The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter's Tale by Robert Louis Stevenson (most popular ebook readers txt) 📖

be the Master, like a diabolical Æneas, full of matter the most pleasing in the world to any youthful ear, such as battles, sea-disasters, flights, the forests of the West, and (since his later voyage) the ancient cities of the Indies. How cunningly these baits might be employed, and what an empire might be so founded, little by little, in the mind of any boy, stood obviously clear to me. There was no inhibition, so long as the man was in the house, that would be strong enough to hold these two apart; for if it be hard to charm serpents, it is no very difficult thing to cast a glamour on a little chip of manhood not very long in breeches. I recalled an ancient sailor-man who dwelt in a lone house beyond the Figgate Whins (I believe, he called it after Portobello), and how the boys would troop out of Leith on a Saturday, and sit and listen to his swearing tales, as thick as crows about a carrion: a thing I often remarked as I went by, a young student, on my own more meditative holiday diversion. Many of these boys went, no doubt, in the face of an express command; many feared and even hated the old brute of whom they made their hero; and I have seen them flee from him when he was tipsy, and stone him when he was drunk. And yet there they came each Saturday! How much more easily would a boy like Mr. Alexander fall under the influence of a high-looking, high-spoken gentleman-adventurer, who should conceive the fancy to entrap him; and, the influence gained, how easy to employ it for the child’s perversion!

I doubt if our enemy had named Mr. Alexander three times before I perceived which way his mind was aiming—all this train of thought and memory passed in one pulsation through my own—and you may say I started back as though an open hole had gaped across a pathway. Mr. Alexander: there was the weak point, there was the Eve in our perishable paradise; and the serpent was already hissing on the trail.

I promise you, I went the more heartily about the preparations; my last scruple gone, the danger of delay written before me in huge characters. From that moment forth I seem not to have sat down or breathed. Now I would be at my post with the Master and his Indian; now in the garret, buckling a valise; now sending forth Macconochie by the side postern and the wood-path to bear it to the trysting-place; and, again, snatching some words of counsel with my lady. This was the verso of our life in Durrisdeer that day; but on the recto all appeared quite settled, as of a family at home in its paternal seat; and what perturbation may have been observable, the Master would set down to the blow of his unlooked-for coming, and the fear he was accustomed to inspire.

Supper went creditably off, cold salutations passed and the company trooped to their respective chambers. I attended the Master to the last. We had put him next door to his Indian, in the north wing; because that was the most distant and could be severed from the body of the house with doors. I saw he was a kind friend or a good master (whichever it was) to his Secundra Dass—seeing to his comfort; mending the fire with his own hand, for the Indian complained of cold; inquiring as to the rice on which the stranger made his diet; talking with him pleasantly in the Hindustanee, while I stood by, my candle in my hand, and affected to be overcome with slumber. At length the Master observed my signals of distress. “I perceive,” says he, “that you have all your ancient habits: early to bed and early to rise. Yawn yourself away!”

Once in my own room, I made the customary motions of undressing, so that I might time myself; and when the cycle was complete, set my tinder-box ready, and blew out my taper. The matter of an hour afterward I made a light again, put on my shoes of list that I had worn by my lord’s sick-bed, and set forth into the house to call the voyagers. All were dressed and waiting—my lord, my lady, Miss Katharine, Mr. Alexander, my lady’s woman Christie; and I observed the effect of secrecy even upon quite innocent persons, that one after another showed in the chink of the door a face as white as paper. We slipped out of the side postern into a night of darkness, scarce broken by a star or two; so that at first we groped and stumbled and fell among the bushes. A few hundred yards up the wood-path Macconochie was waiting us with a great lantern; so the rest of the way we went easy enough, but still in a kind of guilty silence. A little beyond the abbey the path debauched on the main road and some quarter of a mile farther, at the place called Eagles, where the moors begin, we saw the lights of the two carriages stand shining by the wayside. Scarce a word or two was uttered at our parting, and these regarded business: a silent grasping of hands, a turning of faces aside, and the thing was over; the horses broke into a trot, the lamplight sped like Will-o’-the-Wisp upon the broken moorland, it dipped beyond Stony Brae; and there were Macconochie and I alone with our lantern on the road. There was one thing more to wait for, and that was the reappearance of the coach upon Cartmore. It seems they must have pulled up upon the summit, looked back for a last time, and seen our lantern not yet moved away from the place of separation. For a lamp was taken from a carriage, and waved three times up and down by way of a farewell. And then they were gone indeed, having looked their last on the kind roof of Durrisdeer, their faces toward a barbarous country. I never knew before, the greatness of that vault of night in which we two poor serving-men—the one old, and the one elderly—stood for the first time deserted; I had never felt before my own dependency upon the countenance of others. The sense of isolation burned in my bowels like a fire. It seemed that we who remained at home were the true exiles, and that Durrisdeer and Solwayside, and all that made my country native, its air good to me, and its language welcome, had gone forth and was far over the sea with my old masters.

The remainder of that night I paced to and fro on the smooth highway, reflecting on the future and the past. My thoughts, which at first dwelled tenderly on those who were just gone, took a more manly temper as I considered what remained for me to do. Day came upon the inland mountain-tops, and the fowls began to cry, and the smoke of homesteads to arise in the brown bosom of the moors, before I turned my face homeward, and went down the path to where the roof of Durrisdeer shone in the morning by the sea.

At the customary hour I had the Master called, and awaited his coming in the hall with a quiet mind. He looked about him at the empty room and the three covers set.

“We are a small party,” said he. “How comes?”

“This is the party to which we must grow accustomed,” I replied.

He looked at me with a sudden sharpness. “What is all this?” said he.

“You and I and your friend Mr. Dass are now all the company,” I replied. “My lord, my lady, and the children, are gone upon a voyage.”

“Upon my word!” said he. “Can this be possible? I have indeed fluttered your Volscians in Corioli! But this is no reason why our breakfast should go cold. Sit down, Mr. Mackellar, if you please”—taking, as he spoke, the head of the table, which I had designed to occupy myself—“and as we eat, you can give me the details of this evasion.”

I could see he was more affected than his language carried, and I determined to equal him in coolness. “I was about to ask you to take the head of the table,” said I; “for though I am now thrust into the position of your host, I could never forget that you were, after all, a member of the family.”

For a while he played the part of entertainer, giving directions to Macconochie, who received them with an evil grace, and attending specially upon Secundra. “And where has my good family withdrawn to?” he asked carelessly.

“Ah! Mr. Bally, that is another point,” said I. “I have no orders to communicate their destination.”

“To me,” he corrected.

“To any one,” said I.

“It is the less pointed,” said the master; “c’est de bon ton: my brother improves as he continues. And I, dear Mr. Mackellar?”

“You will have bed and board, Mr. Bally,” said I. “I am permitted to give you the run of the cellar, which is pretty reasonably stocked. You have only to keep well with me, which is no very difficult matter, and you shall want neither for wine nor a saddle-horse.”

He made an excuse to send Macconochie from the room.

“And for money?” he inquired. “Have I to keep well with my good friend Mackellar for my pocket-money also? This is a pleasing return to the principles of boyhood.”

“There was no allowance made,” said I; “but I will take it on myself to see you are supplied in moderation.”

“In moderation?” he repeated. “And you will take it on yourself?” He drew himself up, and looked about the hall at the dark rows of portraits. “In the name of my ancestors, I thank you,” says he; and then, with a return to irony, “But there must certainly be an allowance for Secundra Dass?” he said. “It in not possible they have omitted that?”

“I will make a note of it, and ask instructions when I write,” said I.

And he, with a sudden change of manner, and leaning forward with an elbow on the table—“Do you think this entirely wise?”

“I execute my orders, Mr. Bally,” said I.

“Profoundly modest,” said the Master; “perhaps not equally ingenuous. You told me yesterday my power was fallen with my father’s death. How comes it, then, that a peer of the realm flees under cloud of night out of a house in which his fathers have stood several sieges? that he conceals his address, which must be a matter of concern to his Gracious Majesty and to the whole republic? and that he should leave me in possession, and under the paternal charge of his invaluable Mackellar? This smacks to me of a very considerable and genuine apprehension.”

I sought to interrupt him with some not very truthful denegation; but he waved me down, and pursued his speech.

“I say, it smacks of it,” he said; “but I will go beyond that, for I think the apprehension grounded. I came to this house with some reluctancy. In view of the manner of my last departure, nothing but necessity could have induced me to return. Money, however, is that which I must have. You will not give with a good grace; well, I have the power to force it from you. Inside of a week, without leaving Durrisdeer, I will find out where these fools are fled to. I will follow; and when I have run my quarry down, I will drive a wedge into that family that shall once more burst it into shivers. I shall see then whether my Lord Durrisdeer” (said with indescribable scorn and rage) “will choose to buy my absence; and you will all see whether, by that time, I decide for profit or revenge.”

I was amazed to hear the man so open. The truth is, he was consumed with anger at my lord’s successful flight, felt himself to figure as a dupe, and was in no humour to weigh language.

“Do you consider this entirely wise?” said I, copying his words.

“These twenty years I have lived by my poor wisdom,” he answered with a smile that seemed almost foolish in its vanity.

“And come out a beggar in the end,” said I, “if beggar be a strong enough word for it.”

“I would have you to observe, Mr. Mackellar,” cried he, with a sudden imperious heat, in which I could not but admire him, “that I am scrupulously civil: copy me in that, and we shall be the better friends.”

Throughout this dialogue I had been incommoded by the observation of Secundra Dass. Not one of us, since the first word, had made a feint of eating: our eyes were in each other’s faces—you might say, in each other’s bosoms; and those of the