The Master of Ballantrae

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"I will make a shift, my lady," said I.

She looked over me as I wrote. "That will do," she said, when I
had done. "Thank God, Mackellar, I have you to lean upon! But
what can it be now? What, what can it be?"

In my own mind, I believed there was no explanation possible, and
none required; it was my fear that the man's madness had now simply
burst forth its way, like the long-smothered flames of a volcano;
but to this (in mere mercy to my lady) I durst not give expression.

"It is more to the purpose to consider our own behaviour," said I.
"Must we leave him there alone?"

"I do not dare disturb him," she replied. "Nature may know best;
it may be Nature that cries to be alone; and we grope in the dark.
Oh yes, I would leave him as he is."

"I will, then, despatch this letter, my lady, and return here, if
you please, to sit with you," said I.

"Pray do," cries my lady.

All afternoon we sat together, mostly in silence, watching my
lord's door. My own mind was busy with the scene that had just
passed, and its singular resemblance to my vision. I must say a
word upon this, for the story has gone abroad with great
exaggeration, and I have even seen it printed, and my own name
referred to for particulars. So much was the same: here was my
lord in a room, with his head upon the table, and when he raised
his face, it wore such an expression as distressed me to the soul.
But the room was different, my lord's attitude at the table not at
all the same, and his face, when he disclosed it, expressed a
painful degree of fury instead of that haunting despair which had
always (except once, already referred to) characterised it in the
vision. There is the whole truth at last before the public; and if
the differences be great, the coincidence was yet enough to fill me
with uneasiness. All afternoon, as I say, I sat and pondered upon
this quite to myself; for my lady had trouble of her own, and it
was my last thought to vex her with fancies. About the midst of
our time of waiting, she conceived an ingenious scheme, had Mr.
Alexander fetched, and bid him knock at his father's door. My lord
sent the boy about his business, but without the least violence,
whether of manner or expression; so that I began to entertain a
hope the fit was over.

At last, as the night fell and I was lighting a lamp that stood
there trimmed, the door opened and my lord stood within upon the
threshold. The light was not so strong that we could read his
countenance; when he spoke, methought his voice a little altered
but yet perfectly steady.

"Mackellar," said he, "carry this note to its destination with your
own hand. It is highly private. Find the person alone when you
deliver it."

"Henry," says my lady, "you are not ill?"

"No, no," says be, querulously, "I am occupied. Not at all; I am
only occupied. It is a singular thing a man must be supposed to be
ill when he has any business! Send me supper to this room, and a
basket of wine: I expect the visit of a friend. Otherwise I am
not to be disturbed."

And with that he once more shut himself in.

The note was addressed to one Captain Harris, at a tavern on the
portside. I knew Harris (by reputation) for a dangerous
adventurer, highly suspected of piracy in the past, and now
following the rude business of an Indian trader. What my lord
should have to say to him, or he to my lord, it passed my
imagination to conceive: or yet how my lord had heard of him,
unless by a disgraceful trial from which the man was recently
escaped. Altogether I went upon the errand with reluctance, and
from the little I saw of the captain, returned from it with sorrow.
I found him in a foul-smelling chamber, sitting by a guttering
candle and an empty bottle; he had the remains of a military
carriage, or rather perhaps it was an affectation, for his manners
were low.

"Tell my lord, with my service, that I will wait upon his lordship
in the inside of half an hour," says he, when he had read the note;
and then had the servility, pointing to his empty bottle, to
propose that I should buy him liquor.

Although I returned with my best speed, the Captain followed close
upon my heels, and he stayed late into the night. The cock was
crowing a second time when I saw (from my chamber window) my lord
lighting him to the gate, both men very much affected with their
potations, and sometimes leaning one upon the other to confabulate.
Yet the next morning my lord was abroad again early with a hundred
pounds of money in his pocket. I never supposed that he returned
with it; and yet I was quite sure it did not find its way to the
Master, for I lingered all morning within view of the booth. That
was the last time my Lord Durrisdeer passed his own enclosure till
we left New York; he walked in his barn, or sat and talked with his
family, all much as usual; but the town saw nothing of him, and his
daily visits to the Master seemed forgotten. Nor yet did Harris
reappear; or not until the end.

I was now much oppressed with a sense of the mysteries in which we
had begun to move. It was plain, if only from his change of
habitude, my lord had something on his mind of a grave nature; but
what it was, whence it sprang, or why he should now keep the house
and garden, I could make no guess at. It was clear, even to
probation, the pamphlets had some share in this revolution; I read
all I could find, and they were all extremely insignificant, and of
the usual kind of party scurrility; even to a high politician, I
could spy out no particular matter of offence, and my lord was a
man rather indifferent on public questions. The truth is, the
pamphlet which was the spring of this affair, lay all the time on
my lord's bosom. There it was that I found it at last, after he
was dead, in the midst of the north wilderness: in such a place,
in such dismal circumstances, I was to read for the first time
these idle, lying words of a Whig pamphleteer declaiming against
indulgency to Jacobites:- "Another notorious Rebel, the M-r of B-e,
is to have his Title restored," the passage ran. "This Business
has been long in hand, since he rendered some very disgraceful
Services in Scotland and France. His Brother, L-D D-R, is known to
be no better than himself in Inclination; and the supposed Heir,
who is now to be set aside, was bred up in the most detestable
Principles. In the old Phrase, it is SIX OF THE ONE AND HALF A
DOZEN OF THE OTHER; but the Favour of such a Reposition is too
extreme to be passed over." A man in his right wits could not have
cared two straws for a tale so manifestly false; that Government
should ever entertain the notion, was inconceivable to any
reasoning creature, unless possibly the fool that penned it; and my
lord, though never brilliant, was ever remarkable for sense. That
he should credit such a rodomontade, and carry the pamphlet on his
bosom and the words in his heart, is the clear proof of the man's
lunacy. Doubtless the mere mention of Mr. Alexander, and the
threat directly held out against the child's succession,
precipitated that which had so long impended. Or else my master
had been truly mad for a long time, and we were too dull or too
much used to him, and did not perceive the extent of his infirmity.

About a week after the day of the pamphlets I was late upon the
harbour-side, and took a turn towards the Master's, as I often did.
The door opened, a flood of light came forth upon the road, and I
beheld a man taking his departure with friendly salutations. I
cannot say how singularly I was shaken to recognise the adventurer
Harris. I could not but conclude it was the hand of my lord that
had brought him there; and prolonged my walk in very serious and
apprehensive thought. It was late when I came home, and there was
my lord making up his portmanteau for a voyage.

"Why do you come so late?" he cried. "We leave to-morrow for
Albany, you and I together; and it is high time you were about your
preparations."

"For Albany, my lord?" I cried. "And for what earthly purpose?"

"Change of scene," said he.

And my lady, who appeared to have been weeping, gave me the signal
to obey without more parley. She told me a little later (when we
found occasion to exchange some words) that he had suddenly
announced his intention after a visit from Captain Harris, and her
best endeavours, whether to dissuade him from the journey, or to
elicit some explanation of its purpose, had alike proved
unavailing.

CHAPTER XI. - THE JOURNEY IN THE WILDERNESS.

We made a prosperous voyage up that fine river of the Hudson, the
weather grateful, the hills singularly beautified with the colours
of the autumn. At Albany we had our residence at an inn, where I
was not so blind and my lord not so cunning but what I could see he
had some design to hold me prisoner. The work he found for me to
do was not so pressing that we should transact it apart from
necessary papers in the chamber of an inn; nor was it of such
importance that I should be set upon as many as four or five
scrolls of the same document. I submitted in appearance; but I
took private measures on my own side, and had the news of the town
communicated to me daily by the politeness of our host. In this
way I received at last a piece of intelligence for which, I may
say, I had been waiting. Captain Harris (I was told) with "Mr.
Mountain, the trader," had gone by up the river in a boat. I would
have feared the landlord's eye, so strong the sense of some
complicity upon my master's part oppressed me. But I made out to
say I had some knowledge of the Captain, although none of Mr.
Mountain, and to inquire who else was of the party. My informant
knew not; Mr. Mountain had come ashore upon some needful purchases;
had gone round the town buying, drinking, and prating; and it
seemed the party went upon some likely venture, for he had spoken
much of great things he would do when he returned. No more was
known, for none of the rest had come ashore, and it seemed they
were pressed for time to reach a certain spot before the snow
should fall.

And sure enough, the next day, there fell a sprinkle even in
Albany; but it passed as it came, and was but a reminder of what
lay before us. I thought of it lightly then, knowing so little as
I did of that inclement province: the retrospect is different; and
I wonder at times if some of the horror of there events which I
must now rehearse flowed not from the foul skies and savage winds
to which we were exposed, and the agony of cold that we must
suffer.

The boat having passed by, I thought at first we should have left
the town. But no such matter. My lord continued 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 expensive. 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 almost wholly in the Wilderness,
following that party with whose deeds he had so much concern. He
continually conjured up their camps and progresses, the fashion of
the country, the perpetration in a thousand different manners of
the same horrid fact, and that consequent spectacle of the Master's
bones lying scattered in the wind. These private, guilty
considerations I would continually observe to peep forth in the
man's talk, like rabbits from a hill. And it is the less wonder if
the scene of his meditations began to draw him bodily.

It is well known what pretext he took. Sir William Johnson had a
diplomatic errand in these parts; and my lord and I (from
curiosity, as was given out) went in his company. Sir William was
well attended and liberally supplied. Hunters brought us venison,
fish was taken for us daily in the streams, and brandy ran like
water. We proceeded by day and encamped by night in the military
style; sentinels were set and changed; every man had his named
duty; and Sir William was the spring of all. There was much in
this that might at times have entertained me; but for our
misfortune, the weather was extremely harsh, the days were in the
beginning open, but the nights frosty from the first. A painful
keen wind blew most of the time, so that we sat in the boat with
blue fingers, and at night, as we scorched our faces at the fire,
the clothes upon our back appeared to be of paper. A dreadful
solitude surrounded our steps; the land was quite dispeopled, there
was no smoke of fires, and save for a single boat of merchants on
the second day, we met no travellers. The season was indeed late,
but this desertion of the waterways impressed Sir William himself;
and I have heard him more than once express a sense of
intimidation. "I have come too late, I fear; they must have dug up
the hatchet;" he said; and the future proved how justly he had
reasoned.

I could never depict the blackness of my soul upon this journey. I
have none of those minds that are in love with the unusual: to see
the winter coming and to lie in the field so far from any house,
oppressed me like a nightmare; it seemed, indeed, a kind of awful
braving of God's power; and this thought, which I daresay only
writes me down a coward, was greatly exaggerated by my private
knowledge of the errand we were come upon. I was besides
encumbered by my duties to Sir William, whom it fell upon me to
entertain; for my lord was quite sunk into a state bordering on
PERVIGILIUM, watching the woods with a rapt eye, sleeping scarce at
all, and speaking sometimes not twenty words in a whole day. That
which he said was still coherent; but it turned almost invariably
upon the party for whom he kept his crazy lookout. He would tell
Sir William often, and always as if it were a new communication,
that he had "a brother somewhere in the woods," and beg that the
sentinels should be directed "to inquire for him." "I am anxious
for news of my brother," he would say. And sometimes, when we were
under way, he would fancy he spied a canoe far off upon the water
or a camp on the shore, and exhibit painful agitation. It was
impossible but Sir William should be struck with these
singularities; and at last he led me aside, and hinted his
uneasiness. I touched my head and shook it; quite rejoiced to
prepare a little testimony against possible disclosures.

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