Читать книгу Mr. Misfortunate - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 3

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An evening of late autumn, full of rain, sweet and chill, was closing over the mountain of Ben Alder; low, dark, and watery clouds were reflected in the bosom of Loch Ericht, which gleamed in the valley; the distance was filled but not enclosed by violet hills, whose farthest dim forms sank out of sight with a remote beauty that suggested magic realms of faery.

The only human being in the large and melancholy landscape was a man who stood in front of a wattle hut, which was almost indistinguishable from the gray and stony rock and among the gray-green trees of Lethernilicht, which sloped to the edge of the loch.

This man leant against the low, half-concealed door of the miserable shieling and gazed at the sombre water, the stretches of heather, the uninhabited hills, the low and gloomy sky which showed through the sparse forest, with the look and in the attitude of one overwhelmed by wretched thoughts.

His appearance was in accordance with his surroundings: a torn and dirty plaid of the Cameron tartan hung round his shoulders, his untidy, bright brown hair was half concealed by a rough blue cloth bonnet, his knees were base, and his worsted stockings and latchet shoes of the coarsest material. His figure and bearing, at once graceful and robust, were such as is usual to a hardy mountaineer, but his face was remarkable and in no way suited to the lonely scene and his forlorn situation, and this even though his features were browned by exposure and disfigured by a growth of reddish beard. It was the face of a foreigner, a man of a breed alien to these majestic hills and lonely valleys, an ardent, lovable, attractive face, delicate and haughty, with indications of a hasty and impetuous temper in the full, handsome brown eyes, in the fine, sweeping, eager brows, in the line of the beautiful nostrils, and of pride and obstinacy in the full and firm lips, the lower of which slightly projected.

His age was about five-and-twenty; but there was a weight and dignity in his expression and in his carriage that were beyond his years, and there was nothing of the youth in his firm and well-formed figure.

A few drops of rain fell from the slow-moving water clouds, the violet hills faded into grayness as mists blotted out the last gleams of the sun.

The young man shuddered, and, turning round, peered through the door into the interior of the hut, which was full of the smoke from a peat fire that smouldered in the centre of the earth floor. There were four persons in this shelter, all attired in the same tattered and dark Highland dress; two of these were engaged in making and firing bread and two were playing cards.

Beds of heather and fern, a few folded plaids, a few earthenware vessels were the sole furnishings of the wretched hut, that was scarce large enough to contain half a dozen people.

At the far end stood a little cask of brandy, open, with a wooden cup beside it; the smell of the spirit mingled faintly with the reek of the peat smoke.

One of the card players looked up, saw the young man glancing in, rose up and joined him in the pure twilight.

It was now raining fast, the fresh drops glittering in the boughs of the firs, on the already sodden heather; the clouds outspread and mingled with each other so as to completely cover the sky and obscure the glow of the sunset; the two men stepped clear of the trees on to the bare mountain side. The water was no longer full of the forms of clouds and points of light, but of a uniform neutral tint, like dimmed steel, its smoothness disturbed by the steady fall of the rain. Over the hills the mists were crowding, like battalions of advancing armies, concealing the country they conquered.

The two men, without a word between them, began to walk slowly down the dripping side of the mountain.

The new-comer was of middle age, fair, and of a singularly beautiful countenance, which was marred by neglect and suffering; he also wore the Cameron plaid and a dark common bonnet; he limped heavily in his walk, and helped himself over the entanglements of the wet, elastic heather by means of a rough stick.

His companion looked at him once or twice as if about to speak, but refrained with the air of one who is tired of words; though they were so exactly alike in dress and all the signs of poverty and misery, though they were both fair men and uncommonly handsome men, there was an extraordinary difference of type and breed between them: the younger conveying the complex, the fantastic, the passionate, an exotic race, a destiny crowned and doomed by unusual attributes, while the elder had an air noble and calm, well balanced and serene.

The drenching rain had pearled the rough wool of the plaids with globules of water and darkened the fair locks that escaped from beneath the coarse bonnets; darkness was closing in to an extent which made the descent among the stones and heather difficult and dangerous, especially for the lame man, but neither took any heed.

Both were inured to hardships and both had their thoughts full of greater pains and larger misfortunes than any chance of weather could afford.

When they had gained to within a little of the loch, whose pale shape was fast being absorbed into the surrounding gloom, the younger man spoke.

'I know not why I bring you so far, Lochiel; with your wounded feet it is folly.'

His voice was melancholy and impatient, his accent as foreign as his face.

In a quiet tone Donald Cameron replied,—

'I am glad to leave the smoke of the shieling for the outer air, but if your Highness thinks to see Cluny and Archibald Cameron—I think they would hardly come now, the light having failed.'

He spoke with great courtesy and a certain patience, as of one who schools his tongue to loyalty in some cause his reason repudiates, and his speech, unlike that of his companion, was couched in the purest English, touched with the turn of the Doric tongue.

The two had now paused; with the desolate lake below, the lonely hills above, and all about them the encroaching mists, they seemed isolated from the world, outcast in this landscape without flower or fruit over which the sombre night was descending.

'Cluny has been long enough,' replied the Prince, with an air of hardly controlled passion. 'It is likely he has met with some misfortune.'

'Cluny of Macpherson will meet with no misfortune in the Highlands,' replied the Scottish chief with unconscious pride.

'Perhaps Cumberland's cut-throats have found the treasure at Loch Arkaig,' said the Prince fiercely, 'and Cluny searches in vain. I would he might return, empty-handed or no.'

'Cluny will return,' answered Lochiel, who believed in his friend's honour and devotion as in his own.

The Prince suddenly turned and looked at his companion; they were much of a height and their wet plaids touched, so close together did they stand on the heather slope.

'Lochiel, Lochiel,' cried the young man, 'do you ever call to mind that time fourteen months ago when you came to me in Moidart on the banks of Loch Nanaugh and I strove with you against your better judgment to rouse the Highlands? I, with seven men and a pocketful of French promises and never a penny of money, and you with half Scotland ready to rise at your signal—do you ever recall that, now that you are as landless as I was then?'

'No,' replied the ruined chief calmly; 'it is the way of the weakling to dwell on lost hopes. I think of the future when Charles Stewart shall again land in Scotland with not seven but seven thousand at his back.'

'And we talk over these times in St James's,' interrupted the Prince with a short laugh. 'The ignis-fatuus, Lochiel, the ignis fatuus!'

'Your Highness was not always wont to speak thus.'

'I was not always a hunted man, Lochiel, with a price set on my head,' returned Charles. 'But I have no right to talk thus to one thrice ruined for my sake,' he added with an affectionate smile yet a bitter accent. 'Is not that the hardest stroke of all, that those who love me are in this case because of me?'

'Those who love you, sir,' replied Lochiel, 'would be in no other case but that of following your fortunes.' To the scaffold,' murmured Charles. 'Perhaps Kilmarnock and Cromartie lie headless in their graves even as we speak. And the good blood shed at Culloden Muir, do you think that I never dwell on that?'

Donald Cameron of Lochiel, greatest of Highland chiefs, noblest of Scottish gentlemen, worthy grandchild of Ewan Cameron, did not reply but kept his glance fixed on the vanishing waters of Loch Ericht.

If he was thinking of his own position, a year ago so secure and proud, now as desperate and unhappy as that of the man beside whom he stood, if it did cross his mind how futile was the sacrifice whereby he had cast aside everything that made life dear to him for the sake of a cause which in his judgment had long since been hopeless, and to which he was only bound by hereditary loyalty, he gave no sign of it either in his manner or in his worn and beautiful face.

'Your Highness will talk in a more hopeful measure when you are in France,' he said at length, as if forced to speech by the mournful silence and the insistent gaze of the Prince.

'I shall not regret leaving Scotland, certainly,' replied Charles impetuously.

Donald Cameron winced at that. The Prince was in no way a Scot, though he had successfully endeavoured to appear so, and when he left these rugged shores he would not be leaving home but returning to it, while for Lochiel and such as he the departure from Scotland would mean the bitterest, most heart-breaking exile.

'Let us go back,' said Charles suddenly; we shall not see Cluny to-night.'

They turned and began to ascend the wet, gray rock, the wet, purple heather, Lochiel proceeding painfully by reason of the wounds in his ankles. The night had now almost completely closed in, their sole guide was the glimmer of light that proceeded from Cluny's Cage, as the shieling was called, which by now was absolutely indistinguishable from the mountain side and the mountain trees. The Prince walked slightly ahead of Lochiel, whom he had almost forgotten.

The weight of his ruined fortunes darkened his soul as the night clouds darkened the landscape; he had borne his disasters bravely, with gaiety and humour, neither despair nor temper had added to the hardships of his flight, yet his nature was too ardent, too eager, too keen and haughty, not to feel to the full this complete failure of an enterprise on which he had set his young manhood's dearest hopes.

All his life, spent in nominal exile, had been a training for this attempt on the throne of England, which he most firmly believed to be his by every law, human and divine, and in which belief he was supported by the adherence and acknowledgment of thousands of those whom he considered his subjects, and by the help and countenance of two such powerful states as Rome and France.

His present position was the more humiliating and bitter as there had been a moment when dazzling success had appeared to be within his grasp.

For one brilliant moment London had seemed as easy of achievement as Edinburgh, and Charles still considered that the retreat from Derby, for which he most furiously blamed Lord George Murray, had turned an approaching triumph into an inevitable downfall.

Through all the affected cheerfulness with which he had endured his subsequent fortunes, the gall of that retreat which had been forced on him by his generals had never left the soul of Charles, and in moments such as these, when he escaped from the pressing necessities of his present situation and the companionship of his loyal and devoted followers, it returned to him with overwhelming gloom.

By birth he was more of a Latin and a Pole than an Englishman. By training, education, and religion almost wholly Italian, despite the care that had been taken to surround him with influences of the country so many fond hearts believed he would one day rule. In appearance he was more of a Sobieski than a Stewart; in temperament he belonged more, far more, to the South than the North. To the religion that had cost his grandfather his throne he remained obstinately faithful; and though he had known how tremendously such an act would weigh in his favour and how many waverers it would enroll under his banner, nothing had induced him to attend the services of the Scottish Church when in Edinburgh, nor to endeavour to conciliate the Established faith in any way save by a declaration of complete tolerance, which had little effect on a nation that but too well remembered the worth of Papist promises.

This fact of how he had been hampered, perhaps overthrown, by loyalty to his traditional faith, was not one of the sweetest of Charles's remembrances as he stumbled through the heather towards the murky light of the miserable shelter, the only one left to him, where he must hide his hunted head. It was not soothing for him to reflect that, had he been a Protestant he might have gained the suffrage of a nation to whom the House of Hanover was only less hateful than Popery.

He paused suddenly—a dark, muffled figure in the almost complete darkness—and peered through the rain for Lochiel, who was labouring up the hill behind.

'If I should come again, can you dream of such a day, Lochiel'—he asked a little wildly. 'Will not this night seem strange to us, talking of it in St James's?'

Lochiel's fine voice came through the dark,—

'If the King of France stands firm, your Highness should return within the year. Ten thousand men would do.'

He spoke with the hope that springs from desire, for now every personal motive, as well as honour, bound him to the cause which before he had hesitated to join and which had proved his complete ruin.

Only by the triumph of the Stewarts could he ever hope to be again united to his faithful Camerons, to reign again in Achnagarry, to leave aught but a desolate heritage to his children.

Charles laughed.

'Ten thousand men,' he muttered, as if in derision of such high hopes; but he was young, and by nature sanguine and daring; and like a flash of colour across the dreary night there rose before him a vision of France, of French help, of the old life of luxury and splendour, of Holyrood palace again, and the march to London...not to be checked and turned back at Derby...

When they reached the shieling they found two newcomers, who had arrived another way round the loch and escaped observation in the gathering dark.

These were not Lochiel's brother and Cluny of Macpherson, whom Charles had sent to Loch Arkaig to remove the French treasure buried there, and whom he had been hourly expecting, but Macpherson of Breakachie and Colonel John Roy Stewart, who had commanded the Edinburgh Regiment of the Lowland Foot at Culloden Muir.

Those two men were talking with Glenladale and Lochgarry as Charles entered the hut, and, throwing off his soaking bonnet and dripping plaid, discovered his bright hair and vivid face in the dingy lantern light.

'Colonel Stewart!' he exclaimed eagerly, as if he hoped for good news from this unlooked-for messenger. The other, seeing the Prince come in so suddenly from the night, and beholding so near to him in such surroundings and in such attire one whom he was used to associate with splendour and command, fell back a little with a movement of slight amazement.

Charles laughed and sat down on the edge of the brandy barrel; Colonel Stewart offered to kiss his hand, the other chiefs standing round and waiting.

'John Macpherson met Cluny and Archibald Cameron,' said John Roy Stewart, and they directed him to me to come and find your Highness here and to give you the news that the two French vessels, under the command of Colonel Warren, that are searching for your Highness, have touched at Loch Nanaugh.'

Charles made no reply; the spot named was where he had landed fourteen months before. This news assured him safety and an end to his sufferings, but it was also the final seal on his disaster—the last confirmation of his failure.

'The thought was that your Highness should at once proceed to this shipping by way of Auchnacarry and Loch Arkaig,' continued Colonel Stewart.

Charles gave a quick glance round the circle of his friends' faces, then roused himself to a show of high spirits.

'We must toast your good news, my dear colonel,' he cried, 'even though we have but one cup—there is still some of the Fort Augustus brandy left.' He rose from the barrel, which he tipped up, and scooped out the spirit in the mean cup, then pausing, and suddenly holding himself erect, he looked keenly at Colonel Stewart.

'Any other news—from London?'

John Roy Stewart answered his master's unspoken thought.

'Cromartie has been pardoned, sir.'

'And Kilmarnock—Balmerino?'

Colonel Stewart's hesitancy was his reply.

'Ah, beheaded!' flashed Charles.

'Last month, sir.'

Half the brandy spilled from the Prince's hand and sank into the earth floor; the rest, with a whirling change of humour, he carried to his lips.

'A toast!' he cried defiantly. 'I give you a toast! The Black Eyes!'

He nodded at Lochiel with a look of challenge.

'You know the lady?'

'Miss Walkinshaw, who nursed your Highness at Stirling?' replied Donald Cameron sadly, not being attuned to this mood.

'No!' answered Charles imperiously. 'A king's daughter!'

He drained the cup of the raw brandy and then handed it with a strange smile to Lochgarry to be refilled.

Something about his mien, at once desperate and defiant, as one who faces what he dreads with keyed-up courage; something about the brightness of his person in the ragged clothes, in the murky atmosphere of the hut; something in the wild words that seemed flung at fate like a challenge, kept the others silent as the cup was passed from one to another and the toast drank gravely under the bright gaze of Charles.