“If an angel from heaven told me that Lady Dundee was untrue I would not believe him, and you, you I take to be rather a devil from hell. Said Livingstone eight days? And two are passed. I was proposing to go south for other ends, and now I shall not fail to be there before that appointment. But it may be, Grimond, I shall have to kill you.”
CHAPTER IV
THOU ALSO FALSE
Dundee was a man of many trials, and one on whom fortune seldom smiled; but the most cruel days of his life were the ride from Inverness by the Pass of Corryarrack to Blair Athole, and from Blair Athole by Perth to Dundee. He learned then, as many men have done in times of their distress, the horror of the night time and the blessing of the light. Had his mind not been affected by the universal treachery of the time, and the disappointments he had met on every side, till it seemed that every man except himself was hunting after his own interest, and no one, high or low, could be trusted, he had from the beginning treated Grimond’s story with contempt and made it a subject of jest. He would no more have doubted Jean’s honor than that of his mother. He would have known that Grimond never lied, and that he did not often drink, but he also would have been sure that even if it was Jean who met 238 Livingstone, that there was some good explanation, and he never would have allowed his thoughts to dwell upon the matter. If Jean had been told that Graham had been seen with a lady of the Court at Whitehall, she would have scorned to question him, and indeed she had often laughed at the snares certain frail beauties of that day had laid for him in London. For she knew him, and he also knew her. But he was sorely tried in spirit and driven half crazy by the disloyalty of his friends, and it is in those circumstances of morbid, unhealthy feeling that the seeds of suspicion find a root and grow, as the microbes settle upon susceptible and disordered organs of the body.
As it was, he was divided in his mind, and it was the alternation of dark and bright moods which made his agony. Spring had only reached the Highlands as he rode southwards, but its first touches had made everything winsome and beautiful. While patches of snow lingered on the higher hills, and glittered in the sunlight, the grass in the hollows between the heather was putting on the first greenness of the season, and the heather was sprouting bravely; the burns were full-bodied with the melting snow from the higher levels and rushing with a pleasant noise to join the 239 river. As he came down from the bare uplands at Dalnaspidal into the sheltered glen at Blair Castle, the trees made an arch of the most delicate emerald over his head, for the buds were beginning to open, and the wind blew gently upon his face. The sight of habitations as he came nearer to the Lowlands, the sound of the horses’ feet upon the road, the gayety of his band of troopers, the children playing before their humble cottages, the exhilarating air, and the hope of the season when winter was gone, told upon his heart and reënforced him. The despair of the night before, when he tossed to and fro upon a wretched bed or paced up and down before the farmhouse door, imagining everything that was horrible, passed away as a nightmare. Was there ever such madness as that he, John Graham, should be doubting his wife, Jean Cochrane, whom he had won from the midst of his enemies, and who had left her mother and her mother’s house to be his bride? How brave she had been, how self-sacrificing, how uncomplaining, how proud in heart and high in spirit; she had given up the whole world for him; she was the bravest and purest of ladies. That his wife of those years of storm and the mother a few weeks ago of his child should forget her vows and 240 her love, and condescend to a base intrigue; that she should meet a lover in the orchard where they often used to walk, where the blossom would now be opening on the trees, that Livingstone, whom he knew and counted in a sense a friend, though he held King William’s commission now, and had not stood by the right side, should take the opportunity of his absence to seduce his wife! It was a hideous and incredible idea, some mad mistake which could be easily explained. Dundee, throwing off his black and brooding burden of thought, would touch his horse with the spur and gallop for a mile in gayety of heart and then ride on his way, singing some Cavalier song, till Grimond, who kept away from his master those days and rode among the troopers, would shake his head, and say to himself, “God grant he be not fey” (possessed). Dundee would continue in high spirits till the evening shadows began to fall, and then the other shadow would lengthen across his soul. The night before he met his wife he spent in Glamis Castle, and the grim, austere beauty of that ancient house affected his imagination. Up its winding stairs with their bare, stern walls men had gone in their armor, through the thickness of the outer walls secret stairs connected mysterious 241 chambers one with another. Strange deeds had been done in those low-roofed rooms with their dark carved furniture, and there were secret places in the castle where ghosts of the past had their habitation. Weird figures were said to flit through the castle at night, restless spirits which revisited the scene of former tragedies and crimes, and the room in which Graham slept was known to be haunted. Alas! he needed no troubled ancestor of the Strathmore house to visit him, for his own thoughts were sufficient torment, and through the brief summer night and then through the dawning light of the morning he threshed the question which gnawed his heart. Evil suggestions and suspicious remembrances of the past, which would have fled before the sunlight, surrounded him and looked out at him from the shadow with gibbering faces. Had he not been told that Jean laid traps for him in Paisley that she might secure the safety of her lover Pollock, and also of her kinsman, Sir John Cochrane? Had she not often spoken warmly of that Covenanting minister and expressed her bitter regret that her husband had compassed Pollock’s death? She had tried to keep him from attending the Convention, and of late days had often suggested that he had better 242 be at peace and not stir up the country. After all, can you take out of the life what is bred in the bone?––and Jean Cochrane was of a Covenanting stock, and her mother a very harridan of bigotry. Might there not have been some sense in the fear of his friends that he would no longer be loyal to the good cause, and was Jock Grimond’s grudge against his marriage mere stupidity and jealousy? Everyone was securing his safety and adjusting himself to the new regime; there was hardly a Lowland gentleman who had irretrievably pledged himself to King James, and as for the chiefs, they would fight for their own hand as they had always done, and could only be counted on for one thing, and that was securing plunder. Was not he alone, and would not he soon be either on the scaffold or an exile? The Whigs would soon be reigning in their glory over Scotland, and it would be well with everyone that had their password. If he were out of the way, would there not be a strong temptation for her to make terms with her family and buy security by loyalty to their side? No doubt she was a strong woman, but, after all, she was only a woman, and was she able to stand alone and live forsaken at Glenogilvie, with friends neither among Cavaliers nor Covenanters? 243 Could he blame her if she separated herself from a ruined cause and a discredited husband, for would she not be only doing what soldiers and courtiers had done, what everybody except himself was doing? Why should she, a young woman with life before her, tie herself up with a hopeless cause, and one who might be called commander-in-chief of James’s army, but who had nothing to show for it but a handful of reckless troopers and a few hundred Highland thieves, a man whom all sensible people would be regarding as a mad adventurer? Would it not be a stroke of wisdom––the Whigs were a cunning crew, and he recalled that Lord Dundonald was an adroit schemer––to buy the future for herself and her child by selling him and returning to her old allegiance? There was enough reality in this ghost to give it, as it were, a bodily shape, and Graham, who had been flinging himself about, struck out with his fist as if at flesh and blood.
“Damn you, begone, begone!”
For a while he lay quietly and made as though he would have slept. Then the ghosts began to gather around his bed again as if the Covenanters he had murdered had come from the other world and were having their day of vengeance. It must have been Jean 244 who met Livingstone in the orchard, and it must have been an assignation. There was no woman in Dudhope had her height and carriage, and the vision of her proud face that he had loved so well brought scalding tears to his eyes. For what purpose had she met Livingstone, if not to arrange some base surrender, if not to give information about him so that MacKay might find him more easily? Was it worse than that, if worse could be when all was black as hell? Livingstone had known her for years; it had been evident that he admired her; he was an attractive man of his kind. Nothing was more likely in that day, when unlawful love was not a shame, but a boast, than that he had been making his suit to Lady Dundee. Her husband was away, likely never to return; she was a young and handsome woman, and Livingstone had time upon his hands at Dundee. A month ago he had sworn that the virtue of his wife was unassailable as that of the Blessed Virgin; he would have sworn it two days ago as he rode through Killiecrankie; but now, with the brooding darkness round him and its awful shapes peopling the room, he was not sure of anything that was good and true. Had he not lived at Court, had he not known the great ladies, had not they 245 tried to seduce him, and flung themselves at his head? Was not Jean a woman like the rest, and why should his wife be faithful when every other woman of rank was an adulteress! This, then, was the end of it all, and he had suffered the last stroke of treachery, and the last stain of dishonor. How he had been befooled and bewitched; what an actress she had been, with a manner that would have deceived the wisest! What a stupid, blundering fool he had been! There are times, the black straits of life, when a man must either pray or curse. If he be a saint he will pray, but Dundee was not a saint, so he rose from his bed, and sweeping away the evil shapes from before him with his right arm, and then with his left, as one makes his road through high-standing corn that closes in behind him, he raged from side to side of the room in which the day was faintly breaking, while unaccustomed oaths poured from his mouth. One thing only remained for him, and at the thought peace began to come. He had planned weeks ago to visit Dundee again and give the chance to Livingstone’s dragoons to join him, for he had reason to believe that they were not unalterably loyal. He was on his way to Dundee now, and to-morrow he 246 would be there, but he cared little what the dragoons would do; he had other folk to deal with. If he found he had been betrayed at home, and by her who had lain on his breast, and by a man whom he had counted his friend, they should know the vengeance of the Grahams. “Both of them––both of them to hell, and then my work is done and I shall go to see them!”
It was characteristic of the man that, though he had no assistance from Grimond in the morning––for Jock dared not go near him––Dundee appeared in perfect order, even more carefully dressed than usual; but as he rode from the door of Glamis Castle through the beautiful domain of park and wood, Grimond was aghast at his pinched and drawn face and the gleam in his eye. “May the Lord hae mercy, but I doot sairly that he is aff his head, and that there will be wild work at Dudhope.” And while Grimond had all the imperturbable self-satisfaction and unshaken dourness of the Lowland Scot, and never on any occasion acknowledged that he could be wrong or changed his way, he almost wished that he had left this affair alone and had not meddled between his master and his master’s wife. It was again a fair and sunny day, when the freshness of 247 spring was feeling the first touch of summer, as Dundee and his men rode up the pass through the hills from Strathmore to Dundee. There were times when Graham would have breathed his horse at the highest point, from which you are able to look down upon the sea, and drunk in the pure, invigorating air, and gazed at the distant stretches of the ocean. But he had no time to lose that day; he had work to do without delay. With all his delirium––and Graham’s brain was hot, and every nerve tingling––he retained the instincts of a soldier, and just because he was so suspicious of his reception he took the more elaborate precautions. Before he entered the pass his scouts made sure that he would not be ambuscaded, for it might be that his approach was known, and that Livingstone, taking him at a disadvantage in the narrow way, by one happy stroke would complete his triumph. As he came near Dundee, he sent out a party to reconnoitre, while he remained with his troop to watch events. When the sound of firing was heard he knew that the garrison was on the alert, and that the town could only be taken by assault. The soldiers came galloping back with several wounded men, having left one dead. Livingstone was for the moment safe in his fastness, and it was 248 evident that the dragoons were not in a mind to desert their colors. By this time it would be known at Dudhope that he was near, and the sooner he arrived the more chance of finding his wife. It was possible that Livingstone had garrisoned Dudhope, and that if he rode forward alone he might be snared. But this risk he would take in the heat of his mind, and summoning Grimond with a stern gesture to his side, and ordering the soldiers to follow at a slight interval and to surround the castle, he galloped forward to the door. The place appeared to be deserted, but at last, in answer to his knocking, as he beat on the door with the hilt of his sword, it was opened by an old woman who seemed the only servant left, and who was driven speechless by her master’s unexpected appearance and his wild expression. For, although John Graham had been a stern as well as just and kind master, and although he had often been angry, and was never to be trifled with, no one had ever seen him before other than cool and calm, smooth-spoken and master of himself.