Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers

by Ian Maclaren

"It's a difficult key to turn."

"Call Janet, Kate, for she ought to see this opening, and we 'll carry everything down to my room, for no one could tell what like things are in this gloom. Yes, Perth lived here for weeks, and used to go up to the gallery where Black John's mother sat with her maid; but the son was hiding in the North, and never reached his house till he came to die."

First of all they came upon a ball dress of the former time, of white silk, with a sash of Macpherson tartan, besides much fine lace.

"That is the dress your great-grandmother wore as a bride at the Court of Versailles in the fifties. She was only a lassie, and seemed like her husband's daughter. The Prince danced with her, and they counted the dress something to be kept, and that night Locheil and Cluny also had a reel with Sheena Carnegie, while Black John looked like a young man, for he had been too sorely wounded to be able to dance with her himself." And then the General carried down with his own hands a Highland gentleman's evening dress, trews of the Royal tartan, and a velvet coat with silver buttons, and a light plaid of fine cloth.

"And this was her husband's dress that night; but why the Stewart tartan?"

"No, lassie, that is the suit the Prince wore at Holyrood, where he gave a great ball after Prestonpans, and danced with the Edinburgh ladies. It was smuggled across to France at last with other things of the Prince's, and he gave it to Carnegie. 'It will remind you of our great days,' he said, 'when the Stewarts saw their friends in Mary's Palace.'"

Last of all, the General lifted out a casket and laid it on his table. Within it was a brooch, such as might once have been worn either by a man or a woman; diamonds set in gold, and in the midst a lock of fair hair.

"Is it really, father?…" And Kate took the jewel in her hand.

"Yes, the Prince's hair—his wedding present to Sheena Macpherson."

Kate kissed it fervently, and passed it to Janet, who placed it carefully in the box, while the General made believe to laugh.

"Your mother wore the brooch on great occasions, and you will do the same, Kit, for auld lang syne. There are two or three families left in Perthshire that will like to see it on your breast."

"Yes, and there will maybe be more than two or three that will like to see the lady that wears it." This from Janet.

"Your compliments are a little late, and you may keep them to yourself, Janet; it would have been kinder to tell me.…"

"Tell you what?" And the General looked very provoking.

"I hate to be beaten." Kate first looked angry, and then laughed. "What else is there to see?"

"There is the gallery, which is the one feature in our poor house, and we will try to reach it from the Duke's hiding-place, for it was a cleverly designed hole, and had its stair up as well as down." And then they all came out into one of the strangest rooms you could find in Scotland, and one that left a pleasant picture in their minds who had seen it lit of a winter night, and the wood burning on the hearth, and Kate dancing a reel with Lord Hay or some other brisk young man, while the General looked on from one of the deep window recesses.

The gallery extended over the hall and Kate's drawing-room, and measured fifty feet long from end to end. The upper part of the walls was divided into compartments by an arcading, made of painted pilasters and flat arches. Each compartment had a motto, and this was on one side of the fireplace:

A nice wyfe and
A back doore
Oft maketh a rich
Man poore.

And on the other:—

Give liberalye
To neidfvl folke
Denye nane of
Them al for litle
Thow knawest heir
In this lyfe of what
Chaunce may the
Befall.

The glory of the gallery, however, was its ceiling, which was of the seventeenth century work, and so wonderful that many learned persons used to come and study it. After the great disaster when the Lodge was sold and allowed to fall to pieces, this fine work went first, and now no one examining its remains could have imagined how wonderful it was, and in its own way how beautiful. This ceiling was of wood, painted, and semi-elliptical in form, and one wet day, when we knew not what else to do, Kate and I counted more than three hundred panels. It was an arduous labour for the neck, and the General refused to help us; but I am sure that we did not make too many, for we worked time about, while the General took note of the figures, and our plan was that each finished his tale of work at some amazing beast, so that we could make no mistake. Some of the panels were circles, and they were filled in with coats-of-arms; some were squares and they contained a bestiary of that day. It was hard indeed to decide whether the circles or the squares were more interesting. The former had the arms of every family in Scotland that had the remotest connection with the Carnegies, and besides swept in a wider field, comprising David, King of Israel, who was placed near Hector of Troy, and Arthur of Brittany not far from Moses—all of whom had appropriate crests and mottoes. In the centre were the arms of our Lord Christ as Emperor of Judea, and the chief part of them was the Cross. But it came upon one with a curious shock, to see this coat among the shields of Scottish nobles. There were beasts that could be recognised at once, and these were sparingly named; but others were astounding, and above them were inscribed titles such as these: Shoe-lyon, Musket, Ostray; and one fearsome animal in the centre was designated the Ram of Arabia. This display of heraldry and natural history was reinforced by the cardinal virtues in seventeenth century dress: Charitas as an elderly female of extremely forbidding aspect, receiving two very imperfectly clad children; and Temperantia as a furious-looking person—male on the whole rather than female—pouring some liquor—surely water—from a jug into a cup, with averted face, and leaving little to be desired. The afternoon sun shining in through a western window and lingering among the black and white tracery, so that the marking of a shield came into relief or a beast suddenly glared down on one, had a weird, old-world effect.

"It's half an armoury and half a menagerie," said Kate, "and I think we 'll have tea in the library with the windows open to the Glen." And so they sat together in quietness, with books of heraldry and sport and ancient Scottish classics and such like round them, while Janet went out and in.

"So Donald has been obliged to leave his kirk;" for Kate had not yet forgiven Janet. "He says it's very bad here; I hope you won't go to such a place."

"What would Donald Macdonald be saying against it?" inquired Janet, severely.

"Oh, I don't remember—lots of things. He thought you were making too much of the minister."

"The minister iss a good man, and hass some Highland blood in him, though he hass lost his Gaelic, and he will be very pleasant in the house. If I wass seeing a sheep, and it will be putting on this side and that, and quarrelling with everybody, do you know what I will be thinking?"

"That's Donald, I suppose; well?"

"I will say to myself, that sheep iss a goat." And Janet left the room with the laurels of victory.

CHAPTER V.

CONCERNING BESOMS.

It is one of the miseries of modern life, for which telephones are less than compensation, that ninety out of a hundred city folk have never known the comfort and satisfaction of dwelling in a house. When the sashes are flying away from the windows and the skirting boards from the floor, and the planks below your feet are a finger breadth apart, and the pipes are death-traps, it does not matter that the walls are covered by art papers and plastered over with china dishes. This erection, wherein human beings have to live and work and fight their sins and prepare for eternity, is a fraud and a lie. No man compelled to exist in such an environment of unreality can respect himself or other people; and if it come to pass that he holds cheap views of life, and reads smart papers, and does sharp things in business, and that his talk be only a clever jingle, then a plea in extenuation will be lodged for him at the Great Assize. Small wonder that he comes to regard the world of men as an empty show and is full of cynicism, who has shifted at brief intervals from one shanty to another and never had a fit dwelling-place all his years. When a prophet cometh from the Eternal to speak unto modern times as Dante did unto the Middle Ages, and constructs the other world before our eyes, he will have one circle in his hell for the builders of rotten houses, and doubtless it will be a collection of their own works, so that their sin will be its punishment, as is most fitting and the way of things.

Surely there will also be some corner of heaven kept for the man who, having received a charge to build the shell wherein two people were to make a home, laid its foundations deep and raised strong walls that nothing but gunpowder could rend in pieces, and roofed it over with oaken timber and lined it with the same, so that many generations might live therein in peace and honour. Such a house was the Lodge in those days, although at last beginning to show signs of decay, and it somehow stirred up the heroic spirit of the former time within a man to sit before the big fire in the hall, with grim Carnegies looking down from the walls and daring you to do any meanness, while the light blazing out from a log was flung back from a sword that had been drawn in the '15. One was unconsciously reinforced in the secret place of his manhood, and inwardly convinced that what concerneth every man is not whether he fail or succeed, but that he do his duty according to the light which may have been given him until he die. It was also a regeneration of the soul to awake in a room of the eastern tower, where the Carnegies' guests slept, and fling up the window, with its small square panes, to fill one's lungs with the snell northern air, and look down on the woods glistening in every leaf, and the silver Tochty just touched by the full risen sun. Miracles have been wrought in that tower, for it happened once that an Edinburgh advocate came to stay at the Lodge, who spake after a quite marvellous fashion, known neither in England nor Scotland; and being himself of pure bourgeois blood, the fifth son of a factor, felt it necessary to despise his land, from its kirk downwards, and had a collection of japes at Scottish ways, which in his provincial simplicity he offered to the Carnegies. It seemed to him certain that people of Jacobite blood and many travels would have relished his clever talk, for it is not given to a national decadent to understand either the people he has deserted or the ancient houses at whose door he stands. Carnegie was the dullest man living in the matter of sneering, and Kate took an instant dislike to the mincing little man, whom she ever afterwards called the Popinjay, and so handled him with her tongue that his superiority was mightily shaken. But there was good stuff in the advocate, besides some brains, and after a week's living in the Lodge, he forgot to wear his eye-glass, and let his r's out of captivity, and attempted to make love to Kate, which foolishness that masterful damsel brought to speedy confusion. It was also said that when he went back to the Parliament House, every one could understand what he said, and that he got two briefs in one week, which shows how good it is to live in an ancient house with honest people.

"Is there a ghost, dad?" They were sitting before the fire in the hall after dinner—Kate in her favourite posture, leaning forward and nursing her knee. The veterans and I thought that she always looked at her best so, with her fine eyes fixed on the fire, and the light bringing her face into relief against the shadow. We saw her feet then—one lifted a little from the ground—and V. C. declared they were the smallest you could find for a woman of her size.