BRINGS ME TO HELVOETSLUYS IN WINTER WEATHER
Kilbride and I parted company with the others once we had got within the lines of Holland; the cateran (as I would sometimes be calling him in a joke) giving them as much money as might take them leisuredly to the south they meant to make for, and he and I proceeded on our way across the country towards the mouth of the River Maas.
It was never my lot before nor since to travel with a more cheerful companion. Not the priest himself had greater humour in his composition, and what was more it was a jollity I was able the better to understand, for while much of Hamilton's esprit missed the spark with me because it had a foreign savour, the pawkiness of Kilbride was just the marrow of that I had seen in folks at home. And still the man was strange, for often he had melancholies. Put him in a day of rain and wind and you would hear him singing like a laverock the daftest songs in Erse; or give him a tickle task at haggling in the language of signs with a broad-bottomed bargeman, or the driver of a rattel-van, and the fun would froth in him like froth on boiling milk.
Indeed, and I should say like cream, for this Mac-Kellar man had, what is common enough among the clans in spite of our miscalling, a heart of jeel for the tender moment and a heart of iron for the hard. But black, black, were his vapours when the sun shone, which is surely the poorest of excuses for dolours. I think he hated the flatness of the land we travelled in. To me it was none amiss, for though it was winter I could fancy how rich would be the grass of July in the polders compared with our poor stunted crops at home, and that has ever a cheerful influence on any man that has been bred in Lowland fields. But he (if I did not misread his eye) looked all ungratefully on the stretching leagues that ever opened before us as we sailed on waterways or jolted on the roads.
“I do not ken how it may be with you, Mr. Greig,” he said one day as, somewhere in Brabant, our sluggish vessel opened up a view of canal that seemed to stretch so far it pricked the eye of the setting sun, and the windmills whirled on either hand ridiculous like the games of children—“I do not ken how it may be with you, but I'm sick of this country. It's no better nor a bannock, and me so fond of Badenoch!”
“Indeed and there's a sameness about every part of it,” I confessed, “and yet it has its qualities. See the sun on yonder island—'tis pleasant enough to my notion, and as for the folk, they are not the cut of our own, but still they have very much in common with folks I've seen in Ayr.”
He frowned at that unbelievingly, and cast a sour eye upon some women that stood upon a bridge. “Troth!” said he, “you would not compare these limmers with our own. I have not seen a light foot and a right dark eye since ever I put the back of me to the town of Inverness in the year of 'Fifty-six.'”
“Nor I since I left the Mearns,” I cried, suddenly thinking of Isobel and forgetting all that lay between that lass and me.
“Oh! oh!” cried Kilbride. “And that's the way of it? Therms more than Clemie Walkinshaw, is there? I was ill to convince that a nephew of Andy Greig's began the game at the age of twenty-odd with a lady that might have been his mother.”
I felt very much ashamed that he should have any knowledge of this part of my history, and seeing it he took to bantering me.
“Come, come!” said he, “you must save my reputation with myself for penetration, for I aye argued with Buhot that your tanglement with madame was something short of innocency for all your mim look, and he was for swearing the lady had found a fool.”
“I am beat to understand how my affairs came to be the topic of dispute with you and Buhot?” said I, astonished.
“And what for no'?” said he. “Wasn't the man's business to find out things, and would you have me with no interest in a ploy when it turned up? There were but the two ways of it—you were all the gomeral in love that Buhot thought you, or you were Andy Greig's nephew and willing to win the woman's favour (for all her antiquity) by keeping Buhot in the news of Hamilton's movements.”
“Good God!” I cried, “that was a horrible alternative!” even then failing to grasp all that he implied.
“Maybe,” he said pawkily; “but you cannot deny you kept them very well informed upon your master's movements, otherwise it had gone very hard perhaps with his Royal Highness.”
“Me!” I cried. “I would have as soon informed upon my father. And who was there to inform?”
Kilbride looked at me curiously as if he half doubted my innocence. “It is seldom I have found the man Buhot in a lie of the sort,” said he, “but he led me to understand that what information he had of the movements of the priest came from yourself.”
I jumped to my feet, and almost choked in denying it.
“Oh, very well, very well!” said Kilbride coolly. “There is no need to make a fracas about the matter. I am just telling you what Buhot told me. And troth! it was a circumstantial story he had of it; for he said that the Marshal Duke de Bellisle, and Monsieur Florentin, and Monsieur Berrier, and all the others of the Cabinet, had Fleuriau's name and direction from yourself, and found the plot had some connection with the affair of Damiens. George Kelly, the Prince's secretary, was another man that told me.” He gazed along the deck of the scow we sat in, as if thinking hard, and then turned to me with a hesitating suggestion. “Perhaps,” said he, “you are forgetting. Perhaps you wrote the woman and told her innocently enough, and that would come to the same thing.”
I was overwhelmed with confusion at the idea, though the possibility of my letters being used had once before occurred to me.
“Well, if you must know, it is true I wrote some letters to Miss Walkinshaw,” I confessed shamefacedly. “But they were very carefully transmitted by Bernard the Swiss to her, for I got her answers back.”
He burst out laughing.
“For simplicity you beat all!” cried he. “You sent your news through the Swiss, that was in Buhot's pay, and took the charge from Hamilton's pistols, and did his part in helping you to escape from jyle with a great degree of humour as those of us who knew what was afoot had to agree, and you think the man would swither about peeping into a letter you entrusted to him, particularly if it was directed to hersel'! The sleep-bag was under your head sure enough, as the other man said.”
“And I was the unconscious wretch that betrayed our hiding in the Hôtel Dieu!” I cried with much chagrin, seeing at a flash what all this meant. “If I had Bernard here I could thraw his neck.”
“Indeed,” said he, “and what for should it be Bernard? The man but did what he was told, and there, by my troth! when I think of it, I'm no' so sure that he was any different from yourself.”
“What do you mean?” said I.
“Oh, just that hersel' told you to keep her informed of your movements and you did so. In Bernard and you she had a pair of spies instead of only the one had she trusted in either.”
“And what in all the world would she be doing that for?”
“What but for her lover the prince?” said he with a sickening promptness that some way left me without a doubt he spoke with knowledge. “Foul fa' the day he ever clapt eyes on her! for she has the cunning of the fox, though by all accounts a pleasant person. They say she has a sister that's in the service of the queen at St. James's, and who kens but for all her pretended affection for Tearlach she may be playing all the time into the hands of his enemies? She made you and this Bernard the means of putting an end to the Jesuit plot upon his Royal Highness by discovering the source of it, and now the Jesuits, as I'm told, are to be driven furth the country and putten to the horn.”
I was stunned by this revelation of what a tool I had been in the hands of one I fancied briefly that I was in love with. For long I sat silent pondering on it, and at last unable to make up my mind whether I should laugh or swear. Kilbride, while affecting to pay no heed to me, was keen enough to see my perturbation, and had, I think, a sort of pride that he had been able to display such an astuteness.
“I'm afraid,” said I at last, “there is too much probability in all that you have said and thought. I am a stupendous ass, Mr. MacKellar, and you are a very clever man.”
“Not at all, not at all!” he protested hurriedly. “I have just some natural Hielan' interest in affairs of intrigue, and you have not (by your leave) had my advantages of the world, for I have seen much of the evil as well as the good of it, and never saw a woman's hand in aught yet but I wondered what mischief she was planning. There's much, I'm telling you, to be learned about a place like Fontainebleau or Versailles, and I advantaged myself so well of my opportunities there that you could not drive a hole but I would put a nail in it, as the other man said.”
“Well,” said I, “my hope is that I may never meet the woman again, and that's without a single angry feeling to her.”
“You need not fear about that,” said he. “The thing that does not lie in your road will never break your leg, as the other man said, and I'll be surprised if she puts herself in your way again now that her need for you is done. A score of your friends in Dunkerque could have told you that she was daft about him. I might be vexed for you if I did not know from your own mouth of the other one in Mearns.”
“We'll say nothing about that,” I says, “for that's a tale that's by wi'. She's lost to me.”
He gave a little chuckle and had that turn in the eye that showed he had a curious thought.
“What are you laughing at?” I asked. “Oh, just an old word we have in the Language, that with a two-deer stag-hound it will be happening often that a stag's amissing.”
“There's another thing I would like you to tell me out of your experience,” I said, “and that is the reason for the Prince's doing me a good turn with the one hand and a bad one with the other; using his efforts to get me the lieutenancy and at the same time putting a man on my track to quarrel with me?”
“It's as plain as the nose on your face,” he cried. “It was no great situation he got you when it was in the Regiment d'Auvergne, as you have discovered, but it would be got I'll warrant on the pressure of the Walkinshaw one. Just because she had that interest in you to press him for the post, and you were in the trim to keep up a correspondence with her (though in his own interest, as he must know, so far as she was concerned), he would want you out of the road. Love is like lairdship, Hazel Den, and it puts up very poorly with fellowship, as the other man said.”
I thought of the occasions when his Royal Highness had seen me at night in front of a certain window in the Rue de la Boucherie, and concluded that Kilbride in this too had probably hit the mark.
And so we passed through Holland in many changes of weather that finally turned to a black frost, which covered the canals with ice whereon skated the Dutch folks very pleasantly, but we were the losers, as the rest of our journey had to be made by post.
It was well on in the winter when we got to Helvoetsluys.