Lord Alistair's Rebellion

by Allen Upward

The stranger uttered a sound of surprise.

“The Stuart who lives with Mr. Duncan Gilderoy?”

“Yes.” The answer came unwillingly again.

“Then you are the boy I have come here for.”

“I knew that,” said Stuart. And a slightly cunning look came into his eyes.

The man was baffled. He could not quite make up his mind whether the boy had been playing a practical joke on him from the first, or had been merely too dull to explain himself. Londoner-like, he leant a little towards the second supposition, for he was managing clerk to a firm of solicitors in Theobald’s Road, and firmly believed that human nature contained no depths which he had not sounded to their very bottom. He believed that all men were animated by one supreme motive, the making of money, that they were distracted and impeded in their progress towards the goal by the counter-attractions of woman and wine, and that he was the wisest who best withstood these allurements, and kept his gaze steadily fixed on that yellow bull’s-eye of endeavour. He regarded the law as the rules of the game, and knew to a hair exactly how far it was possible to go without breaking them. There was only one irrational element in the man’s life: he was a Wesleyan, and holding it for certain that the doctrine of that sect amounted to an immediate communication to himself from his Maker, of whom he was a good deal afraid, he paid in reluctantly but largely to the Church funds, which he regarded as a species of blackmail levied by God on business men.

The three walked up through the narrow street together. The street was paved with cobble-stones, and ascended in layers or great steps, with one or more houses to a step. The houses themselves would have been called hovels in London, and looking at them, the law-clerk considered that he was walking through a slum. He wondered almost mournfully how human creatures could submit to pass their lives in such miserable conditions. The sight of the bare-footed lads and lasses with their red cheeks and shapely legs woke actual pity in his breast; for he was naturally kind, and his kindness could only find expression in the benevolent wish to take control of all these lives which he understood so little, and shape them into the image of his own.

Stuart had been looking forward to the coming of this man ever since he could remember. He had always known that Duncan Gilderoy was only his foster-father, and that his life would not be lived out on Oig. They had told him that his father and mother lived in France, and that his father was too ill to have his children with him. He could not recollect these legendary parents, who were only known to him by portraits which he religiously cherished, and by letters which came to him regularly from his mother. His father, from whom he received only occasional messages, was the object of a devotion that filled his whole heart; his yearning for that unknown father’s love was one of those passions of childhood which are never told, and which are never forgotten. There was more of awe than love in his thoughts about his mother; she was an Englishwoman, and the tenderness that her letters expressed was overlaid with pious monitions and references to Bible texts. He learned that he had an elder brother, James, who was being educated at a school in England under the casual supervision of the head of the family, who had never noticed Alistair. At some time or other—he was doubtful when—the perception had come that the character of his upbringing was at least partly due to lack of money. The islands and moorlands, the castles and broad acres that made up the great inheritance of Trent and Colonsay were all tributary to certain men of law in London and in Edinburgh, whom the clansmen of Oig hated as a conquered nation hates the invader encamped upon its soil.

Alistair knew also—for these things were the history and politics of Oig—that his father stood next in succession to the dukedom, and that his brother’s favour with the reigning Duke was in right of his exalted destiny as heir.

Thus the boy, reared in the society of herdsmen and fishers, who were to him as kinsmen of a lower rank, had had always before his eyes the vision of the great world in which he was one day to play a part. Civilization shone for him afar off, as it shines for the native of some colonial wilderness, in all the hues of hope and wonder. How often had he climbed to the top of the cliff that overlooked the Sound of Oig, and laid himself down on the wind-mown grass, looking and longing for the first peep of that sooty feather which he had taken for the signal of emancipation. No instinct had ever warned him that the little noisy packet was a slaveship, the galley of the great Anglo-Roman Raj, coming to make him captive, and carry him off to be tamed and trained into a citizen of the Raj, to speak its tongue and wear its dress, and learn its manners, and its laws, till the innermost pulse of his being should be timed to the Anglo-Roman time, and the ancient Pictish blood in his veins should forget its source, and run as if through Anglo-Roman ducts.