John Skene

“ John Knox, the celebrated Reformer, left three daughters, one of whom was married to a Mr Baillie of the Jerviswood family, and by him had a daughter, who was married to a Mr Kirkton of Edinburgh. By this marriage Mr Kirkton had a daughter, Margaret, who was married to Dr Andrew Skene in Aberdeen. Dr Skene left several children, the eldest of whom, Dr Andrew Skene, had by his wife, Miss Lumsden of Cushnie, several sons and daughters. One of these, Mary, was married to Andrew Thomson of Banchory, who had issue by her, Margaret, Andrew, and Alexander. ”

“ Accordingly, in the first year of his reign, King Robert confirms to John, Lord of the Isles, the territory on the mainland and the Isles which had belonged to Alan, son of Roderic, and in the following year confirms a grant by the Lord of the Isles of these possessions to his son Reginald, the youngest of the three brothers, who appears to have agreed to the arrangement, the eldest son, John, having predeceased his father, and the second, Godfrey, having apparently refused to surrender his rights ”

“ The purely spurious matter must be entirely rejected. It is by such a process only that we can hope to dispel the fabulous atmosphere which surrounds this period of Scottish history, and attempt to base it upon anything like a genuine foundation.
The first to attempt this task was Thomas Innes, a priest of the Scots College in Paris, who published in 1729 his admirable Essay on the ancient inhabitants of Scotland. In this essay he assailed the fabulous history first put into shape by John of Fordun and elaborated by Hector Boece, and effectually demolished its authority ”

“ John M‘Kennedy captain thereof;’ this term of Captain being the equivalent of the Toisech of the Irish and Scottish Gael, [251] and the word Muintir, or people, being one of the appellations of a tribe.
Modification of original tribes under foreign influences. These indications of the existence of a tribal organisation analogous to that in Ireland among the Celtic population during the period when, with the exception of Saxon Lothian, both king and people were Celtic, comprise in the main the information we are able to gain from the most trustworthy sources available to us ”

“ I owe Lord Skene very much, if I owe his lady very little. He’s been a good second father to me, if she’s been an indifferent first mother. All I want to find out is why she has been. I want to know why, Johnny; and I want to know who my first father was, and how this man Dalston knows what I don’t know, and why he is able to make such crushing use of his knowledge. That’s all it comes to at present; and you mustn’t be looking for reasons in their company, but behave just like an ordinary polite little Johnny as you are. There’ll be time enough to discuss our campaign by-and-by. ”

“ He only pondered me, dumfoundered, fingering his lips.
“The man is an infernal scoundrel, sir,” I said with emphasis. “I intimated as much to you once before. What I did not, could not, touch upon at the time, was the strange coincidence of his double connection with your family. He was not only your son’s travelling tutor, sir; but he is also, by his own assertion, and in Lady Skene’s belief, my father.”
For a moment his mind, grasping desperately at the significance of my words, slipped and went under.
“Dalston!” he muttered amazed. “Delane was Charlie’s tutor.” ”

“ I took that, not for myself, but—damn it! don’t you know that Lord Skene disapproves of your coming here? I told him you came by your own will, not mine; and if your will isn’t his, he can just look after his own. But you take the risk of any consequences if you come. I warn you, I’m master here, and I kiss or ill treat whom I choose. Do you understand? You’re a ‘unique young party’ according to him, and you’ve been kissed by the grandson of that old pottle-pot yonder. How do you like the thought? You’ve bound yourself slave to something worse than you expected, haven’t you! ”

“ But I have ceased to be a boy—there’s the devil of it, Mr Pugsley. If you don’t know who my father was, does Lord Skene know?”
He shook his head, with an odd little gasp. I saw him making for the pill-box again.
“What!” cried I. “Did he, too, accept me as a pledge?”
Something in his face enlightened me. The man was too shallow to hide a guilty self-consciousness. ”

“ What the deuce did that mean?” demanded his lordship.
“My father invented ‘Grafto,’ sir,” said Johnny; “the—the hair-wash, you know. And he—his name was Dando, you see.”
Lord Skene stared bewildered, but Miss Christmas clasped her hands tragically.
“‘Grafto’!” she exclaimed. “Are you really the son of ‘Grafto’—the ‘Grafto’ that has crowned more heads than Warwick the Kingmaker?”
“Yes,” said Johnny. “That was one of the advertisements. There are lots of others as good or better.” ”

“ Miss Christmas, sir, has been offered a husband by her guardian.”
“What husband?”
“O, not you, sir—don’t think it. It is Lord Sycamore. He is very tall, and very silly, but only fairly well off; and he has no roof to his mouth, or to his head—I forget which; but anyhow, if it was the dome of St Paul’s, I shouldn’t want him.”
“I should hope not. And Lord Skene thinks to impose this ass on you?”
“Richard, don’t shout so. Yes; and he is enormously angry over my refusal.”
“I owe a debt to my grandfather for it. He seems determined to add to my obligations to him. And Lady Skene, Ira?” ”

“ O, you may take my word for it! and do what you like with the information. Lady Skene, I think, will hardly rush to establish her claim to that connection. And, even if she did, I’ve means of controlling Mother Carey. What if I say three hundred pounds?”
“You shall have it.”
“So I supposed. Then we’ll say five hundred.”
“Ruin me, if you will.”
“Hush, my dear! What an inference! To esteem me capable of such a blind villainy! You’re still a very beautiful woman, Georgie.” ”

“ She did not move, however, but turned as pale as her frock.
“Richard!—O, Richard!” she implored. “Don’t hit me like that. You are so strong; and I am only a girl. I had no right to say it; it might have meant nothing; and Lady Skene has always been so good to me.”
“What reason have you—or has she, for that matter—to expect any consideration from me? I will know the truth.”
“Richard, make some allowance. You had insulted me too, you know.” ”

“ She has grown so humble, it makes me cry. And, Richard, I think Uncle Charlie feels the change in her; and it has made him more masterful—more peremptory. Once Mr Pugsley came, and he would not let him see her, but got rid of him without ceremony, and she did not say anything when she heard. It is as if she knows that she has forfeited her right to a voice in the conduct of her own affairs.”
“I have no quarrel with her, Ira; and now less than ever. She will always be my mother in my heart—God forgive me, and her. But with Lord Skene it is another matter. ”

“ And the next moment she is prostrate at my feet.
“Richard! I will be poor—O, I will be poor!”
Hush! Who is this come suddenly upon us from the shadows, where Ira, hearing my step, had hidden her?
“Will you make my burden, Richard, more than I can bear?”
I turn in amazement. It is Lady Skene.
“I have dared much to come to you—to her,” she says, in a low agitated voice. “I knew from my husband that you could never win—not there—not in that Court. But here, Richard? O, it is great to be generous in triumph, but greater in defeat.”
“Generous! What have I left to give in all the world?” ”

“ I should be thankful, on the contrary, for every crumb of condescension vouchsafed me—a feast, if I could only come to realise in it a sense of my own insignificance. She was always poking that in my teeth, viciously and by innuendo. I wondered even that Lady Skene could stand it, since it reflected upon herself; but she had truly no snobbism, and valued her creed above all earthly aggrandisements. The abominable child played up to this weakness, or strength, in her, and so secured her own position as prime favourite with the real head of the establishment. ”

“ I have always been a model of frankness myself. I am glad to hear you pay that debt to your inheritance, Richard.”
I was gathering, at last, something of his drift. He was feeling his way to my sense of filial duty. I could have struck my fist into his accursed dandy face. No doubt he had heard from Lady Skene the facts of that interview between us in her boudoir, and had assumed, as she had assumed, that the knowledge of my parentage was a revelation to me. Let him rejoice then, and scheme on that premise, and set the trap to his own damnation. ”

“ But childhood can see no beauty in what it dislikes. Instinctive sympathy with itself, with its moods and difficulties, is its criterion of loveliness.
This girl, and a certain Pugsley, were my morbid aversions of those days. The reverend Mr Pugsley had been translated—through the instrumentality of Lord Skene and the influence of his lady—from a suburban cure to the living of St Luke’s, Market Grazing. He had belonged, I believe, to the “Clapham Sect,” or what, in his time, constituted the remnants of that dour and depressing body. ”

“ And yet it was a coincidence, as strange as any that the annals of villainy can record. But then Coincidence is the father of Luck.
This strange, strange letter! this old young voice from the clouds, dropping upon me all in an unexpected moment like a ghostly message from Thibet. It must have its meaning in the sequences of Fate—must have been meant to have. That the fellow should have been young Skene’s tutor—his monitor, great God! a vulgar intrigant, with a past, hardly past indeed, and caught, in despite of it, making eyes at “you-know-who”! You-know-who? ”

“ She approached me again, curiously.
“Eh!” she wondered. “So this is my Georgie’s child, is it, the deuce? And how does your mammy treat you, my pretty?”
“Lady Skene has got another son now,” I said. “Didn’t you know it?”
“I hear nothing, and I know nothing in these days, dovey the devil,” she answered. “So long as I’m given my little provision as her mother, Georgie’s welcome to make out her own life as she pleases for me. We usen’t to get on very well together, not always, her and me. She’d come to me in her troubles, she would, like her father’s own gal; but most times we lived apart.” ”

“ The discovery that my mother, and my mother’s mother (I could hardly bring myself to acknowledge the old bibulous harpy for my grandmother) had both been on the stage; the discovery that their name was Carey; the discovery that the elder had “come into money”—been pensioned off, belike, by Lord Skene—and that the younger had “found religion” at the hands of Mr Pugsley of the tin tabernacle—all these little enlightenments and confirmations made a certain definite “grounding,” on which I might hope to embroider that web which should catch Lady Skene’s feet tripping. ”

“ It is fair that the truth of them should be set down en grande tenue by the one whom, after all, it most concerns. Not that for my own sake I desire for them more publicity, God knows, than they have received; but there is the question of the moral heirloom. The sensational Skene claim before the Lords of Common Pleas will be in the memory of a generation now passing: it is for the benefit of the generation to come, and the many thence ensuing, that I clothe these legal bones in the nerves and flesh of living actualities. ”

“ Well, enough of these moods. I am not built of the stuff which harps on self-grievances to win sympathy. Soon, and very soon, I was to become “the master of my fate, the captain of my soul,” and from the first moment of my command, I never voluntarily relinquished it.
The baby, a poor peakish little male fellow, was born, I say; and I was forgotten. When at last I was remembered, development of nerve and character had so fastened me to my position, that there was no question of ousting me from it against my will. Nor was there much attempt. Lady Skene ignored me ”

“ She is a humbug here as she was a humbug in my lodge. It is nothing but her puckish instinct to play a part to desire.
I never came to the house but of nights to dine, conforming only, in its strictly literal sense, with Lord Skene’s expressed wish; and then I would dawdle out an impatient hour in the drawing-room, and the moment the clock struck ten be off to my woods again. Lady Skene had accepted my reappearance with no comment but the briefest greeting; but I thought her manner to me was more chilling than ever. She seemed resolved upon disallowing my last claim to her consideration. ”

“ There was a path running through that slope of the thickets which led up towards the house, and this path ended in the pleasant bosky sward known as the “Baby’s Garden” before mentioned. It was a lovely quiet spot, and thither the honourable Master Skene was often carried by his nurse for air and exercise. I could easily at will command a view of them without being seen myself. The life of the wild man had taught me many a trick of cunning concealment, and I never scrupled to practise an espionage which was, after all, only a necessary habit of savage precaution. ”

“ I would add, “to a system which imposes honour or ridicule, either undeserved, on a new-born child. Let a man be christened into his surname, such as he shall make or choose it, only when he comes of age. Amen!”
Well, I was Richard Gaskett—not so bad on the whole; but why was I? I wondered if Lord Skene would tell me; I wondered if it were Lady Skene’s maiden name—yet hardly that; for would not the admission have betrayed her to her noble suitor? Perhaps it was my father’s, since, “from the moral point of view,” she was his wife. ”