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

“Now,” says he, “will you give me your troth as a Christian, and a faithful servant of my brother’s, that I shall have no more to fear from your attempts?”

“I give it you,” said I.

“I shall require your hand upon it,” says he.

“You have the right to make conditions,” I replied, and we shook hands.

He sat down at once in the same place and the old perilous attitude.

“Hold on!” cried I, covering my eyes. “I cannot bear to see you in that posture. The least irregularity of the sea might plunge you overboard.”

“You are highly inconsistent,” he replied, smiling, but doing as I asked. “For all that, Mackellar, I would have you to know you have risen forty feet in my esteem. You think I cannot set a price upon fidelity? But why do you suppose I carry that Secundra Dass about the world with me? Because he would die or do murder for me to-morrow; and I love him for it. Well, you may think it odd, but I like you the better for this afternoon’s performance. I thought you were magnetised with the Ten Commandments; but no—God damn my soul!”—he cries, “the old wife has blood in his body after all! Which does not change the fact,” he continued, smiling again, “that you have done well to give your promise; for I doubt if you would ever shine in your new trade.”

“I suppose,” said I, “I should ask your pardon and God’s for my attempt. At any rate, I have passed my word, which I will keep faithfully. But when I think of those you persecute—” I paused.

“Life is a singular thing,” said he, “and mankind a very singular people. You suppose yourself to love my brother. I assure you, it is merely custom. Interrogate your memory; and when first you came to Durrisdeer, you will find you considered him a dull, ordinary youth. He is as dull and ordinary now, though not so young. Had you instead fallen in with me, you would to-day be as strong upon my side.”

“I would never say you were ordinary, Mr. Bally,” I returned; “but here you prove yourself dull. You have just shown your reliance on my word. In other terms, that is my conscience—the same which starts instinctively back from you, like the eye from a strong light.”

“Ah!” says he, “but I mean otherwise. I mean, had I met you in my youth. You are to consider I was not always as I am to-day; nor (had I met in with a friend of your description) should I have ever been so.”

“Hut, Mr. Bally,” says I, “you would have made a mock of me; you would never have spent ten civil words on such a Square-toes.”

But he was now fairly started on his new course of justification, with which he wearied me throughout the remainder of the passage. No doubt in the past he had taken pleasure to paint himself unnecessarily black, and made a vaunt of his wickedness, bearing it for a coat-of-arms. Nor was he so illogical as to abate one item of his old confessions. “But now that I know you are a human being,” he would say, “I can take the trouble to explain myself. For I assure you I am human, too, and have my virtues, like my neighbours.” I say, he wearied me, for I had only the one word to say in answer: twenty times I must have said it: “Give up your present purpose and return with me to Durrisdeer; then I will believe you.”

Thereupon he would shake his head at me. “Ah! Mackellar, you might live a thousand years and never understand my nature,” he would say. “This battle is now committed, the hour of reflection quite past, the hour for mercy not yet come. It began between us when we span a coin in the hall of Durrisdeer, now twenty years ago; we have had our ups and downs, but never either of us dreamed of giving in; and as for me, when my glove is cast, life and honour go with it.”

“A fig for your honour!” I would say. “And by your leave, these warlike similitudes are something too high-sounding for the matter in hand. You want some dirty money; there is the bottom of your contention; and as for your means, what are they? to stir up sorrow in a family that never harmed you, to debauch (if you can) your own nephew, and to wring the heart of your born brother! A footpad that kills an old granny in a woollen mutch with a dirty bludgeon, and that for a shilling-piece and a paper of snuff—there is all the warrior that you are.”

When I would attack him thus (or somewhat thus) he would smile, and sigh like a man misunderstood. Once, I remember, he defended himself more at large, and had some curious sophistries, worth repeating, for a light upon his character.

“You are very like a civilian to think war consists in drums and banners,” said he. “War (as the ancients said very wisely) is ultima ratio. When we take our advantage unrelentingly, then we make war. Ah! Mackellar, you are a devil of a soldier in the steward’s room at Durrisdeer, or the tenants do you sad injustice!”

“I think little of what war is or is not,” I replied. “But you weary me with claiming my respect. Your brother is a good man, and you are a bad one—neither more nor less.”

“Had I been Alexander—” he began.

“It is so we all dupe ourselves,” I cried. “Had I been St. Paul, it would have been all one; I would have made the same hash of that career that you now see me making of my own.”

“I tell you,” he cried, bearing down my interruption, “had I been the least petty chieftain in the Highlands, had I been the least king of naked negroes in the African desert, my people would have adored me. A bad man, am I? Ah! but I was born for a good tyrant! Ask Secundra Dass; he will tell you I treat him like a son. Cast in your lot with me to-morrow, become my slave, my chattel, a thing I can command as I command the powers of my own limbs and spirit—you will see no more that dark side that I turn upon the world in anger. I must have all or none. But where all is given, I give it back with usury. I have a kingly nature: there is my loss!”

“It has been hitherto rather the loss of others,” I remarked, “which seems a little on the hither side of royalty.”

“Tilly-vally!” cried he. “Even now, I tell you, I would spare that family in which you take so great an interest: yes, even now—to-morrow I would leave them to their petty welfare, and disappear in that forest of cut-throats and thimble-riggers that we call the world. I would do it to-morrow!” says he. “Only—only—”

“Only what?” I asked.

“Only they must beg it on their bended knees. I think in public, too,” he added, smiling. “Indeed, Mackellar, I doubt if there be a hall big enough to serve my purpose for that act of reparation.”

“Vanity, vanity!” I moralised. “To think that this great force for evil should be swayed by the same sentiment that sets a lassie mincing to her glass!”

“Oh! there are double words for everything: the word that swells, the word that belittles; you cannot fight me with a word!” said he. “You said the other day that I relied on your conscience: were I in your humour of detraction, I might say I built upon your vanity. It is your pretension to be un homme de parole; ‘tis mine not to accept defeat. Call it vanity, call it virtue, call it greatness of soul—what signifies the expression? But recognise in each of us a common strain: that we both live for an idea.”

It will be gathered from so much familiar talk, and so much patience on both sides, that we now lived together upon excellent terms. Such was again the fact, and this time more seriously than before. Apart from disputations such as that which I have tried to reproduce, not only consideration reigned, but, I am tempted to say, even kindness. When I fell sick (as I did shortly after our great storm), he sat by my berth to entertain me with his conversation, and treated me with excellent remedies, which I accepted with security. Himself commented on the circumstance. “You see,” says he, “you begin to know me better. A very little while ago, upon this lonely ship, where no one but myself has any smattering of science, you would have made sure I had designs upon your life. And, observe, it is since I found you had designs upon my own, that I have shown you most respect. You will tell me if this speaks of a small mind.” I found little to reply. In so far as regarded myself, I believed him to mean well; I am, perhaps, the more a dupe of his dissimulation, but I believed (and I still believe) that he regarded me with genuine kindness. Singular and sad fact! so soon as this change began, my animosity abated, and these haunting visions of my master passed utterly away. So that, perhaps, there was truth in the man’s last vaunting word to me, uttered on the second day of July, when our long voyage was at last brought almost to an end, and we lay becalmed at the sea end of the vast harbour of New York, in a gasping heat, which was presently exchanged for a surprising waterfall of rain. I stood on the poop, regarding the green shores near at hand, and now and then the light smoke of the little town, our destination. And as I was even then devising how to steal a march on my familiar enemy, I was conscious of a shade of embarrassment when he approached me with his hand extended.

“I am now to bid you farewell,” said he, “and that for ever. For now you go among my enemies, where all your former prejudices will revive. I never yet failed to charm a person when I wanted; even you, my good friend—to call you so for once—even you have now a very different portrait of me in your memory, and one that you will never quite forget. The voyage has not lasted long enough, or I should have wrote the impression deeper. But now all is at an end, and we are again at war. Judge by this little interlude how dangerous I am; and tell those fools”—pointing with his finger to the town—“to think twice and thrice before they set me at defiance.”