Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [271]
“We have heard and understood you, Mr. Lauder, and have been well served by your skill and your clarity in this most distressing task today. The panel has also heard you. We now invite him to address us in his own defence on the charges so preferred against him. Mr. Crawford.”
From Lymond’s pale hair to his finger tips no uncomprehending muscle moved. “I have nothing to add,” he said.
In the crowded room the atmosphere tightened as if he had shouted. “Nothing?” exclaimed Argyll. “You are accused of treason, sir: you have heard the gravest accusations and the gravest doubts expressed about your evidence. Have you no excuse?”
Bare of irony, Lymond’s eyes left the Justiciar and rested on his own immobile and flatly crossed hands. “The margin is so small,” he said, “between life and no life, fact and lie, treason and patriotism, civilization and savagery … If Mr. Lauder can see it, he is lucky; if you can comprehend it you have a better right to judge than I have to plead. I have nothing to add.”
“If you can’t tell the difference between loyalty and treason, Mr. Crawford,” said the Bishop, “then you are certainly safer hanged.”
The Master’s eyes studied him. “Why, can you?”
“As long,” said Orkney broadly, “as I know the difference between right and wrong.”
“Yes. The position is very similar. Patriotism,” said Lymond, “like honesty is a luxury with a very high face value which is quickly pricing itself out of the spiritual market altogether.”
“Feeling for one’s country,” said the Lord Advocate softly, “is not usually considered as a freestanding riddle in ethics.…”
The easy voice lifted the comment and the topic, and carried them to deeper waters. “No. It is an emotion as well, and of course the emotion comes first. A child’s home and the ways of its life are sacrosanct, perfect, inviolate to the child. Add age; add security; add experience. In time we all admit our relatives and our neighbours, our fellow townsmen and even, perhaps, at last our fellow nationals to the threshold of tolerance. But the man living one inch beyond the boundary is an inveterate foe.”
He laced his long fingers and raised them, his gaze resting on the exposed palms. “Patriotism is a fine hothouse for maggots. It breeds intolerance; it forces a spindle-legged, spurious riot of colour.… A man of only moderate powers enjoys the special sanction of purpose, the sense of ceremony; the echo of mysterious, lost and royal things; a trace of the broad, plain childish virtues of myth and legend and ballad. He wants advancement—what simpler way is there? He’s tired of the little seasons and looks for movement and change and an edge of peril and excitement; he enjoys the flowering of small talents lost in the dry courses of daily life. For all these reasons, men at least once in their lives move the finger which will take them to battle for their country.…
“Patriotism,” said Lymond again. “It’s an opulent word, a mighty key to a royal Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. Patriotism; loyalty; a true conviction that of all the troubled and striving world, the soil of one’s fathers is noblest and best. A celestial competition for the best breed of man; a vehicle for shedding boredom and exercising surplus power or surplus talents or surplus money; an immature and bigoted intolerance which becomes the coin of barter in the markets of power—”
Into the silence, the Master spoke gently. “These are not patriots but martyrs, dying in cheerful self-interest as the Christians died in the pleasant conviction of grace, leaving their example by chance to brood beneath the water and rise, miraculously, to refresh the centuries. The cry is raised: Our land is glorious under the sun. I have a need to believe it, they say. It is a virtue to believe it; and therefore I shall wring from this unassuming clod a passion and a power and a selflessness that otherwise would be laid unquickened in the grave.”
With the unfettered freedom of his voice, with the disciplined and friendly ardours of his mind, he made it plain where he was leading them.