Flemington

“ BALNILLO FINDS PERFECTION A SCONCE of candles beside a window-recess shed a collective illumination from the wall, and Christian Flemington stood full in their light, contemplating the company with superb detachment, and pervaded by that air, which never left her, of facing the world, unaided and unabashed, with such advantages as God had given her. Her neck, still white and firm, was bare, for she wore no jewels but the ruby earrings which shot blood-red sparks around her when she moved. ”

“ The passion for beauty lay deep below the tossing, driving impulses of Flemington’s nature, and it rose up now as he stood on the yew-edged terraces of Balnillo and gazed before him. For the moment everything in his mind was swallowed up but the abstract, fundamental desire for perfection, which is, when all is said and done, humanity’s mainspring, its incessant though often erring guide, whose perverted behests we call sin, whose legitimate ones we call virtue; whose very existence is a guarantee of immortality. ”

“ Madam Flemington felt as though her brain refused to work. There seemed to be nothing to drive it forward. The world stood still. The walls, an imprisoning horror, shut her in from all movement, all action, when action was needed. She had never felt Ardguys to be so desperately far from the reach of humanity, herself so much cut off from it, as now. And yet she must act. Her nearest channel of communication was the judge, riding away.
“Fool!” she cried, seizing Mysie, “run—run! Send the boy after Lord Balnillo. Tell him to run!” ”

“ Night fell on the barn at last. Wattie slept sound, with the yellow cur’s muzzle against his shoulder; but he awoke towards midnight, for Archie’s feverish voice was coming from the corner in which he lay. He inclined his ear, [Pg 202] attracted by the recurrent name of Logie which ran through the disconnected babblings, rising again and again like some half-drowned object carried along a swift stream. The darkness made every word seem more distinct.
“Listen to me!” cried Flemington. “Logie! Logie! you do not understand . . . it is safe . . . it is burnt! ”

“ That is excusable, surely.”
“It is Logie,” said he. “He has made it impossible for me. I cannot cheat a man who has given me all his confidence.”
“He gave you his confidence?” cried Madam Flemington. “Heavens! He is well served, that stage-puppet Prince, when his servants confide in the first stranger they meet! Captain Logie must be a man of honour!”
“He is,” said Archie. “It was his own private confidence he gave me. I heard his own history from his own lips, and, knowing it, I cannot go on deceiving him. I like him too much.”
Madam Flemington was confounded. ”

“ James drew up a chair, and Ferrier also sat down, tossing the roll of paper to his companion.
“A young man called Flemington is at Balnillo painting my brother’s portrait,” said Logie. “It’s a pity that I have not something of his gift for drawing.”
“Flemington——?” said the other. “There is a widow Flemington who lives a mile or so this side of the Perthshire border; but that is the only part of the country I do not know.”
“This is her grandson. She lived at St. Germain, and her husband was with King James. He is a strange lad—a fine lad too. My brother seems mightily taken up with him.” ”

“ Custom had inured him to risks of every kind, and if his keenness of enterprise was the same as it had been in youth, the excitement of youth had evaporated. It was the depths that stirred in Logie, seldom the surface. Like Archie Flemington, he loved life, but he loved it differently. Flemington loved it consciously, joyously, pictorially; James loved it desperately—so desperately [Pg 156] that his spirit had survived the shock which had robbed it of its glory, for him. He was like a faithful lover whose mistress has been scarred by smallpox. ”

“ He would wait, listening for that person to move away, and then would try his luck. He had spent perhaps ten minutes thus occupied when, without a warning sound, the door opened and Archie stood on the threshold, as still as though he were made of marble. It was too dark for either man to see more than the other’s blurred outline.
Flemington looked out into the night.
“Come in, Callandar!” he called. “You are the very man I want!” ”

“ Germain, which he had let fall with all the quiet dignity of a man too upright to pass under false colours, had done more to put the brothers on the wrong track than the most violent protestations. Balnillo had been careful, in spite of his confidence in his guest; but in the sympathy of his soul James had given Flemington the means of future access to himself. Now the tavern in the Castle Wynd at Stirling could be of use to him no longer, and he knew that only the last extremity must find him in any of the secret haunts known to him in the Muir of Pert. ”

“ Grandmother, he would have had me promise to go to him for help. How can I spy upon him and cheat him after that?”
He stopped. He could not tell her more, for he knew that the mention of the hundred pounds would but make her more angry; the details of what Logie had written could be given to no one. He was only waiting for an opportunity to destroy the paper he carried.
“We have to do with principles, not men,” said Madam Flemington. “He is a rebel to his King. If I thought you were so much as dreaming of going over to those worthless Stuarts, I would never see you nor speak to you again. ”

“ Painters in those days had not the standing in society that they have now, but the voice and manner were unmistakably those of a man of breeding. Even his freedom was not the upstart licence of one trying to assert himself, but the easy expression of a roving imagination.
“I should introduce myself too,” said Logie. “I am Captain James Logie, Lord Balnillo’s brother. But we must rescue your—your—baggage. Where is your postilion?”
Flemington held up the lantern again, and its rays fell upon a man holding the two horses which were standing together under a tree. James went towards them. ”

“ When he entered Brechin and rolled past the high, circular shaft of its round tower, the world made way for him with a grin, and when it was not agile enough to please him, he heralded himself with a shrill note from the chanter, which he had unscrewed from his pipes. Business was business with him. He meant to lie in the town to-night, but he was anxious to get on to Flemington’s tracks before the scent was cold.
He drove to the Swan inn and entered the yard, and there he had the satisfaction of seeing Archie’s [Pg 189] horse being rubbed down with a wisp of straw. ”

“ After the struggles and perplexities of the months that had elapsed since Balnillo and Christian Flemington met in Edinburgh, she had come slowly to herself amid storms of sleet. Beyond the Grampians, in the North, her awakened eyes looked on a country whose heart had been broken at Culloden. The ragged company that gathered round its Prince on that Wednesday morning was dispersed among the fastnesses of the hills, or lying dead and dying among the rushes and heather, whilst Cumberland’s soldiers finished their bloody business ”

“ It was nine years before this story opens that Christian Flemington had left France to take up her abode on the small estate of Ardguys, which had been left to her by a distant relation. Whilst still almost a child, she had married a man much older than herself, and her whole wedded life had been spent at the Court of James II. of England at St. Germain, whither her husband, a Scottish gentleman of good birth in the exiled King’s suite, had followed his master, remaining after his death in attendance upon his widow, Mary Beatrice of Modena. ”

“ Archie’s quick answers and racy talk had amused the Duke, who, uncompanionable himself, felt the awkward man’s amazement at the readiness of others, and scraps of Flemington’s sayings had gone from lip to lip, hall-marked by his approval. Callandar was taciturn and grave, but he was not stupid, and he had begun to wonder what was amiss with his companion. He decided that his own society must be uncongenial to him, and, being a very modest man, he did not marvel at it. ”

“ Perhaps Archie’s charm had told on him all the time they had been together, though he had never decided whether he liked him or not. And he looked so young when he laughed.
“What have you done?” he cried, pacing suddenly up and down the little room. “You have run on destruction, Flemington; you have thrown your life away. Why have you done this—you?”
“If a thing is worthless, there is nothing to do but throw it away.”
Callandar watched him with pain in his eyes.
“What made you suspect me?” asked Archie. “You can tell me anything now. There is only one end to this business. ”

“ Madam Flemington could deal out punishment thoroughly, but she was not one of those who burn its raw wounds with sour words, and her grandson had not that woeful sense of estrangement which is the lot of many children when disciplined by those they love. Archie adored his grandmother, and the gap of years between them was bridged for him by his instinctive and deep admiration. She was no companion to him, but she was a deity, and he had never dreamed of investing her with those dull attributes which the young will tack on to those who are much their seniors, whether they possess them or not. ”

“ There was no vainer man in Scotland than Balnillo, and if the mental half of his vanity had suffered from the deception practised on it, the physical half was yet preening itself in the sunny remembrance of the portrait at home—the portrait of David Balnillo as he would fain have had the world see him—the portrait, alas and alas! unfinished. He could not feel quite as James felt, who had opened his purse, and, more—far more than that—had laid open the most sacred page of his life before Flemington. ”

“ Had he understood Madam Flemington perfectly, he might have sung ‘The Tod,’ but as he only understood her superficially, he sang ‘Logie Kirk.’ He did not know how nearly the extremities of the social scale can draw together in the primitive humours of humanity. It is the ends of a line that can best be bent to meet, not one end and the middle. ”

“ Christian Flemington carried with her that atmosphere which enwraps a woman who has been much courted by men, and, though she was just over forty-two, and a grandmother, the most inexperienced observer might know how strongly the fires of life were burning in her still. An experienced one would be led to think of all kinds of disturbing subjects by her mere presence ”

“ Flemington?”
“Aye, yon lad Flemington—an’ a deevil o’ a lad he is to tak’ the road wi’! Ma leddy, there’s been a pucklie fechtin’ aboot Montrose, an’ the Prince’s men hae gotten a haud o’ King George’s ship that’s in by Ferryden. As a’ gaed doon to the toon, a’ kaipit† wi’ Flemington i’ the road. He’d gotten a clour on ’s heed. He was fechtin’ doon aboot Inchbrayock, he tell’t me.”
“Fighting? With whom?” asked Madam Flemington, fixing her tiger’s eyes on him. ”

“ The thing was bad, but the manner of its doing was worse, for the Queen and Lady Despard had used young Flemington as though he had been of no account. The Flemingtons had served James Stuart whole-heartedly, taking his evil fortunes as though they had been their own; they had done it of their own free will, high-handedly. But Mary Beatrice and her favourite had treated Christian [Pg 121] and her son as slaves, chattels to be sacrificed to the needs of their owner. There was enough nobility in Christian to see that part of the business as its blackest spot. ”

“ He knew that he was on Cumberland’s staff, just as Logie was on the staff of the Prince, and he wagged his head as he thought how Archie must have enriched himself at the expense of both Whig and Jacobite. It was his opinion that, knowledge being marketable, it was time that somebody else should enrich himself too. He would have given a great deal to know whether Flemington, as a well-known man, had continued his traffic with the other side, and as he went up the hill beside the dark Whig officer he was turning the question over in his mind. ”

“ The old regard a tragedy through its influences on the past, and the young through its influences on the future. To Archie, Madam Flemington’s revelation was an insignificant thing compared to the horror that was upon him now. ”

“ Flemington listened with parted lips. His personal feelings, his shrinking dread of being drawn into the confidence of the man whom it was his business to betray, were swallowed by a wave of interest.
“I was no more than a boy, with my head full of cards and women and horses, and every devilry under heaven, when I went to the house among the canals. The Conte de Montdelys had built it, for he lived in Holland a part of the year to grow his tulips. He was a rich man—a hard, old, pinched Frenchman—but his passion was tulip-growing, and their cultivation was a new thing. ”

“ Archie’s buoyancy of spirit was sufficient to keep at arm’s length a regret he could not quite banish; for he had the happy carelessness that carries a man easily on any errand which has possibilities of development, more from the cheerful love of chance than from responsible feeling. [Pg 54] His light-hearted courage and tenacity were buried so deep under a luxuriance of effrontery, grace, and mother-wit, and the glamour of a manner difficult to resist, that hardly anyone but Madam Flemington, who had brought him up, suspected the toughness of their quality. ”