The Master of Ballantrae Chapter 9

Thomas Copeland (0:11)

Chapter IX. Mr. McCullar's Journey with the Master.

The chaise came to the door in a strong drenching mist. We took our leave in silence. The house of Durrisdeer standing with drooping gutters and windows closed like a place dedicated to melancholy. I observed the Master kept his head out, looking back on these splashed walls and glimmering roofs, till they were suddenly swallowed in the mist. And I must suppose some natural sadness fell upon the man at this departure? Or was it some prevision of the end? At least upon our mounting the long bray from Durrisdeer, as we walked side by side in the wet, he began first to whistle and then to sing the saddest of our country tunes, which set folk weeping in a tavern, wandering willy. The set of words he used with it I have not heard elsewhere, and could never come by any copy, but some of them which were the most appropriate to our departure linger in my memory. One verse began, Home was home then my dear full of kindly faces, Home was home then my dear happy for the child.

And ended somewhat thus.

I could never be a judge of the merit of these verses. They were so hallowed by the melancholy of the air, and were sung, or rather soothed to me by a master singer at a time so fitting.

He looked at my face when he had done and saw that my eyes watered. Ah, McKellar, said he, do you think I have never regret?

I do not think you could be so bad a man, said I, if you had not all the machinery to be a good one.

No, not all, says he, not all.

You are there in error. The malady of not wanting, my evangelist. But Methodys sighed as he mounted again into the chaise.

All day long we journeyed in the same miserable weather, the mist besetting us closely, the heavens incessantly weeping on my head. The road lay over moorish hills, where was no sound with the crying of moor fowl in the wet heather and the pouring of the swollen burns.

Sometimes I would doze off in slumber, when I would find myself plunged at once in some foul and ominous nightmare, from the which I would awake strangling. Sometimes if the way was steep and the wheels turning slowly I would overhear the voices from within, talking in that tropical tongue which was to me as inarticulate the piping of the fowls.

Sometimes at a longer ascent the master would set foot to ground and walk by my side, mostly without speech, and all the time, sleeping or waking, I beheld the same black perspective of approaching ruin, and the same pictures rose in my view, only they were now painted upon hillside mist. One I remember stood before me with the colors of a true illusion. It showed me my lord seated at a table in a small room. His head, which was at first buried in his hands, he slowly raised and turned upon me a countenance from which hope had fled.

I saw it first on the black window panes my last night in Durrisdeer. It haunted and returned upon me half the voyage through, and yet it was no effect of lunacy, for I have come to a ripe old age with no decay of my intelligence, nor yet, as I was then tempted to suppose, a heaven-sent warning of the future, for all manner of calamities befell. Not that calamity. And I saw many pitiful sights, but never that one.

It was decided we should travel on all night, and it was singular once the dust had fallen, my spirit somewhat rose. The bright lamps shining forth into the mist and on the smoking horses and the hotting post-boy gave me perhaps an outlook intrinsically more cheerful than what day had shown. Or perhaps my mind had become weary to this melancholy. At least I spent some waking hours not without satisfaction in my thoughts, although wet and weary in my body, and fell at last into a natural slumber without dreams. Yet I must have been at work even in the deepest of my sleep, and at work with at least a measure of intelligence, for I started broad awake in the very act of crying out to myself, Home was home then, my dear. Happy for the child! Stricken to find in it an appropriateness which I had not yesterday observed to the Master's detestable purpose in the present journey.

We were then close upon the city of Glasgow, where we were soon breakfasting together at an inn, and where, as the devil would have it, we found a ship in the very article of sailing. We took our places in the cabin, and two days after carried our effects on board. Her name was the Nonesuch, a very ancient ship and very happily named. By all accounts, this should be her last voyage. People shook their heads upon the keys, and I had several warnings offered me by strangers in the street to the effect that she was rotten as a cheese, too deeply loathing and must infallibly found her if we met a gale. From this it fell out we were the only passengers. The captain, Mamurti, was a silent, absorbed man with the Glasgow or Gaelic accent. The mates, ignorant, rough seafarers, come in through the hoss-hole, and the Master and I were cast upon each other's company.