Lochinvar: A Novel

And he paused to consider the problem, while Wat divided himself between chuckling at his late enemy's dilemma, thinking what he would say in his coming interview with Barra in the camp, and (what occupied nine out of every ten minutes) wondering how Kate McGhie would receive him in the street of Zaandpoort.

At last the man in the white bandagings had an idea. He clapped his hand suddenly to his brow.

"What a dull dotard am I to forget Sandy Lyall!"

"I know," he continued in explanation, "a certain honest fool of a Scot that hath wedded a wife of the country. He lives but a mile from here and breeds young Flamands for the prince's armies, and ducks for the Amersfort market. We will e'en go find him, and make him deliver of the best in his wardrobe. For he and I count kin in some seventeenth or eighteenth degree, though this is the first time I ever bethought me of claiming it."

And with no more words John Scarlett turned his horse briskly down a side lane, just as the sun was rising and beginning to shine ruddily brown through the morning haze. The sails of a score of windmills darted up suddenly black in the level rush of light, and every hissing goose and waddling, matronly hen had a rosy side and a gray side, together with an attenuated shadow which stretched up the dikes and away across the polders.

Presently Scarlett and his companion, at the foot of a leafy by-lane, came to the house of the Scot who had married the Flemish wife for the very practical purposes described by Scarlett.

The madcap figure in white went forward to the door, while Wat remained behind cackling helplessly with idiot laughter. Scarlett thundered on the warped and sun-whitened deal of the panels with the hilt of his sword. Then, receiving no response, he kicked lustily with his boots and swore roundly at the unseen occupants in a dozen camp dialects.

During his harangues, sulky maledictions grumbled intermittently from the house. Presently an upper window flew open, a splash of dirty water fell souse on the warrior, and still more sadly bedraggled the preposterous quixotry of his attire.

The temper of the master-at-arms was now strained to the breaking-point. "Sandy Lyall," he cried – and to do him justice, his voice was more full of sorrow than of anger – "Sandy Lyall, of Pittenweem, listen to me, John Scarlett, gin ye dinna come doon this minute and get me a suit o' claes, warm and dry, I'll thraw your dirty Fifish neck – aye, like a twist of rotten straw at a rick-thatching."

But even this explicit malediction threatened to go by without effect.

But at long and last there looked out of the small diamond-paned window from which the jar of water had fallen the head of a respectable enough woman, who wore a red shawl wrapped round her coarse black hair in the fashion of a nightcap.

"Decent woman," cried Jack Scarlett to her, "is your man at hame?"

But the woman, feather-bed sleep yet blinking heavily in her eyes, threw up her hands and shrieked aloud at the unexpected apparition of a man thus mountebanking before her window in white and incomplete skin-tights.

Without articulate speech she withdrew her head and fled within. Whereat Scarlett fell to louder knocking than before, exclaiming all the while on the idleness, incapacity, and general uselessness of such men of Fife as had married foreigneering sluts, and especially threatening what he would do to the particular body and soul of Sandy Lyall, sometime indweller in the ancient borough of Pittenweem.

"Never did I see such a man. The ill-faured wife o' him settin' her head out o' a winnock-sole at five in the morning, and Sandy himsel' lyin' snorkin' an' wamblin' in his naked bed like a gussy swine in a stye! Lord, Lord, wait till I get my hands on him! I'll learn him to keep honester men than himsel' waitin' on the loan of his Sabbath gear, crawling partan o' the East Neuk that he is!"

"Aye, John Scarlett, man, but is that you, na?" drawled a quiet, sleepy voice at the window. "Wha wad hae thocht on seeing you in mountebank's cleading so early in the morning? Hae ye been at some play-actin' near by? Ye dinna look as if you had gotten muckle for your pains. Come awa ben, and I'll gar the wife rise an' get ye porridge – siclike porridge as ane can get in this Guid-forsaken country, that is mair like hen-meat than decent brose for Scots thrapples, to my thinkin'!"

"Sandy Lyall!" cried Scarlett, still much incensed, "hear to me! Come down this instant and let me in! Gi'e me a pair o' trews, a coat, and a decent cloak, and let me be gaun, for I am on an errand of great importance which takes me before the Prince of Orange himsel' this very morning, and it befits not a Scot and a soldier to appear before his high mightiness in this costume."

"I'll come doon the noo, as fast as I can don my gear and truss my points!" cried Sandy Lyall. "Ye were aye a rude man and unceevil a' the days o' ye, John Scarlett. But I canna leave ony Scots lad to want for a pair o' breeks and a cloak to cover his nakedness – or what amounts to the same thing, as the monkey said when he sat down on the hot girdle and gat up again before he was fairly rested."

And with these words, Sandy Lyall, of Pittenweem, in the shire of Fife, slowly descended, his feet sounding portentously on the wooden ladder. The door opened, and there was the master of the dwelling standing with outstretched hand, bidding his compatriots welcome to his house. The action would have disarmed a Cossack of Russia. It quenched the anger of John Scarlett like magic.

"Aye, man, an' hoo's a' wi' ye?" he said, as it is the custom for all Scots to say when they forgather with one another in any land under the sun.

After turning out of one drawer and another various articles of his wife's attire, which were clearly not intended (as Sandy remarked) "for breeks to a grown man like John Scarlett," the master of the house at last managed to array his friend somewhat less unsuitably in a coat of dark-blue Rotterdam cloth, adorned with tails, which on his thinner figure clapped readily together in a military manner; a pair of breeches of tanned leather went very well with the boots and sword-belt of buff, which were all that remained to Scarlett of his fine French uniform. The master-at-arms surveyed himself with no small satisfaction.

"For a Fifer, ye are a man of some discernment," he said; "and your duds fit me no that ill. They maun hae been made for ye when ye were younger, and altogether a better-lookin' figure o' a man!"

"Aye; they were cutted oot for me when I was coortin' – no this ane," Sandy Lyall explained, indicating his present wife with a placid, contemptuous thumb, "but a braw, weel-tochered lass oot o' the pairish o' Sant Andros. But she wadna hae me because I cam' frae Pittenweem. She said I smelled o' fish-creels."

"And what, Master Lyall, might have brought you to Flanders?" asked Wat, who had been waiting as patiently as he might while his companion arrayed himself.

He thought that this otiose burgher of Pittenweem must be a strange subject for the religious enthusiasm which was mostly in these days the cause of a man's being exiled from his native country.

"Weel," returned Sandy, with immense and impressive gravity, checking off the details upon the palm of one hand with the index-finger of the other, "ye see the way o't was this: There was a lass, and there was a man, and there was me. And the man and me, we baith wanted the lass – ye comprehend? And the lass didna want but ane o' us. And that ane wasna me. So I gied the man a clour, and he fell to the grund and didna get up. And the lass she gaed and telled. So that was the way that I left my native land for conscience' sake."

Wat marvelled at the simple, quiet-looking man who had so strenuously arranged matters to his satisfaction before leaving his love and the land of his birth.

"Aye, but that wasna the warst o' it," Sandy Lyall went on, "for, a' owin' to that lang-tongued limmer, I had to leave ahint me as thrivin' a cooper's business as there was in a' the heartsome toon o' Pittenweem – aye, and as mony as half a score o' folk owin' me siller! But I owed ither folk a deal mair, and that was aye some consolation."

CHAPTER VI

THE PRINCE OF ORANGE

In a long, low, narrow room in the palace of the stadtholder in the city of Amersfort, sat Murdo, Lord of Barra and the Small Isles. The head of a great though isolated western clan, he had detached himself from the general sentiments of his people with regard to religion and loyalty. First his father and then he himself had taken the Covenanting side in the national struggle – his father through interest and conviction, the son from interest alone. Both, however, had carried with them the unquestioning loyalty of their clan, so that it became an important consideration to any claimant for the throne of Britain who desired quietness in the north to have on his side the McAlisters, Lords of Barra and the Small Isles.

The Prince of Orange had given to both father and son a welcome and a place of refuge when the storm of persecution shook even the wild Highlands and the government was granting to its more zealous adherents letters of fire and sword for the extirpation of suspected clans, and especially for the encouragement of the well-affected by the plunder of rebels and psalm-singers.

Now, in acknowledgment of this timely succor and safe harborage, Barra had, ever since his father's death, given his counsel to the prince on many matters concerning Scotland. Yet, though Murdo McAlister had been used, he had never been fully trusted by William of Orange, nor yet by those wise and farseeing men who stood closest about him. Something crafty in Barra's look, something sinister in his eye, kept those who knew him best from placing complete confidence in him. And there were those who made no difficulty about declaring that Murdo of Barra had a foot in either camp, and that, were it not for the importance of the information sent from Holland to the court of James the Second, my Lord of Barra could very well return home, and enjoy his long barren moorlands and wave-fretted heritages in unvexed peace.

It was yet early morning when Wat and John Scarlett stood before my Lord of Barra in the palace room which he occupied as provost-marshal of the city and camp. They saluted him civilly, while his cold, viperish eye took in the details of their attire with a certain chill and insolent regard, which made Wat quiver from head to foot with desire to kill him.

To judge by the provost-marshal's reception, he might never have seen either of them before. Yet Lochinvar was as certain as that he lived that it was his laugh which had jarred upon him in the passage behind Haxo in the inn of Brederode, and which had been the means of bringing the combat to a close. Yet he, too, must have ridden fast and far since the fight at the inn, if Wat's vivid impression had any basis in fact.

"Your business with me?" inquired Barra, haughtily, looking straight past them into the blank wall behind.

"You know my business," said Walter, abruptly. "I carried out your orders in collecting information with regard to the number of the troops, the position of the regiments, and the defences of the camp and city. This report I was ordered to deliver to an officer of the prince privately – in order, as I was informed, not to offend those dignitaries of the city and others who hated the war and wished ill-success to the prince's campaigns. I set out, therefore, last evening with three of your retainers, supplied for the purpose by you, to the inn of Brederode. There I was met, not by an accredited servant of the prince, but by an officer of the French king, who endeavored first by promises and then by force to obtain the papers from me; and now I have brought back the reports safely to Amersfort, to lay them before the prince in person, and, at the same time, to tax you with double-dealing and treachery."

Barra listened with an amused air.

"And pray, whom do you expect to delude with this cock-and-bull story?" he said. "Not, surely, the prince, in whose company I was till a late hour last night; and not surely myself, who never in my life either issued or heard of any such preposterous order."

"I demand to see the prince, to whom I shall speak my mind," reiterated Walter, still more curtly.

"You shall see the inside of a prison in a few moments," returned Barra, with vicious emphasis. But ere he could summon an officer the inner door opened, and there entered a dark, thin, sallow-faced man, with brilliant, hollow-set eyes, who walked with his head a little forward, as if he had gone all his life in haste.

It was the Prince of Orange himself, dressed in his general's uniform, but without decorations or orders of any kind.

Barra rose at his entrance and remained standing.

"Pray sit down," said the prince to him, "and proceed with your conversation with these gentlemen of your country."

"I was about," said Barra, deferentially, "to commit to prison this soldier of the Douglas Dragoon regiment for a most insolent slander concerning myself, and also for collecting information as to the condition of our forces with intent to communicate it to the enemy. There is, indeed, an officer of the King of France with the man at this very moment, but in disguise."

The prince turned his bright keen eyes upon Wat and Scarlett in turn.

"And you, sir! what have you to say?" he asked, quietly.

Whereupon, nothing daunted, Wat told his plain tale, and showed the order which he had received from Sergeant Davie Dunbar, signed with Barra's name.

"I never wrote the order, and never heard of it," said Barra, who stood, calmly contemptuous, at the prince's elbow.

"Call Sergeant David Dunbar!" ordered the prince.