Free Bonnie Dundee by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

I have ever had such joy of it again as I had in that hour. I am thinking that as with many other things, love, aye, and friendship among them, so it is with painting and the making of songs and the like, we have a first time, a virginity to lose, and the hour that we lose it is not just like any other hour in all our lives.
    But I am wandering from my story. When I came back to myself the painting light was almost gone, and there were footsteps and voices outside the door; and the door opened and in came Mynheer himself, carrying a great three-branched silver candlestick, andbehind him Lord Dundonel and her old ladyship and two – three more that must have been supping with them, and my lady Jean – and Colonel Graham.
    I sat where I was, frozen, not so much with any sense of guilt or fear that I would be getting into trouble, but because I had not had time to come fully back from one world to another, and was somewhat dazed.
    Mynheer van Meere saw the portrait on its easel, uncovered, and then myself in the window embrasure, and he let out something startled in Dutch sounding like a small explosion, and came quickly across the room, the candle flames trailing in the draught of his coming, and next instant he was standing over me, peering down at the bit of board on my knee.
    I looked, too, seeing what I had done spring out at me in the new light of the candles. Claverhouse’s head and shoulders in his shabby buff coat as I had so often seen him in the stable-yard; and under the slim black brows his eyes looking so directly into mine that for the moment it came almost as a shock.
    It was a crude enough bit of work, mind you; I was not yet fifteen, and I had had no teaching save the little that my father had given me when I was too young to profit much by it. But I have always had the knack of catching a likeness from memory.
    Mynheer was silent so long that I grew afraid that he was angry after all. But then he said, ‘It seems we have another portrait painter here among us.’
    And he was not mocking; not mocking at all.
    And then everyone came crowding round exclaiming, my lady’s portrait that they had come to see all unnoticed for the moment, while I had not even the presence of mind to get up but just went on perching in the windowsill with the bit of board tipped sideways onmy knee to show them since it seemed that they wanted to see. Old Lady Dundonel was clucking like a hen just off the nest; and Lord Dundonel said suddenly, as though in surprise, ‘John, I never knew you had a look of your famous kinsman!’
    ‘What kinsman would that be?’ Claverhouse said.
    ‘Montrose.’
    ‘Montrose,’ Claverhouse echoed the name quiet-like, but with something in his voice that made me look round at him. ‘I was but two years old when he – died, and I never saw him, but I should be glad to think that I had a look of him.’
    He was looking at the little sketch, and I was looking at him, and in that moment I learned something about Claverhouse. I learned that despite his thirty-five years and his hardness with the Covenanters, he had a laddie’s gift for hero-worship in him still; and I knew who the hero was.
    As though he felt my gaze on him, he looked from the picture to my face, and our eyes met. As before in the stable-yard I had the feeling that he was seeing me, directly and clearly and consciously, as few men see the people they look at. Maybe he, too, was learning something – that he had a follower for life, though at that time just a follower the like of many others…
    ‘It is strange, I have found it before,’ said Mynheer, ‘how family likenesses will appear in a painting that lie concealed in life; and of a certainty the boy has caught the likeness of Colonel Graham. The work is crude, of course – untaught—’
    ‘But it’s bonnie for all that,’ Lady Jean put in softly. ‘And it
is
like.’ And ah, but she was bonnie herself, with the candles making the bright hair shine round her head.