Читать книгу Mr. Misfortunate - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 7

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It was a hot autumn in Paris; later than usual the man with the heron feathers in his cap and the metal receptacle full of barley water on his back continued to wander about the dusty Tuileries, Palais Royal, and Luxembourg, selling his thin drink from a chained cup to the nurses, the soldiers, the little bourgeosie and the children who crowded these popular promenades.

People talked of the end of the war, but without much hope; the taxes were crushing, the bread bad, all the necessities of life adulterated because of the numberless monopolies; every one drank the impure Seine water, the public fountains were dry, the poor died by the hundreds in the pestilent quarters of St Marcel and Ile de la Cité, where the refuse from the slaughter-houses lay decaying in the foul gutters; every night the death-cart creaked its way, laden with horrid corpses, from the Hôtel Dieu to the cemetery of Clamart, there to toss its burden into a ditch sprinkled with quicklime; every day some wretch, the victim of crime or his own despair, floated down the muddy waters of the river to be caught in the filets de St Cloud, together with the other refuse of the great black and white city.

And every day the nobles rode through the foul streets, preceded by running footmen and huge Danish dogs that knocked down the passers-by, their coachman's whips often wounding those who cowered out of their way, their wheels splashing shops and houses with the filth of the street while they rolled on to some feast, where they would eat from gold plate the flesh of a boar that had been fed on champagne and drink soup of turtles brought by special messenger from London.

The two Stewart princes lived in this inner brilliancy that was enclosed in the outer misery and squalor of Paris.

They were frequent guests at Versailles, entertained by all the nobility, maintained lavishly by the King.

Charles fitted easily into this gorgeous existence, but Henry was not happy; he went frequently to the churches, and he could not find one where the profanity of the congregations and the indifference of the priests did not offend his piety.

He wrote dismal letters home to the dreary old King in Rome, portraying his elder brother as beguiled by the flatteries of the Court, sunk in dissipation and unmindful of everything but his own pleasures.

Which was very far from the truth. Charles never forgot for a single instant the one great object of his life, and kept his head singularly well during the attentions to which he was subjected. He was very much the fashion with the women; his rank, his romance, his adventures, his youth and handsome grace combined to make him irresistible to the French ladies.

But Charles was as cold in Paris as he had been in Rome or Edinburgh; his ambition ruled entirely his unroused heart. He still toasted, openly and privately, 'The King's daughter.'

Nor was it easy for him to always avoid this fervour of feminine adoration; women came over from London merely for the chance of a glimpse of him in his box at the opera, and the French ladies were open in their attempts to capture his attention. The longer he remained free the more passionate the interest he created, the more desperate the curiosity which speculated on which he would pick up of the many favours cast at his feet.

But under all his gaiety and charm, his good-fellowship and seeming light-hearted enjoyment of his own position, Charles was absorbed heart and soul in the one thing: a French army, French money...another landing in Scotland, another face to face fight, this time on equal terms, with the armies of the House of Hanover. So far Louis, Tencin, and D'Argenson were all evasive though friendly.

The Stewart prince was useful to France to use as a thorn in the side of England; a goad, if need be, and a threat; she was in no position to do anything more substantial for him than gifts and compliments.

So the young man (who was further handicapped by his refusal to court Madame Pompadour) made no more progress than the Earl Marischal had predicted.

To his friends he was very loyal, and for them he was able to do something; Lochiel, Lochgarry, and Maxwell of Kirkconnell were all given commissions in the French army with appropriate pensions.

Lochiel accepted his regiment with reluctance. To be a Brigadier in the French army meant little to the Highland chief whose heart was ever with the ruins of Achnagarry, and who was homesick for his own people and his own country.

'Lord Ogilvy or others might incline to make a figure in France,' wrote the noble and gentle Cameron to Rome, 'but for my part my ambition is to serve the Crown, and serve my country or perish with it...I hope your Majesty will approve the resolutions I have taken to share in the fate of the people I have undone, and if they must be sacrificed, to die along with them. It is the only way that I can free myself from the reproach of their blood.' With this resolution high in his heart, Lochiel left his wife and daughter in their modest lodging in Paris and rode out to Clichy to the residence of O'Brien, where Charles in this late autumn of 1746 then resided.

The splendid Chateau St Antoine he had returned to the King on an impulse of dignity.

'I will not live in a style that will deceive the expectations of my friends,' he said.

In the small house at Clichy, with a much depleted establishment, consisting mostly of Scottish gentlemen whom in any case he had to provide for, Charles then lived, taking as little as possible from Louis, breaking himself on the French politicians, on ill terms with the depressed and antagonistic Henry, and more than ever the idol of the Court and the capital.

Lochiel found him in the walled garden, which was full of poplar and willow trees, wallflowers and Michaelmas daisies edging the sweeps of plain shadowed grass.

Clichy was a pretty village, free from the smoke and fogs of Paris, and Lochiel was glad of the green, the blue, the quiet and the sweet air, after the noise and smells, the hideous sights and sordid filth of the capital.

Charles was seated on one of the long stone benches beneath the row of poplar trees, which rose up straight against the cloudless blue; the topmost boughs, shaken by a little breeze, showed fluttering gold and silver leaves that fell now and then slowly to the ground.

The Prince's face was overcast, his air of gloom emphasised the slight heaviness of underjaw and chin, a characteristic hardly noticeable when he was animated.

He wore a fawn-coloured coat much the same in hue as the poplar leaves that fluttered with every lift of the air on to the shorn grass. He greeted Lochiel with kind affection and told him briefly the news that had saddened him. Charles Radcliffe, the brother of that luckless Earl of Derwentwater who had perished in the '15, had been executed. His body, still clothed in the uniform of a captain of France, lay near his brother's lonely grave in St Giles-in-the-Fields, far from the beautiful Dilstone that had given birth to both these brothers, who had now perished for the White Rose.

Lochiel had not known Mr. Radcliffe, who had been, like his own father and the Earl Marischal, thirty years an exile, but the news saddened him; he thought of his own kin, his son and brother left in Scotland, of the brave Cluny skulking in the heather, of many a noble friend of his who might at any moment fall into the hands of the English Government.

More than ever was he strengthened in the temper in which he had come to visit the Prince.

'There is no way in which to endure these things,' he said simply, 'but to endeavour to avenge them, sir.'

'I have not,' replied Charles, 'any other object in life.'

Lochiel, at the Prince's bidding, seated himself beside him on the bench. The scant shade of the stripped poplar was over them, and before them the long stretch of plain grass, leading to the little house where Henry had spent the fourteen wretched months of his brother's adventure.

The Prince held a sprig of wallflower, which he turned about in his slim, capable hands.

'Mr. O'Brien,' he said, abruptly naming the man who for long had been his father's agent in Paris, 'tells me that Cardinal Tencin has shown him a paper on which was written the intentions of France towards myself.'

And these were?' questioned Lochiel eagerly.

'Twelve thousand livres a month pension, a house for Henry and myself!' smiled the Prince.

'I do not believe it!' cried Lochiel.

'Nor I,' said Charles. 'I cannot, no, by Heaven, I cannot!'

Nevertheless the very report was like the touch of a whip on the cheek to both men; mere food and lodging to be the result of all the splendid French promises!

Lochiel's heart contracted; the pleasant garden seemed to him suddenly very dreary; he looked at the peaceful scene with exile's eyes.

'Sir,' he said passionately, 'if he will not give you what he has promised—take nothing from him.'

'Save what I must,' commented the Prince with bitterness.

'Money can always be got from Rome and from the English Jacobites,' replied Lochiel undauntedly. Your Highness may live in this house that your father maintains, without accepting any pension from France.'

Prince Charles broke the flower in his hands.

'Be assured, Lochiel,' he said, 'that I will have all or nothing. But as for my maintenance here, the King, my father, will not long support even this establishment, which is kept out of the money he sends to O'Brien. Like the Earl Marischal, he no longer believes in me, and his cry is all for peace and resignation.'

'In which the Duke joins him?'

'Most assuredly,' replied the Prince sharply, casting away the bruised wallflower. 'Henry is unhappy here—naturally—he will not divert himself, he is continually shocked, he is not popular.'

'We are none of us happy,' remarked Lochiel with a gentle sigh.

'Well,' said Charles, 'for the matter of that I confess to a zest for life—even this life.'

'You are young, sir,' replied Donald Cameron.

'And so are you, Lochiel.'

'Ah, my life lies in the past I fear, sir. I feel as if I had only existed since I looked on the ruins of Achnagarry.'

Charles rose impetuously.

'Would you cut me to the heart, Lochiel!' he exclaimed. 'Do I ever forget, night or day, what you have lost for me?'

Lochiel seized his master's hand and kissed it humbly. 'I regret nothing that has happened to me in your service,' he said.

The Prince's eyes darkened with a tumultuous emotion as he gazed at this loyal friend.

Lochiel looked ill. The foul air, the adulterated food of Paris, agreed ill with the Highland chief, who, besides, had never wholly recovered from the wounds through his ankles received at Culloden.

Very different did he appear in his emaciation—his beauty partly effaced by mental suffering and bad health—from the splendid chief who had come to Moidart not two years before to receive his King's son; he did not now seem the influential, the famous Lochiel, happy among his people, who had given those counsels of prudence that the Prince had so impetuously overruled.

There was a saying among the Camerons that a fair-haired chief was born to misfortune, and Donald Cameron was almost golden-haired.

'Take my hand, hold it,' cried Charles eagerly, 'and hear me say that I am one with you in everything. I will never settle down on a pension; I will never return to Rome. Here I dedicate my life to the service of those fallen for me, those ruined for me—believe me, Lochiel, though I may at times seem light and thoughtless—never have I forgotten for one instant my duty to my people.'

He spoke like the hero of Falkirk and Preston; he used the ingenuous charm that had won all hearts at Holyrood. All that was best in him, his gay courage, his gentle kindness, his sensitive response to the fine and generous in others, his capability of sincere abandonment to the heroic impulse of the moment, showed in these words of his to Lochiel. It was perfect truth that the interests of his followers were as uppermost in his mind as his own, and that he who was incapable of harshness towards an enemy, was full of intense gratitude towards his friends.

'In my heart I hate this life,' he continued to Lochiel, who had risen and kept his face away to hide his emotion. These Court diversions, this idleness, corruption, and confusion—all is distasteful to me...I was happier at Holyrood, almost happier among the heather...And the women, always the women here...I ever wished to manage my affairs without women, Lochiel.'

He spoke with some disdain, and Lochiel recalled how cold he had been to the Scottish ladies and how sparing with his balls at Holyrood, to the extent that he had been blamed, as James had been in '15, for his 'over-much chastity.'

The Highland chief had his race's dislike of this use of intrigue by women, so common to the Latins, and was in agreement with the Prince's disgust.

'Yet I have no doubt,' he remarked sadly, 'Madame de Pompadour could do you a better service than either Tencin or D'Argenson.'

'I hope to succeed without her,' replied Charles. 'I hope,' he added, alluding to his dearest and most secret ambition, 'to make such an alliance that she will be powerless to harm me.'

Then, quickly changing the subject, he said, 'There is other news from London besides Charles Radcliffe's death. Murray of Broughton has turned informer—'

Lochiel gave a bitter exclamation.

'Impossible!'

'Very possible,' replied Charles; you must not blame him, but rather those who tortured him into dishonour. 'Tis not all of us, Lochiel, can pass through these dark places with our souls unscathed. Poor Murray was bitterly tempted.'

'No more so than Kilmarnock or Balmerino,' cried Lochiel whose face was flushed with a reflected shame, 'and many a small, mean wretch who might have played the Judas.'

'Those were fortunate in their fortitude,' said the Prince. 'Do you envy the miserable Murray, Lochiel? He will live to wish he had perished by the worst death they could invent.'

'I fear, sir, that he will send many honest men to the block and the gallows.'

'I am in hopes that he can tell nothing more than Lovat and such traitors had already revealed. I have other news for you. The ship on which young Glengarry was returning to Scotland has been stopped and he arrested. God knows what they will do with him.'

Donald Cameron was silent; he had no comment to make on news so disagreeable. He thought of his far-away heir and his brother, of his little daughter drooping in Paris, of the brave wife who had accompanied him in his ruin, and he spoke with a passionate accent and lips that quivered.

'For God's sake, sir, press these ministers. Now is the moment to strike before the Highlands are depopulated by English cruelty and the Elector has brought to the scaffold the most loyal of your subjects.'

'Lochiel,' replied the Prince earnestly. 'I will go to Versailles to-night and stay there till I have made his Majesty express himself clearly.'

'What do you yourself think, sir,' asked Lochiel anxiously, 'of the King of France's intentions towards you?'

'I cannot tell,' said Charles frankly. 'He is always charming. I do not know if he is sly or false; sometimes I think he is laughing at everything. At first I believed him very indolent and wholly the puppet of his ministers. Now I think that he keeps much business entirely in his own hands and lets even Tencin remain in the dark on several affairs. He says he is straitened for money, but I cannot judge of the truth of that.'

'The country does not appear to be prosperous, but the luxury is marvellous,' said Lochiel, who had always lived with dignity on an estate of five hundred a year.

'Louis says he is always straitened for money, but the Court spends prodigious sums. The women rule everything, and they have no thought beyond prodigious extravagance. It is neither the Court nor the country over which I would care to reign, Lochiel.'

'I do not want this regiment, sir,' said Donald Cameron. 'I would rather not be in the dependency of the King of France.'

'Lochiel,' replied the Prince sadly, we cannot choose—you and I—we must live with some dignity if we are to achieve anything, and this is the only way that I can establish you.'

Lochiel flushed.

'I will take it sooner than be a charge upon your 'Highness,' he said quickly, 'but, as I have written to the King in Rome, it accords ill with my desires and my conscience.'

The Prince pressed his friend's hand; he felt very warmly towards the man who so eagerly seconded him in all his wishes, who was so loyal and uncomplaining a supporter. The more estranged he became from the Duke of York and the Earl Marischal the more he turned to men like Lochiel.

The long shadows had now covered all the close grass and only the front of the house remained in the last glow of the autumn sun.

A soft breeze was shaking the light heart-shaped leaves from the poplar trees, and sending them in little eddies round the feet of the two men.

'Let us go in,' said the Prince suddenly, 'it becomes chilly.'