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CHAPTER X
PASSAGES AT NEW YORK
I have mentioned I was resolved to steal a march upon the Master; and this, with the complicity of Captain M’Murtrie, was mighty easily effected: a boat being partly loaded on the one side of our ship, and the Master placed on board of it, the while a skiff put off from the other, carrying me alone. I had no more trouble in finding a direction to my lord’s house, whither I went at top speed, and which I found to be on the outskirts of the place, a very suitable mansion, in a fine garden, with an extraordinary large barn, byre, and stable, all in one. It was here my lord was walking when I arrived; indeed, it had become his chief place of frequentation, and his mind was now filled with farming. I burst in upon him breathless, and gave him my news: which was indeed no news at all, several ships having outsailed the Nonesuch in the interval.
“We have been expecting you long,” said my lord; “and indeed, of late days, ceased to expect you any more. I am glad to take your hand again, Mackellar. I thought you had been at the bottom of the sea.”
“Ah! my lord, would God I had!” cried I. “Things would have been better for yourself.”
“Not in the least,” says he grimly. “I could not ask better. There is a long score to pay, and now – at last – I can begin to pay it.”
I cried out against his security.
“O!” says he, “this is not Durrisdeer, and I have taken my precautions. His reputation awaits him; I have prepared a welcome for my brother. Indeed, fortune has served me; for I found here a merchant of Albany who knew him after the ’Forty-five, and had mighty convenient suspicions of a murder: some one of the name of Chew it was, another Albanian. No one here will be surprised if I deny him my door; he will not be suffered to address my children, nor even to salute my wife: as for myself, I make so much exception for a brother that he may speak to me. I should lose my pleasure else,” says my lord, rubbing his palms.
Presently he bethought himself, and set men off running, with billets, to summon the magnates of the province. I cannot recall what pretext he employed; at least, it was successful; and when our ancient enemy appeared upon the scene, he found my lord pacing in front of his house under some trees of shade, with the Governor upon one hand and various notables upon the other. My lady, who was seated in the verandah, rose with a very pinched expression and carried her children into the house.
The Master, well dressed, and with an elegant walking-sword, bowed to the company in a handsome manner and nodded to my lord with familiarity. My lord did not accept the salutation, but looked upon his brother with bended brows.
“Well, sir,” says he at last, “what ill wind brings you hither of all places, where (to our common disgrace) your reputation has preceded you?”
“Your lordship is pleased to be civil,” cries the Master, with a fine start.
“I am pleased to be very plain,” returned my lord; “because it is needful you should clearly understand your situation. At home; where you were so little known, it was still possible to keep appearances; that would be quite vain in this province; and I have to tell you that I am quite resolved to wash my hands of you. You have already ruined me almost to the door, as you ruined my father before me; – whose heart you also broke. Your crimes escape the law; but my friend the Governor has promised protection to my family. Have a care, sir!” cries my lord, shaking his cane at him: “if you are observed to utter two words to any of my innocent household, the law shall be stretched to make you smart for it.”
“Ah!” says the Master, very slowly. “And so this is the advantage of a foreign land! These gentlemen are unacquainted with our story, I perceive. They do not know that I am the true Lord Durrisdeer; they do not know you are my younger brother, sitting in my place under a sworn family compact; they do not know (or they would not be seen with you in familiar correspondence) that every acre is mine before God Almighty – and every doit of the money you withhold from me, you do it as a thief, a perjurer, and a disloyal brother!”
“General Clinton,” I cried, “do not listen to his lies. I am the steward of the estate, and there is not one word of truth in it. The man is a forfeited rebel turned into a hired spy: there is his story in two words.”
It was thus (in the heat of the moment) I let slip his infamy.
“Fellow,” said the Governor, turning his face sternly on the Master, “I know more of you than you think for. We have some broken ends of your adventures in the provinces, which you will do very well not to drive me to investigate. There is the disappearance of Mr. Jacob Chew with all his merchandise; there is the matter of where you came ashore from with so much money and jewels, when you were picked up by a Bermudan out of Albany. Believe me, if I let these matters lie, it is in commiseration for your family, and out of respect for my valued friend, Lord Durrisdeer.”
There was a murmur of applause from the provincials.
“I should have remembered how a title would shine out in such a hole as this,” says the Master, white as a sheet: “no matter how unjustly come by. It remains for me, then, to die at my lord’s door, where my dead body will form a very cheerful ornament.”
“Away with your affectations!” cries my lord. “You know very well I have no such meaning; only to protect myself from calumny, and my home from your intrusion. I offer you a choice. Either I shall pay your passage home on the first ship, when you may perhaps be able to resume your occupations under Government, although God knows I would rather see you on the highway! Or, if that likes you not, stay here and welcome! I have inquired the least sum on which body and soul can be decently kept together in New York; so much you shall have, paid weekly; and if you cannot labour with your hands to better it, high time you should betake yourself to learn. The condition is – that you speak with no member of my family except myself,” he added.
I do not think I have ever seen any man so pale as was the Master; but he was erect and his mouth firm.
“I have been met here with some very unmerited insults,” said he, “from which I have certainly no idea to take refuge by flight. Give me your pittance; I take it without shame, for it is mine already – like the shirt upon your back; and I choose to stay until these gentlemen shall understand me better. Already they must spy the cloven hoof, since with all your pretended eagerness for the family honour, you take a pleasure to degrade it in my person.”
“This is all very fine,” says my lord; “but to us who know you of old, you must be sure it signifies nothing. You take that alternative out of which you think that you can make the most. Take it, if you can, in silence; it will serve you better in the long-run, you may believe me, than this ostentation of ingratitude.”
“O, gratitude, my lord!” cries the Master, with a mounting intonation, and his forefinger very conspicuously lifted up. “Be at rest: it will not fail you. It now remains that I should salute these gentlemen whom we have wearied with our family affairs.”
And he bowed to each in succession, settled his walking-sword, and took himself off, leaving every one amazed at his behaviour, and me not less so at my lord’s.
We were now to enter on a changed phase of this family division. The Master was by no manner of means so helpless as my lord supposed, having at his hand, and entirely devoted to his service, an excellent artist in all sorts of goldsmith work. With my lord’s allowance, which was not so scanty as he had described it, the pair could support life; and all the earnings of Secundra Dass might be laid upon one side for any future purpose. That this was done, I have no doubt. It was in all likelihood the Master’s design to gather a sufficiency, and then proceed in quest of that treasure which he had buried long before among the mountains; to which, if he had confined himself, he would have been more happily inspired. But unfortunately for himself and all of us, he took counsel of his anger. The public disgrace of his arrival – which I sometimes wonder he could manage to survive – rankled in his bones; he was in that humour when a man – in the words of the old adage – will cut off his nose to spite his face; and he must make himself a public spectacle in the hopes that some of the disgrace might spatter on my lord.
He chose, in a poor quarter of the town, a lonely, small house of boards, overhung with some acacias. It was furnished in front with a sort of hutch opening, like that of a dog’s kennel, but about as high as a table from the ground, in which the poor man that built it had formerly displayed some wares; and it was this which took the Master’s fancy, and possibly suggested his proceedings. It appears, on board the pirate ship he had acquired some quickness with the needle – enough, at least, to play the part of tailor in the public eye, which was all that was required by the nature of his vengeance. A placard was hung above the hutch, bearing these words in something of the following disposition:
JAMES DURIE, formerly MASTER of BALLANTRAE
CLOTHES NEATLY CLOUTED
SECUNDRA DASS, DECAYED GENTLEMAN OF INDIA
FINE GOLDSMITH WORK
Underneath this, when he had a job, my gentleman sat withinside tailor-wise and busily stitching. I say, when he had a job; but such customers as came were rather for Secundra, and the Master’s sewing would be more in the manner of Penelope’s. He could never have designed to gain even butter to his bread by such a means of livelihood: enough for him that there was the name of Durie dragged in the dirt on the placard, and the sometime heir of that proud family set up cross-legged in public for a reproach upon his brother’s meanness. And in so far his device succeeded that there was murmuring in the town and a party formed highly inimical to my lord. My lord’s favour with the Governor laid him more open on the other side; my lady (who was never so well received in the colony) met with painful innuendoes; in a party of women, where it would be the topic most natural to introduce, she was almost debarred from the naming of needle-work; and I have seen her return with a flushed countenance, and vow that she would go abroad no more.
In the meanwhile my lord dwelled in his decent mansion, immersed in farming; a popular man with his intimates, and careless or unconscious of the rest. He laid on flesh; had a bright, busy face; even the heat seemed to prosper with him; and my lady – in despite of her own annoyances – daily blessed Heaven her father should have left her such a paradise. She had looked on from a window upon the Master’s humiliation; and from that hour appeared to feel at ease. I was not so sure myself; as time went on, there seemed to me a something not quite wholesome in my lord’s condition. Happy he was, beyond a doubt, but the grounds of this felicity were secret; even in the bosom of his family he brooded with manifest delight upon some private thought; and I conceived at last the suspicion (quite unworthy of us both) that he kept a mistress somewhere in the town. Yet he went little abroad, and his day was very fully occupied; indeed, there was but a single period, and that pretty early in the morning, while Mr. Alexander was at his lesson-book, of which I was not certain of the disposition. It should be borne in mind, in the defence of that which I now did, that I was always in some fear my lord was not quite justly in his reason; and with our enemy sitting so still in the same town with us, I did well to be upon my guard. Accordingly I made a pretext, had the hour changed at which I taught Mr. Alexander the foundation of ciphering and the mathematic, and set myself instead to dog my master’s footsteps.
Every morning, fair or foul, he took his gold-headed cane, set his hat on the back of his head – a recent habitude, which I thought to indicate a burning brow – and betook himself to make a certain circuit. At the first his way was among pleasant trees and beside a graveyard, where he would sit a while, if the day were fine, in meditation. Presently the path turned down to the water-side, and came back along the harbour-front and past the Master’s booth. As he approached this second part of his circuit, my Lord Durrisdeer began to pace more leisurely, like a man delighted with the air and scene; and before the booth, half-way between that and the water’s edge, would pause a little, leaning on his staff. It was the hour when the Master sate within upon his board and plied his needle. So these two brothers would gaze upon each other with hard faces; and then my lord move on again, smiling to himself.
It was but twice that I must stoop to that ungrateful necessity of playing spy. I was then certain of my lord’s purpose in his rambles and of the secret source of his delight. Here was his mistress: it was hatred and not love that gave him healthful colours. Some moralists might have been relieved by the discovery; I confess that I was dismayed. I found this situation of two brethren not only odious in itself, but big with possibilities of further evil; and I made it my practice, in so far as many occupations would allow, to go by a shorter path and be secretly present at their meeting. Coming down one day a little late, after I had been near a week prevented, I was struck with surprise to find a new development. I should say there was a bench against the Master’s house, where customers might sit to parley with the shopman; and here I found my lord seated, nursing his cane and looking pleasantly forth upon the bay. Not three feet from him sate the Master, stitching. Neither spoke; nor (in this new situation) did my lord so much as cast a glance at his enemy. He tasted his neighbourhood, I must suppose, less indirectly in the bare proximity of person; and, without doubt, drank deep of hateful pleasures.
He had no sooner come away than I openly joined him.
“My lord, my lord,” said I, “this is no manner of behaviour.”
“I grow fat upon it,” he replied: and not merely the words, which were strange enough, but the whole character of his expression, shocked me.
“I warn you, my lord, against this indulgency of evil feeling,” said I. “I know not to which it is more perilous, the soul or the reason; but you go the way to murder both.”
“You cannot understand,” said he. “You had never such mountains of bitterness upon your heart.”
“And if it were no more,” I added, “you will surely goad the man to some extremity.”
“To the contrary; I am breaking his spirit,” says my lord.
Every morning for hard upon a week my lord took his same place upon the bench. It was a pleasant place, under the green acacias, with a sight upon the bay and shipping, and a sound (from some way off) of mariners singing at their employ. Here the two sate without speech or any external movement, beyond that of the needle, or the Master biting off a thread, for he still clung to his pretence of industry; and here I made a point to join them, wondering at myself and my companions. If any of my lord’s friends went by, he would hail them cheerfully, and cry out he was there to give some good advice to his brother, who was now (to his delight) grown quite industrious. And even this the Master accepted with a steady countenance; what was in his mind, God knows, or perhaps Satan only.
All of a sudden, on a still day of what they call the Indian Summer, when the woods were changed into gold and pink and scarlet, the Master laid down his needle and burst into a fit of merriment. I think he must have been preparing it a long while in silence, for the note in itself was pretty naturally pitched; but breaking suddenly from so extreme a silence, and in circumstances so averse from mirth, it sounded ominously on my ear.
“Henry,” said he, “I have for once made a false step, and for once you have had the wit to profit by it. The farce of the cobbler ends to-day; and I confess to you (with my compliments) that you have had the best of it. Blood will out; and you have certainly a choice idea of how to make yourself unpleasant.”
Never a word said my lord; it was just as though the Master had not broken silence.
“Come,” resumed the Master, “do not be sulky; it will spoil your attitude. You can now afford (believe me) to be a little gracious; for I have not merely a defeat to accept. I had meant to continue this performance till I had gathered enough money for a certain purpose; I confess ingenuously I have not the courage. You naturally desire my absence from this town; I have come round by another way to the same idea. And I have a proposition to make; or, if your lordship prefers, a favour to ask.”
“Ask it,” says my lord.
“You may have heard that I had once in this country a considerable treasure,” returned the Master; “it matters not whether or no – such is the fact; and I was obliged to bury it in a spot of which I have sufficient indications. To the recovery of this has my ambition now come down; and, as it is my own, you will not grudge it me.”
“Go and get it,” says my lord. “I shall make no opposition.”
“Yes,” said the Master; “but to do so I must find men and carriage. The way is long and rough, and the country infested with wild Indians. Advance me only so much as shall be needful: either as a lump sum, in lieu of my allowance; or, if you prefer it, as a loan, which I shall repay on my return. And then, if you so decide, you may have seen the last of me.”
My lord stared him steadily in the eyes; there was a hard smile upon his face, but he uttered nothing.
“Henry,” said the Master, with a formidable quietness, and drawing at the same time somewhat back – “Henry, I had the honour to address you.”
“Let us be stepping homeward,” says my lord to me, who was plucking at his sleeve; and with that he rose, stretched himself, settled his hat, and, still without a syllable of response, began to walk steadily along the shore.
I hesitated a while between the two brothers, so serious a climax did we seem to have reached. But the Master had resumed his occupation, his eyes lowered, his hand seemingly as deft as ever; and I decided to pursue my lord.
“Are you mad?” I cried, so soon as I had overtook him. “Would you cast away so fair an opportunity?”
“Is it possible you should still believe in him?” inquired my lord, almost with a sneer.
“I wish him forth of this town!” I cried. “I wish him anywhere and anyhow but as he is.”
“I have said my say,” returned my lord, “and you have said yours. There let it rest.”
But I was bent on dislodging the Master. That sight of him patiently returning to his needlework was more than my imagination could digest. There was never a man made, and the Master the least of any, that could accept so long a series of insults. The air smelt blood to me. And I vowed there should be no neglect of mine if, through any chink of possibility, crime could be yet turned aside. That same day, therefore, I came to my lord in his business room, where he sat upon some trivial occupation.
“My lord,” said I, “I have found a suitable investment for my small economies. But these are unhappily in Scotland; it will take some time to lift them, and the affair presses. Could your lordship see his way to advance me the amount against my note?”
He read me a while with keen eyes. “I have never inquired into the state of your affairs, Mackellar,” says he. “Beyond the amount of your caution, you may not be worth a farthing, for what I know.”
“I have been a long while in your service, and never told a lie, nor yet asked a favour for myself,” said I, “until to-day.”
“A favour for the Master,” he returned quietly. “Do you take me for a fool, Mackellar? Understand it once and for all, I treat this beast in my own way; fear nor favour shall not move me; and before I am hoodwinked, it will require a trickster less transparent than yourself. I ask service, loyal service; not that you should make and mar behind my back, and steal my own money to defeat me.”
“My lord,” said I, “these are very unpardonable expressions.”
“Think once more, Mackellar,” he replied; “and you will see they fit the fact. It is your own subterfuge that is unpardonable. Deny (if you can) that you designed this money to evade my orders with, and I will ask your pardon freely. If you cannot, you must have the resolution to hear your conduct go by its own name.”
“If you think I had any design but to save you – ” I began.
“O! my old friend,” said he, “you know very well what I think! Here is my hand to you with all my heart; but of money, not one rap.”
Defeated upon this side, I went straight to my room, wrote a letter, ran with it to the harbour, for I knew a ship was on the point of sailing; and came to the Master’s door a little before dusk. Entering without the form of any knock, I found him sitting with his Indian at a simple meal of maize porridge with some milk. The house within was clean and poor; only a few books upon a shelf distinguished it, and (in one corner) Secundra’s little bench.
“Mr. Bally,” said I, “I have near five hundred pounds laid by in Scotland, the economies of a hard life. A letter goes by yon ship to have it lifted. Have so much patience till the return ship comes in, and it is all yours, upon the same condition you offered to my lord this morning.”
He rose from the table, came forward, took me by the shoulders, and looked me in the face, smiling.
“And yet you are very fond of money!” said he. “And yet you love money beyond all things else, except my brother!”
“I fear old age and poverty,” said I, “which is another matter.”
“I will never quarrel for a name. Call it so,” he replied. – “Ah! Mackellar, Mackellar, if this were done from any love to me, how gladly would I close upon your offer!”
“And yet,” I eagerly answered – “I say it to my shame, but I cannot see you in this poor place without compunction. It is not my single thought, nor my first; and yet it’s there! I would gladly see you delivered. I do not offer it in love, and far from that; but, as God judges me – and I wonder at it too! – quite without enmity.”
“Ah!” says he, still holding my shoulders, and now gently shaking me, “you think of me more than you suppose. ‘And I wonder at it too,’” he added, repeating my expression and, I suppose, something of my voice. “You are an honest man, and for that cause I spare you.”
“Spare me?” I cried.
“Spare you,” he repeated, letting me go and turning away. And then, fronting me once more: “You little know what I would do with it, Mackellar! Did you think I had swallowed my defeat indeed? Listen: my life has been a series of unmerited cast-backs. That fool, Prince Charlie, mismanaged a most promising affair: there fell my first fortune. In Paris I had my foot once more high up on the ladder: that time it was an accident; a letter came to the wrong hand, and I was bare again. A third time I found my opportunity; I built up a place for myself in India with an infinite patience; and then Clive came, my rajah was swallowed up, and I escaped out of the convulsion, like another Æneas, with Secundra Dass upon my back. Three times I have had my hand upon the highest station: and I am not yet three-and-forty. I know the world as few men know it when they come to die – Court and camp, the East and the West; I know where to go, I see a thousand openings. I am now at the height of my resources, sound of health, of inordinate ambition. Well, all this I resign; I care not if I die, and the world never hear of me; I care only for one thing, and that I will have. Mind yourself; lest, when the roof falls, you, too, should be crushed under the ruins.”
As I came out of his house, all hope of intervention quite destroyed, I was aware of a stir on the harbour-side, and, raising my eyes, there was a great ship newly come to anchor. It seems strange I could have looked upon her with so much indifference, for she brought death to the brothers of Durrisdeer. After all the desperate episodes of this contention, the insults, the opposing interests, the fraternal duel in the shrubbery, it was reserved for some poor devil in Grub Street, scribbling for his dinner, and not caring what he scribbled, to cast a spell across four thousand miles of the salt sea, and send forth both these brothers into savage and wintry deserts, there to die. But such a thought was distant from my mind; and while all the provincials were fluttered about me by the unusual animation of their port, I passed throughout their midst on my return homeward, quite absorbed in the recollection of my visit and the Master’s speech.
The same night there was brought to us from the ship a little packet of pamphlets. The next day my lord was under engagement to go with the Governor upon some party of pleasure; the time was nearly due, and I left him for a moment alone in his room and skimming through the pamphlets. When I returned, his head had fallen upon the table, his arms lying abroad amongst the crumpled papers.
“My lord, my lord!” I cried as I ran forward, for I supposed he was in some fit.
He sprang up like a figure upon wires, his countenance deformed with fury, so that in a strange place I should scarce have known him. His hand at the same time flew above his head, as though to strike me down. “Leave me alone!” he screeched, and I fled, as fast as my shaking legs would bear me, for my lady. She, too, lost no time; but when we returned, he had the door locked within, and only cried to us from the other side to leave him be. We looked in each other’s faces, very white – each supposing the blow had come at last.
“I will write to the Governor to excuse him,” says she. “We must keep our strong friends.” But when she took up the pen it flew out of her fingers. “I cannot write,” said she. “Can you?”
“I will make a shift, my lady,” said I.
She looked over me as I wrote. “That will do,” she said, when I had done. “Thank God, Mackellar, I have you to lean upon! But what can it be now? What, what can it be?”
In my own mind I believed there was no explanation possible, and none required; it was my fear that the man’s madness had now simply burst forth its way, like the long-smothered flames of a volcano; but to this (in mere mercy to my lady) I durst not give expression.
“It is more to the purpose to consider our own behaviour,” said I. “Must we leave him there alone?”
“I do not dare disturb him,” she replied. “Nature may know best; it may be Nature that cries to be alone; and we grope in the dark. O yes, I would leave him as he is.”
“I will, then, despatch this letter, my lady, and return here, if you please, to sit with you,” said I.
“Pray do,” cries my lady.
All afternoon we sat together, mostly in silence, watching my lord’s door. My own mind was busy with the scene that had just passed, and its singular resemblance to my vision. I must say a word upon this, for the story has gone abroad with great exaggeration, and I have even seen it printed, and my own name referred to for particulars. So much was the same: here was my lord in a room, with his head upon the table, and when he raised his face, it wore such an expression as distressed me to the soul. But the room was different, my lord’s attitude at the table not at all the same, and his face, when he disclosed it, expressed a painful degree of fury instead of that haunting despair which had always (except once, already referred to) characterised it in the vision. There is the whole truth at last before the public; and if the differences be great, the coincidence was yet enough to fill me with uneasiness. All afternoon, as I say, I sat and pondered upon this quite to myself; for my lady had trouble of her own, and it was my last thought to vex her with fancies. About the midst of our time of waiting, she conceived an ingenious scheme, had Mr. Alexander fetched, and bid him knock at his father’s door. My lord sent the boy about his business, but without the least violence, whether of manner or expression; so that I began to entertain a hope the fit was over.
At last, as the night fell and I was lighting a lamp that stood there trimmed, the door opened and my lord stood within upon the threshold. The light was not so strong that we could read his countenance; when he spoke, methought his voice a little altered, but yet perfectly steady.
“Mackellar,” said he, “carry this note to its destination with your own hand. It is highly private. Find the person alone when you deliver it.”
“Henry,” says my lady, “you are not ill?”
“No, no,” says he querulously, “I am occupied. Not at all; I am only occupied. It is a singular thing a man must be supposed to be ill when he has any business! Send me supper to this room, and a basket of wine: I expect the visit of a friend. Otherwise I am not to be disturbed.”
And with that he once more shut himself in.
The note was addressed to one Captain Harris, at a tavern on the port-side. I knew Harris (by reputation) for a dangerous adventurer, highly suspected of piracy in the past, and now following the rude business of an Indian trader. What my lord should have to say to him, or he to my lord, it passed my imagination to conceive: or yet how my lord had heard of him, unless by a disgraceful trial from which the man was recently escaped. Altogether I went upon the errand with reluctance, and from the little I saw of the captain, returned from it with sorrow. I found him in a foul-smelling chamber, sitting by a guttering candle and an empty bottle; he had the remains of a military carriage, or rather perhaps it was an affectation, for his manners were low.
“Tell my lord, with my service, that I will wait upon his lordship in the inside of half an hour,” says he when he had read the note; and then had the servility, pointing to his empty bottle, to propose that I should buy him liquor.
Although I returned with my best speed, the captain followed close upon my heels, and he stayed late into the night. The cock was crowing a second time when I saw (from my chamber window) my lord lighting him to the gate, both men very much affected with their potations, and sometimes leaning one upon the other to confabulate. Yet the next morning my lord was abroad again early with a hundred pounds of money in his pocket. I never supposed that he returned with it; and yet I was quite sure it did not find its way to the Master, for I lingered all morning within view of the booth. That was the last time my Lord Durrisdeer passed his own enclosure till we left New York; he walked in his barn, or sat and talked with his family, all much as usual; but the town saw nothing of him, and his daily visits to the Master seemed forgotten. Nor yet did Harris reappear; or not until the end.
