Day in, day out, he would work upon her, sitting by his chimney-side with his finger in his Latin book, and his eyes set upon her face with a kind of pleasant intentness that became the old gentleman very well. If she wept, he would condole with her like an ancient man that has seen worse times and begins to think lightly even of sorrow; if she raged, he would fall to his reading again in his Latin book but always with some civil excuse; if she offered, as she often did, to let them have her money in a gift, he would show her how little it consisted with his honour…
The Durrisdeers had a family crest on their stained-glass window, until it was smashed by the coin that sent James to the wars. The old lord and Alison, now married to Henry, refuse to let him mend the missing window pane. Desiring neither the old identity renewed, nor a new identity defined, the pair prefer the mutual seclusion of the chimney-side where they chatter and weep together, jealous of their private heartache, watched over by a blank space. The old heraldic values have been smashed by a golden guinea and the symbolism of this could not be more pointed.
The ‘old cause’, too, is soon revealed as a matter for the kind of lachrimose sentimentality which is both self-serving and self-deceiving, as Tam Macmorland spreads his wild tales of betrayal, and even Jessie Broun (seduced and left pregnant by the Master) joins the drunken chorus weeping for her ‘bonny laddie’. Nor is it long before the ‘laddie’ himself is shown in the same unflattering light, and even the Chevalier Burke’s admiring narrative cannot hide the fact that his hero managed to escape after Culloden at the expense of many friends left behind. Three years after writing Kidnapped, Stevenson has redrawn the fierce pride and the loyalty of Alan Breck into a picture of something positively morbid.
Nothing is as it might seem in this tale, not least because it comes to us by way of three separate narrators, none of whom are wholly reliable or unbiased. But the final symbol of the Master’s nature, and of how radically Stevenson has sought to subvert the conventions of his earlier fiction, can be found, once again, in the coin which set the whole affair in motion. As a symbol of gold, it smashed the blazon of the Durrisdeers; and as a symbol of blind, causeless chance, it stands for the ruling principle of James Durie’s life.
The Master tosses a coin to see who will go to war, and he does it again with Burke to see whether they will be friends or foes. Even when starving in the wilderness, surrounded by possible enemies, he trusts to chance and the turn of a coin to choose his next step. On first acquaintance Burke admired the gesture as something worthy of ‘the old tales of Homer and the poets’; but once again Stevenson uses James’s physical position to symbolise the true status of such an act:
… he suddenly plucked out his coin, shook it in his closed hands, looked at it, and then lay down with his face in the dust.
Ephraim Mackellar, sober-sided Calvinist and supporter of Mr Henry that he is, suspects the Master of Satanic powers. At least there would be some sort of order to the tale if James can be seen as a follower of evil, dedicated to overthrow the good and the true. But the randomness of the coin is the true symbol of James’s condition. As a marker of the ultimate indifference of the universe the spinning coin stands at the heart of this tale of causeless fraternal enmity, and in the last analysis it subverts all romance, even the undeniable glamour of James himself. ‘I have always done exactly as I felt inclined’, the Master admits, and again: ‘I go my own way with inevitable motion.’ It is not just his family crest which has a blank space at the core of its being:
‘Life is a singular thing’, said he, ‘and mankind a very singular people. You suppose yourself to love my brother. I assure you it is merely custom…. Had you instead fallen in with me, you would today be as strong upon my side.’
So it is that James and Henry uncover a loveless world, and Stevenson, the undoubted master of the dynamics of romance and dualism in his earlier books, has subverted them in The Master of Ballantrae. With all the apparently familiar adventure trappings of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and even of Jekyll and Hyde, he has produced a memorable ‘winter’s tale’ instead: a tale which ends in mere blankness, just as the brothers end, in a wilderness of cold and night.
Roderick Watson
Dedication
TO SIR PERCY FLORENCE AND LADY SHELLEY
Here is a tale which extends over many years and travels into many countries. By a peculiar fitness of circumstance the writer began, continued it, and concluded it among distant and diverse scenes. Above all, he was much upon the sea. The character and fortune of the fraternal enemies, the hall and shrubbery of Durrisdeer, the problem of Mackellar’s homespun and how to shape it for superior flights; these were his company on deck in many star-reflecting harbours, ran often in his mind at sea to the tune of slatting canvas, and were dismissed (something of the suddenest) on the approach of squalls. It is my hope that these surroundings of its manufacture may to some degree find favour for my story with seafarers and sealovers like yourselves.
And at least here is a dedication from a great way off: written by the loud shores of a subtropical island near upon ten thousand miles from Boscombe Chine and Manor: scenes which rise before me as I write, along with the faces and voices of my friends.
Well, I am for the sea once more; no doubt Sir Percy also. Let us make the signal B.R.D.!
R.L.S.
Waikiki, May 17th, 1889
ALTHOUGH an old, consistent exile, the editor of the following pages revisits now and again the city of which he exults to be a native; and there are few things more strange, more painful, or more salutary, than such revisitations. Outside, in foreign spots, he comes by surprise and awakens more attention than he had expected; in his own city, the relation is reversed, and he stands amazed to be so little recollected. Elsewhere he is refreshed to see attractive faces, to remark possible friends; there he scouts the long streets, with a pang at heart, for the faces and friends that are no more. Elsewhere he is delighted with the presence of what is new, there tormented by the absence of what is old. Elsewhere he is content to be his present self; there he is smitten with an equal regret for what he once was and for what he once hoped to be.
He was feeling all this dimly, as he drove from the station, on his last visit; he was feeling it still as he alighted at the door of his friend Mr Johnstone Thomson, W.S., with whom he was to stay. A hearty welcome, a face not altogether changed, a few words that sounded of old days, a laugh provoked and shared, a glimpse in passing of the snowy cloth and bright decanters and the Piranesis on the dining-room wall, brought him to his bedroom with a somewhat lightened cheer, and when he and Mr Thomson sat down a few minutes later, cheek by jowl, and pledged the past in a preliminary bumper, he was already almost consoled, he had already almost forgiven himself his two unpardonable errors, that he should ever have left his native city or ever returned to it.
‘I have something quite in your way,’ said Mr Thomson. ‘I wished to do honour to your arrival; because, my dear fellow, it is my own youth that comes back along with you; in a very tattered and withered state, to be sure, but—well!—all that’s left of it.’
‘A great deal better than nothing,’ said the editor. ‘But what is this which is quite in my way?’
‘I was coming to that,’ said Mr Thomson: ‘Fate has put it in my power to honour your arrival with something really original by way of dessert. A mystery.’
‘A mystery?’ I repeated.
‘Yes,’ said his friend, ‘a mystery. It may prove to be nothing, and it may prove to be a great deal. But in the meanwhile it is truly mysterious, no eye having looked on it for near a hundred years; it is highly genteel, for it treats of a titled family; and it ought to be melodramatic, for (according to the superscription) it is concerned with death.’