Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [257]
Lymond, still resting with his back to the window, put up a hand suddenly for no obvious reason, and dropped it again. He said coolly, ‘How did you know about these people?’
‘Margaret Erskine,’ said O’LiamRoe dryly. ‘She made sure from time to time I knew exactly whom I was damning to hell.… God knows why I should cosset your conscience, but I could tell you, as a last piece of interference, some advice that the same sensible woman gave me once about you.’
‘Spare me,’ said Lymond briefly.
He had said already, in spite of himself, more than he wished; no one but himself need be obsessed by the clever decision to lay by soft handling, so that Stewart might stand up for himself. ‘I wish you had come to me five years ago. You would have hated me, as you do now; but the Stewarts might have found themselves with a man’ … God.…
Then it struck him that O’LiamRoe deserved to know something, and he said, ‘I could have forced him to tell me all he knew the other week, but—Christ, how bloody pompous can you be?—I thought he would hate himself so much.… He ought to be left to tell me out of his own conscience and conviction, not out of—’
‘—Love for Francis Crawford,’ said O’LiamRoe quietly.
‘It wasn’t love,’ said Lymond in a queer, rather desperate voice. ‘It was a kind of … oh, God, I don’t know. Hero worship, I suppose. It’s the only oozing emotion I seem able to inspire. It leads to nothing but misery.’
‘Yet but for that,’ said O’LiamRoe concisely, ‘Robin Stewart would be alive, and none of this need have happened. I should be back in the Slieve Bloom with no past and no stake in the future. And Oonagh O’Dwyer would be with O’Connor still. You see, you did right.’
He paused. Lymond, breathing shallowly and fast, lifted his chin suddenly but did not speak. O’LiamRoe went on. ‘You were angry with Margaret Lennox because she mocked my first, stumbling steps in the way of human responsibility. And an hour later, you had to draw me a picture of your duty as you knew it, that you believed would poison the very word in my mouth. I am telling you now that you did right with Robin Stewart and I am telling you that the error you made came later, when you took no heed of his call. It was too late then, I know it. But he should have been in your mind. He was your man. True for you, you had withdrawn the crutch from his sight, but still it should have been there in your hand, ready for him. For you are a leader—don’t you know it? I don’t, surely, need to tell you?—And that is what leadership means. It means fortifying the fainthearted and giving them the two sides of your tongue while you are at it. It means suffering weak love and schooling it till it matures. It means giving up your privacies, your follies and your leisure. It means you can love nothing and no one too much, or you are no longer a leader, you are the led.’
‘And that, you think, I should find easy,’ Lymond said; and even to himself his voice sounded odd. It was cold. O’LiamRoe spoke and it came to Lymond, only then, that something was happening to him, and that he did not know if his eyes were closed or foolishly open, or even if he were moving or not. It was the last, bloody, squeak-gutted, pusillanimous straw.
As O’LiamRoe began to run towards him, Lymond swept round to the window and with a force that jarred the hair loose on his brow, smashed his fist clean through the glass. The mild, herbal airs of the forest welled through the space, and O’LiamRoe stopped.
For a long moment, neither man moved. Then the air, or the pain, did its work. Lymond opened his eyes, straightened, and after hesitating for a second, walked past O’LiamRoe to the table. He sat down, holding his injured hand tight with the other, Robin Stewart’s blood and his own mixed on his sleeve.
‘That is the work of a child,’ said the Prince of Barrow, and opening the beautiful pack on the floor, began to search it for bandages.