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

his stay in Albany where he had no ostensible affairs, and kept me by him, far from my due employment, and making a pretence of occupation. It is upon this passage I expect, and perhaps deserve, censure. I was not so dull but what I had my own thoughts. I could not see the Master entrust himself into the hands of Harris, and not suspect some underhand contrivance. Harris bore a villainous reputation, and he had been tampered with in private by my lord; Mountain, the trader, proved, upon inquiry, to be another of the same kidney; the errand they were all gone upon being the recovery of ill-gotten treasures, offered in itself a very strong incentive to foul play; and the character of the country where they journeyed promised impunity to deeds of blood. Well: it is true I had all these thoughts and fears, and guesses of the Master’s fate. But you are to consider I was the same man that sought to dash him from the bulwarks of a ship in the mid-sea; the same that, a little before, very impiously but sincerely offered God a bargain, seeking to hire God to be my bravo. It is true again that I had a good deal melted towards our enemy. But this I always thought of as a weakness of the flesh and even culpable; my mind remaining steady and quite bent against him. True, yet again, that it was one thing to assume on my own shoulders the guilt and danger of a criminal attempt, and another to stand by and see my lord imperil and besmirch himself. But this was the very ground of my inaction. For (should I anyway stir in the business) I might fail indeed to save the Master, but I could not miss to make a byword of my lord.

Thus it was that I did nothing; and upon the same reasons, I am still strong to justify my course. We lived meanwhile in Albany, but though alone together in a strange place, had little traffic beyond formal salutations. My lord had carried with him several introductions to chief people of the town and neighbourhood; others he had before encountered in New York: with this consequence, that he went much abroad, and I am sorry to say was altogether too convivial in his habits. I was often in bed, but never asleep, when he returned; and there was scarce a night when he did not betray the influence of liquor. By day he would still lay upon me endless tasks, which he showed considerable ingenuity to fish up and renew, in the manner of Penelope’s web. I never refused, as I say, for I was hired to do his bidding; but I took no pains to keep my penetration under a bushel, and would sometimes smile in his face.

“I think I must be the devil and you Michael Scott,” I said to him one day. “I have bridged Tweed and split the Eildons; and now you set me to the rope of sand.”

He looked at me with shining eyes, and looked away again, his jaw chewing, but without words.

“Well, well, my lord,” said I, “your will is my pleasure. I will do this thing for the fourth time; but I would beg of you to invent another task against to-morrow, for by my troth, I am weary of this one.”

“You do not know what you are saying,” returned my lord, putting on his hat and turning his back to me. “It is a strange thing you should take a pleasure to annoy me. A friend—but that is a different affair. It is a strange thing. I am a man that has had ill-fortune all my life through. I am still surrounded by contrivances. I am always treading in plots,” he burst out. “The whole world is banded against me.”

“I would not talk wicked nonsense if I were you,” said I; “but I will tell you what I would do—I would put my head in cold water, for you had more last night than you could carry.”

“Do ye think that?” said he, with a manner of interest highly awakened. “Would that be good for me? It’s a thing I never tried.”

“I mind the days when you had no call to try, and I wish, my lord, that they were back again,” said I. “But the plain truth is, if you continue to exceed, you will do yourself a mischief.”

“I don’t appear to carry drink the way I used to,” said my lord. “I get overtaken, Mackellar. But I will be more upon my guard.”

“That is what I would ask of you,” I replied. “You are to bear in mind that you are Mr. Alexander’s father: give the bairn a chance to carry his name with some responsibility.”

“Ay, ay,” said he. “Ye’re a very sensible man, Mackellar, and have been long in my employ. But I think, if you have nothing more to say to me I will be stepping. If you have nothing more to say?” he added, with that burning, childish eagerness that was now so common with the man.

“No, my lord, I have nothing more,” said I, dryly enough.

“Then I think I will be stepping,” says my lord, and stood and looked at me fidgeting with his hat, which he had taken off again. “I suppose you will have no errands? No? I am to meet Sir William Johnson, but I will be more upon my guard.” He was silent for a time, and then, smiling: “Do you call to mind a place, Mackellar—it’s a little below Engles—where the burn runs very deep under a wood of rowans. I mind being there when I was a lad—dear, it comes over me like an old song!—I was after the fishing, and I made a bonny cast. Eh, but I was happy. I wonder, Mackellar, why I am never happy now?”

“My lord,” said I, “if you would drink with more moderation you would have the better chance. It is an old byword that the bottle is a false consoler.”

“No doubt,” said he, “no doubt. Well, I think I will be going.”

“Good-morning, my lord,” said I.

“Good-morning, good-morning,” said he, and so got himself at last from the apartment.

I give that for a fair specimen of my lord in the morning; and I must have described my patron very ill if the reader does not perceive a notable falling off. To behold the man thus fallen: to know him accepted among his companions for a poor, muddled toper, welcome (if he were welcome at all) for the bare consideration of his title; and to recall the virtues he had once displayed against such odds of fortune; was not this a thing at once to rage and to be humbled at?

In his cups, he was more excessive. I will give but the one scene, close upon the end, which is strongly marked upon my memory to this day, and at the time affected me almost with horror.

I was in bed, lying there awake, when I heard him stumbling on the stair and singing. My lord had no gift of music, his brother had all the graces of the family, so that when I say singing, you are to understand a manner of high, carolling utterance, which was truly neither speech nor song. Something not unlike is to be heard upon the lips of children, ere they learn shame; from those of a man grown elderly, it had a strange effect. He opened the door with noisy precaution; peered in, shading his candle; conceived me to slumber; entered, set his light upon the table, and took off his hat. I saw him very plain; a high, feverish exultation appeared to boil in his veins, and he stood and smiled and smirked upon the candle. Presently he lifted up his arm, snapped his fingers, and fell to undress. As he did so, having once more forgot my presence, he took back to his singing; and now I could hear the words, which were those from the old song of the Twa Corbies endlessly repeated:

“And over his banes when they are bare
The wind sall blaw for evermair!”

I have said there was no music in the man. His strains had no logical succession except in so far as they inclined a little to the minor mode; but they exercised a rude potency upon the feelings, and followed the words, and signified the feelings of the singer with barbaric fitness. He took it first in the time and manner of a rant; presently this ill-favoured gleefulness abated, he began to dwell upon the notes more feelingly, and sank at last into a degree of maudlin pathos that was to me scarce bearable. By equal steps, the original briskness of his acts declined; and when he was stripped to his breeches, he sat on the bedside and fell to whimpering. I know nothing less respectable than the tears of drunkenness, and turned my back impatiently on this poor sight.

But he had started himself (I am to suppose) on that slippery descent of self-pity; on the which, to a man unstrung by old sorrows and recent potations there is no arrest except exhaustion. His tears continued to flow, and the man to sit there, three parts naked, in the cold air of the chamber. I twitted myself alternately with inhumanity and sentimental weakness, now half rising in my bed to interfere, now reading myself lessons of indifference and courting slumber, until, upon a sudden, the quantum mutatus ab illo shot into my mind; and calling to remembrance his old wisdom, constancy, and patience, I was overborne with a pity almost approaching the passionate, not for my master alone but for the sons of man.

At this I leaped from my place, went over to his side and laid a hand on his bare shoulder, which was cold as stone. He uncovered his face and showed it me all swollen and begrutten [10] like a child’s; and at the sight my impatience partially revived.

“Think shame to yourself,” said I. “This is bairnly conduct. I might have been snivelling myself, if I had cared to swill my belly with wine. But I went to my bed sober like a man. Come: get into yours, and have done with this pitiable exhibition.”

“Oh, Mackellar,” said he, “my heart is wae!”

“Wae?” cried I. “For a good cause, I think. What words were these you sang as you came in? Show pity to others, we then can talk of pity to yourself. You can be the one thing or the other, but I will be no party to half-way houses. If you’re a striker, strike, and if you’re a bleater, bleat!”

“Cry!” cries he, with a burst, “that’s it—strike! that’s talking! Man, I’ve stood it all too long. But when they laid a hand upon the child, when the child’s threatened”—his momentary vigour whimpering off—“my child, my Alexander!”—and he was at his tears again.

I took him by the shoulders and shook him. “Alexander!” said I. “Do you even think of him? Not you! Look yourself in the face like a brave man, and you’ll find you’re but a self-deceiver. The wife, the friend, the child, they’re all equally forgot, and you sunk in a mere log of selfishness.”

“Mackellar,” said he, with a wonderful return to his old manner and appearance, “you may say what you will of me, but one thing I never was—I was never selfish.”

“I will open your eyes in your despite,” said I. “How long have we been here? and how often have you written to your family? I think this is the first time you were ever separate: have you written at all? Do they know if you are dead or living?”

I had caught him here too openly; it braced his better nature; there was no more weeping, he thanked me very penitently, got to bed and was soon fast asleep; and the first thing he did the next morning was to sit down and begin a letter to my lady: a very tender letter it was too, though it was never finished. Indeed all communication with New York was transacted by myself; and it will be judged I had a thankless task of it. What to tell my lady and in what words, and how far to be false and how far cruel, was a thing that kept me often from my slumber.

All this while, no doubt, my lord waited with growing impatiency for news of his accomplices. Harris, it is to be thought, had promised a high degree of expedition; the time was already overpast when word was to be looked for; and suspense was a very evil counsellor to a man of an impaired intelligence. My lord’s mind throughout this interval dwelled