stung, then immediately brought out a reaction. "To each
some specialty in error! I no more than he am monstrous!" There arose
a desire to defend himself, to show Old Steadfast certain things. He
spoke. "We are going to fight presently--"

"Yes."

"That's understood. Now listen to me a little! For long years we were
together, friends near and warm! You knew that I saw differently from
you in regard to many things--in regard, for instance, to women. I
remember old discussions.... Well, you differed, and sometimes you
were angry. But for all that, friendship never went out with violence!
You knew the ancient current that I swam in--that it was narrower,
more mixed with earth, than your own! But you were tolerant. You took
me as I was.... What has developed was essentially there then, and you
knew it. The difference is that at last it touched what you held to be
your own. Then, and not till then, the sinner became _anathema!_"

"In some part you say truth. But my load of inconsistency does not
lighten yours of guilt."

"Perhaps not. We were friends. Five-sixths of me made a fair enough
friend and comrade. We interlocked. You had gifts and possessions I
had not. I liked the oak-feeling of you--the great ship in sail! In
turn, I had the key, perhaps, to a few lands of bloom and flavor that
you lacked. We interchanged and thought that we were each the richer.
Five-sixths.... Say, then, that the other sixth might be defined as
no-friend, or as false friend! Say that it was wilful, impatient of
superiorities, proud, vain, willing to hurt, betray, and play the
demon generally! Say that once it gave itself swing it darkened some
of the other sixths.... Well, it is done! Yet there was gold. Perhaps,
laird of Glenfernie, there is still gold in the mine!"

"You are mistaken in your proportions. Gold! You are to me the specter
of the Kelpie's Pool!"

Silence held for a minute or two. The clouds, passing between earth
and sun, made against the mountain slopes impalpable, dark, fantastic
shapes. An eagle wheeled above its nest at the mountain-top. Ian spoke
again. His tone had altered.

"If I do not decline remorse, I at least decline the leaden cope of it
you would have me wear! There is such a thing as fair play to oneself!
Two years ago come August Elspeth Barrow and I agreed to part--"

"Oh, 'agreed'--"

"Have it so! I said that we must part. She acquiesced--and that
without the appeals that the stage and literature show us. Oh,
doubtless I might have seen a pierced spirit, and did not, and was
brute beast there! But one thing you have got to believe, and that is
that neither of us knew what was to happen. Even with that, she was
aware of how a letter might be sent, with good hope of reaching me.
She was not a weak, ignorant girl.... I went away, and within a
fortnight was deep in that long attempt that ends here. I became
actively an agent for the Prince and his father. A hundred names and
their fates were in my hands. You can fill in the multitude of
activities, each seeming small in itself, but the whole preoccupying
every field.... If Elspeth Barrow wrote I never received her letter.
When my thought turned in that direction, it saw her well and not
necessarily unhappy. Time passed. For reasons, I ceased to write home,
and again for reasons I obliterated paths by which I might be reached.
For months I heard nothing, as I said nothing. I was on the very eve
of quitting Paris, under careful disguise, to go into Scotland. Came
suddenly your challenge--and still, though I knew that to you at least
our relations must have been discovered, I knew no more than that! I
did not know that she was dead.... I could not stay to fight you then.
I left you to brand me as you pleased in your mind."

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