Lochinvar: A Novel

"And if you hesitate to believe the extraordinary things I have to tell you, my friend here, Captain Gordon of the Covenanting regiment, will tell you where, in the discharge of my duty as provost-marshal of the camp, it was our business to penetrate, and in what company and in what circumstances we found your cousin of Lochinvar."

"We do not want to hear. It was all our fault!" said Maisie, turning suddenly full upon the speaker. Unconsciously to himself, Barra had been using a somewhat pompous and judicial tone, as though he were pronouncing judgment upon a hardened offender.

At Maisie's words, the provost-marshal instantly sat erect in his chair. He was exceedingly astonished. A few hours before he had seen these two women stern almost to severity over a mere breach of good manners. He could not imagine that now they would not utterly reject and condemn such a reprobate as Wat Gordon had proved himself to be. He felt that he must surely have been misunderstood, so he proceeded to make his meaning clear.

"But I tell you plainly, my ladies," Barra continued, still more impressively, "that your husband and I found your cousin of Lochinvar at the Hostel of the Coronation, of which you may have heard – there spending his living with harlots, flaunting their endearments in a public place, and afterwards brawling with the meanest and rudest boors of the camp."

"And I do not wonder!" cried Maisie Lennox, emphatically, "after the way he was used in this house, which ought to have been a home to him. William Gordon, I wonder how, as a Christian man, you could permit your cousin to be so used!" she continued, fiercely turning upon her husband and bursting into tears.

Will Gordon groaned inarticulately from the settle. He had not been present at the time, but he knew well that with women such a transparent subterfuge would avail him nothing.

"Why, Maisie," he began, speaking from the depths of the pillow, "did not you yourself – "

"I do not think," said Barra, looking over to Will, "that your wife understands that the Hostel of the Coronation is, of all the haunts of sin in this city of Amersfort, the vilest and the worst. The man who would make his good name a byword there is certainly unfit to have the honor of admission into a circle so gracious, into society so pure as that in which I first found him. I speak as the censor of the morals of the army, and also as one who has suffered many things for conscience' sake and in order to deserve the praise of them that do well."

Kate looked up for the first time since Will and Barra had come in.

As the latter finished speaking he noticed that her eyes were very dark, and yet at the same time very bright. The black of the pupil had overspread the iris so that the whole eye at a distance appeared as dark as ink, but deep within the indignant light of a tragic love burned steadily, like a lamp in the night.

The girl spoke quickly and clearly, as if the words had been forced from her.

"Had I been so used at the only place I called 'home,' when I was a stranger in a strange land, I tell you all I should have gone straight to the Hostel of the Coronation – or worse, if worse might be!" she cried, indignantly.

"And so also would I!" cried Maisie, with still greater emphasis, sticking her needle viciously into the table and breaking it as she spoke.

The settle creaked as Will Gordon leaped to his feet.

"Silly women, ye ken not what ye say!" he said, sternly. "Be wise and plead rather with the man in whose hands our cousin's very life may lie, for the deeds of this black night."

"His life – his life!" cried, instantly, Maisie and Kate together.

The latter rose to her feet, letting all her white bravery of seamstressing slip unheeded to the ground. Maisie, on her part, turned a pale and tear-stained face eagerly up to her husband.

"Yes," said Barra, swiftly, eager to tell the story first, "it is true – his life; for Walter Gordon, being in company at the place I have mentioned with a light woman, brawled and insulted those who sat near him, offering to assert and defend her virtue at the sword's point. Then when he was withstood and threatened with arrest by my officers, as their duty was, he turned fiercely upon them and upon others, the supporters of law and order, and now he lies in prison awaiting trial for murder!"

Kate caught the table with her hand at the last terrible word, which Barra hissed out with concentrated fury and hatred.

"Is this true?" she said, in a low voice, making a great effort to regain her calmness. She turned to Will Gordon as she spoke.

"Nay," said Will, "indeed I know nothing of the cause of the quarrel. But certain it is that there has been a most fierce brawl, and that in the affray certain men have been grievously wounded, if not killed."

"And is our Wat in prison?" demanded Maisie, fiercely.

"He lies in the military prison of the city awaiting his trial by court-martial!" replied the provost.

Maisie turned her about and caught her husband by the braid of his coat.

"Go you to him at once – you must! Tell him it is all our fault – we have been unhappy and to blame, Kate and I – ask him to forgive."

And, being overwrought and strained, she put her head down on Will Gordon's breast and wept aloud.

Kate went to her and took her hand gently. And to her Maisie instantly turned, setting her husband aside with a pathetic little gesture of renunciation, as something which has been proven untrustworthy. Then, still leaning on Kate's shoulder, she passed slowly from the room. As Kate McGhie opened the door she flashed one glance, quick with measureless anger and contempt, back upon the two men who stood gazing after her. Then she passed out.

There was a long silence between the provost-marshal and his host after the women had disappeared.

At last Barra broke in upon the awkward pause with a laugh of scorn which ended with something like a sigh.

"Oh, women! women," he cried. "From what pits will ye not dig the clay to make you your gods!"

"He had been our friend so long, and in such bitter passes and desperate ventures," said Will Gordon, excusingly, speaking of Wat in a hushed voice almost as one would speak of the dead.

Barra shrugged his shoulders to intimate that the whole sex was utterly impossible of comprehension.

"Nevertheless, you will give our poor cousin your best word and offices to-morrow?" Will Gordon went on, anxiously.

"I shall see the prince in person," answered Barra, promptly, "and I shall make my endeavor to arrange that the prisoner shall not be tried by court-martial – so that nothing summary may take place, and no sentence be hastily or vindictively carried out."

Will Gordon blanched at the word "summary," which in the severely disciplined army of the States-General had but one meaning.

He conducted his guest to the door in silence. The moonlight was casting deep shadows in the high-gabled street of Zaandpoort and glittering on the pole-axes and muskets of the provost's guard who stood without, stamping their feet impatiently and waiting the appearance of their leader.

"Till to-morrow, then!" said Will Gordon, as he parted.

"Till to-morrow!" replied the provost-marshal, more heartily than he had yet spoken, giving him his hand.

But as he walked down the street towards the camp he smiled a smile from under the thin, drooping mustache which showed his teeth. They glittered white in the moonlight like a dog's.

CHAPTER XII

THE PRISON OF AMERSFORT

The prison of the city of Amersfort stood at the corner of one of its most ancient streets, and the military portion of it exposed a long scarped wall to the public, broken only by a single line of small windows triply barred with iron stanchions of the thickness of a man's wrist. These windows were only separated from the street by a low wall and a strong but wide-meshed railing of wrought iron. In the large room of the jail, where only those prisoners were kept who were detained for slight offences, or who awaited trial, the unglazed squares of the window were large enough to admit of a pole and small basket being protruded, so that it should hang within reach of the passers-by. One of the inmates was appointed to stand with this curious fishing-rod in his hand, and the plaintive wail, "Remember the poor prisoners of the prince!" resounded all day along the ancient thoroughfare.

But Wat was too important a guest to be placed in this common room. By special direction of the provost-marshal he had a cell assigned to him in a tower only a few yards above the level of the street. His apartment had two windows, one of which being in the belly of the tower looked up and down the thoroughfare. He could see the passengers as they went to and fro, and if any had cared to stop he might even have spoken with them.

Wat paid little attention to the street for the first day or two which he passed in the cell. Mostly he sat on the low pallet bed with his head sunk deeply in his hands. He gave himself up completely to melancholy thoughts. During the first day he had expected every hour to be brought before a military tribunal. But the fact that the day passed without incident more discomposing than the visits of the turnkey with his scanty meals informed Wat that he was not to be tried by any summary method of jurisdiction, though in the angry state of the feelings of the army against the townsfolk of Amersfort, and especially smouldering hatred of the provost-marshal's men, this would doubtless have been Wat's best chance.

But his mortal enemy did not wish to run the risk of seeing his rival set free with but some slight penalty, and, being in a position of great influence, he had his will. Day by day passed in the prison, each wearier and grayer than the other. Finally, Wat took to his barred windows and watched the stream of traffic. As the poignancy of his regret dulled to a steady ache, he became deeply interested in the boys who sported in the gutters and sailed ships of wood and paper in every spate and thunder-shower. He watched for the rosy-cheeked maids, with their black, clattering sabots, who paused a moment to adjust their foot-gear with a swish of pleated skirts and a glimpse of dainty ankle; and then, having once stopped, stood a long time gossiping with their plain-visaged, flat-capped, broad-breeched lovers. Above all, Wat loved the vagrant dogs that wandered lazily about the shady corners and fought one another like yellow, whirling hoops in the dust.

Often he would leave his meagre meal untouched in order to watch them. One dog in particular interested him more than all the human beings in the Street of the Prison. He was a long, thin-bodied beast of a yellowish-gray color, of no particular ancestry, and certainly without personal charms of any kind, save as it might be those incident to phenomenal and unredeemed ugliness.

To this ignoble hound Wat daily devoted a large proportion of his dole of bread. It amused him to entice the beast each day nearer to the railings, and then, while other stouter and better-favored animals were for the moment at a distance, Wat would deftly propel a pellet of bread to this faithful attendant. At first, the pariah of the Street of the Prison suspected a trap. For during an eventful life he had on several occasions been taken in with pepper balls and second-hand mustard plasters by the brisk young men of the hospitals and of the Netherlands trading companies.

Now it chanced that while Wat thus played good Samaritan to a cur of the gutter, two women stood at the outer gate of the prison. It was not the first occasion they had been there, nor yet the first time they had been denied entrance.

Maisie and Kate, with women's generosity and swift repentance, still blaming themselves deeply for their hastiness, had gone to inquire for Lochinvar early on the morning after he had been put in prison.

But neither by persuasions nor yet with all their little store of money could they buy even a moment's interview. The jailer's orders were too imperative. Some one high in authority had given the sternest injunctions that no one was to be allowed to see the prisoner on any pretext. Will had accompanied them on one occasion in his new officer's uniform, and even discovered in the chief turnkey an old comrade of Groningen. But it was vain. Strict obedience to his instructions was the keeper's life, as well as his bread and his honor. Simply, he dared not, he said, permit any to see that particular prisoner.