Читать книгу The Greatest Historical Novels & Stories of D. K. Broster - D. K. Broster - Страница 110

Table of Contents

And after that came the death in life of those intervening two days, which seemed a whole lifetime on the rack, and yet a river hurrying with implacable haste to the sea.

There was no hope for Archibald Cameron now, except the faint possibility of that eleventh hour reprieve to which a few still pinned their faith. At one moment Ewen would feel that the intensity of his desire alone must call this into being; the next, that he had always known the sentence would take its course. Lord Stowe, grave and disappointed, advised him not to trust to a miracle. It was remarkable that Aveling, young and generous-hearted though he was, gave the same advice, and would not take the easier path of trying to buoy up his friend’s spirits with an anticipation which he did not share. But Lady Stowe, with whom Ewen had an interview, not of his seeking, on the Tuesday, proclaimed her conviction that the execution would not take place, and hinted at the influence which she herself had brought to bear on certain members of the Government. Hector Grant was in a frenzy, dashing hither and thither, sure that something could still be done, and talking wildly of a rescue at Tyburn itself, of kidnapping Lord Newcastle or Henry Pelham and holding them to ransom, and other schemes equally impossible.

But by noon on Wednesday Ewen had abandoned all dreams, sober and extravagant alike. His faint hope of seeing Archie once more was dead too, even the Earl of Stowe’s influence could not procure him another interview. And in the afternoon he shut himself up in his lodging, and would see no one, not even Hector. He could talk about to-morrow’s tragedy no longer, and, like a wounded animal which seeks solitude, only asked to be left alone. How desperately hard it was to meet a friend’s fate with composure and resignation—how much less hard to face one’s own! He knew, for he himself had once been almost as near the scaffold as Archibald Cameron was now.

He had sat for he knew not how long that afternoon immured in the close little parlour, with the window fast shut since the moment when he had overheard two men in the street below arranging to go to Tyburn on the morrow, and one of them, who was a trifle drunk, offering the other some only too vivid reminiscences of the execution of the Scottish Jacobites in 1746. Ewen had sprung up, and, calling upon his Maker, had slammed down the window with such violence that he had nearly shattered it. Then, after walking to and fro for a while like a man demented, he had flung himself down on the settle, and was still sitting there, his head in his hands, when a timid tap at the door announced Mrs. Wilson.

“I’d not disturb you, sir,” she whispered sympathetically, “but that there’s a messenger below from the Tower in a hackney-coach, and he brings this.” She held out a letter.

Ewen lifted his head from his hands.

“From the Tower?” he repeated, looking at her stupidly. Surely she did not mean that?

But, opening the letter, he saw the heading; saw, too, that it came from the Deputy-Lieutenant.

“Dear Sir,” it ran—

“Doctor Cameron having very earnestly desired to see you once more, and I myself having come to the conclusion that it were better Mrs. Cameron did not pass the night here, but left before the gates were shut, and that some friend should be present to take her away, I have obtained leave from the Constable for you to visit the prisoner and also to perform this office; and have therefore sent the bearer in a hackney-coach to bring you back with all speed, as the gates must infallibly be closed at six o’clock this evening.

“Your obedient humble servant,

“Charles Rainsford.”

Ewen drew a long breath. “I will come at once,” he said.

Nearly all the way, jolting in the coach with the warder, or whatever he was, Ardroy was turning over and over a once entertained but long abandoned idea of changing clothes with Archie. The same obstacle brought him up again—his own unusual stature, though Archie was of a good height himself. Yet this unexpected summons did so clearly seem as though Fate were holding out a last opportunity of rescue—but what opportunity? Ewen’s former visit had shown him how impregnable were the Tower walls, how closely guarded the gates. To-night every soul there would be doubly alert. And if Archie were by now in irons there was no hope of any kind . . . there was little enough in any case.

To his surprise, when he came to the Byward Tower, they did not offer to search him, and he was told, also, that Doctor Cameron had been moved from the Lieutenant’s house and was there, in the Byward Tower itself. Ewen asked the reason.

“It was thought safer, sir. My Lords Kilmarnock and Balmerino were lodged here in ’46, though my Lord Kilmarnock, too, was at first in the Lieutenant’s house.”

“And Mrs. Cameron, is she in this tower with her husband?”

“No, sir; she remains in the Lieutenant’s house until she leaves, before the gates are shut.”

He would see Archie alone, then, and he could not but be glad of that.

It had indeed a very different setting, this last meeting, and one which better fitted the circumstances than the former. Unlike the pleasant apartments with their glimpses of the outer world, this place was heavily charged with an atmosphere of finality, for the roof curved cage-like above the large, circular stone-vaulted room with its narrow windows. In the middle was a table with a couple of chairs; and at this table Archie was sitting with a book open before him; but his eyes were on the door. He was not in irons.

They clasped hands in silence as the door swung to and clashed home. Only then did Ewen see that they were not alone, for some distance away a wooden-faced warder sat stiffly on a chair against the wall.

“Cannot that man leave us for a little?” murmured Ewen.

“No,” said his cousin. “I must have a shadow now until—until there’s no more need of watching me. This good fellow must even sleep here to-night. But we can speak French or Erse; he’ll not understand either.”

Ewen was bitterly disappointed. If there were a witness present they had not the faintest chance of changing clothes. He said as much in his native tongue.

“My dear Ewen,” replied Archibald Cameron smiling, “Nature, when she gave you that frame, never intended you for such a rôle—and in any case it is quite impracticable. Come, sit down and let us talk. You see there is another chair.”

It seemed of a tragic incongruity to sit quietly talking at a table, but Ewen obeyed. Talk he could not, at first. But Archie began to speak with perfect calm of his last arrangements, such as they were; he had given his wife, he said, what he had been able to set down from time to time of his wishes and sentiments, by means of a bit of blunt pencil which he had contrived to get hold of after all.

“Four or five scraps of paper they are,” he concluded. “I could not come by more, but I have signed my name to everyone of them, that they may be known for authentic.”

Only once did he betray emotion; it was in speaking of his young children in exile, and their future, so desperately uncertain when he was gone.

“I have no money to leave them,” he said sadly. “Had that gold from Loch Arkaig really stayed in my hands they would not be penniless now, poor bairns! But I have been very much pleased,” he went on, “with a letter which my wife showed me from my eldest boy—you remember John, Ewen; he always had a great admiration for you. I have for some time observed in him a sense of loyalty and honour much beyond what might have been expected from a boy of his years, and in this letter of which I speak he expresses not only his conviction of my inviolable fidelity to the Cause, but a desire that I should rather sacrifice my life than save it upon dishonourable terms. I have great hopes of his future, even though the principles of uprightness and loyalty be not over-popular nowadays.”

Ewen saw that great velvet curtain in the Duke of Argyll’s house, with the shaft of light slipping through. . . . Did Archie know of that appeal? He certainly did not know of the chance of life which Ewen himself had rejected on his behalf, for that Ewen had not communicated to Mrs. Cameron when he wrote.

“Did the Privy Council,” he asked somewhat hesitatingly, “ever hold out a promise of mercy if you would make disclosures?”

Archie nodded. “Yes. And I believe that hopes of my doing so must have been cherished for some time after my examination, since Mr. Sharpe, the Solicitor to the Treasury, certainly had them as late as the seventeenth of May, when I was sentenced. Tell me, Ewen,” he added, looking at him hard, “—for Jean has confessed to me the step which she worked upon you to take—had his Grace of Argyll the same hopes?”

“You know of that?” exclaimed Ewen, half-apprehensive, half-relieved. “You know—and you forgive me for going to him?”

“My dear lad, there’s no question of forgiveness. I ought to thank you from the bottom of my heart for undertaking what I know must have been a very repugnant task. Moreover, as I am neither a saint nor a hermit, but an ordinary man like the next, I’ll not deny that a span of forty-six years sometimes seems a little short to me. If MacCailein Mor could by honourable means have prolonged it, I should not have relished accepting the boon from his hands, but I should not have refused it.”

Ewen turned very pale. “Archie . . . you make me feel like your executioner. You might have had your life, perhaps—but I—in effect I refused it for you! I . . . But it’s not too late.” He half-rose from his chair.

Archie caught at his arm. “Ah, laochain, I guess why you refused it for me. Should I think that you know me less well than my poor John? I’d like to have had the refusing of it to MacCailein Mor myself, on the terms which I can divine that he offered.”

“To do him justice, he offered nothing. At the end indeed he spoke of . . . of a possible door. You can guess what it was. He would have naught to do with it himself. Yet——” Ewen turned his head away. What an inhuman, sterile deity seemed, after all, that abstraction called honour! “Oh, Archie, if it were possible to accept! . . . It was not so hard then to turn one’s back on the chance; I did it without weighing the matter. I knew you would not consent. But it is much harder now.” And at last he looked at his cousin, with eyes which, half-ashamedly, implored, as if somehow, somehow . . .

Archibald Cameron smiled and gave his head a little shake. “You will be glad by this time to-morrow. What welcome do you think Murray of Broughton’s former friends give him nowadays? And would you set the door of Ardroy wide for me, Ewen, were I to save my skin as he did? You know you would not!—But enough of this talk. There has been no choice in the matter. I could not bring myself to betray either my companions or my Prince’s plans.”

“Yet you yourself have been betrayed!” came instinctively to Ewen’s lips.

Archie’s face clouded a little. “I am glad to think that I do not know the informer, whether the thing was done of his own free will or at another’s instigation. It is easier to forgive, thus.”

This time it was Ewen who was determined that Archie should read nothing upon his face, and he set it immovably. Of what use to burden his spirit, so soon to be gone, with the hatred and suspicion which lay so heavy on his own since the encounter with young Glenshian?

Moreover—luckily perhaps—Archie here pulled out his watch. “Good Mr. Falconar, the Scots nonjuring clergyman who has been visiting me, and will attend me to Tyburn to-morrow, is to bring me the Sacrament at five o’clock. I would have wished to take it to-morrow morning before I set out, but then Jean could not have received it with me, nor you, if you wish to do so?”

“Will it be here?”

“Yes.” The Doctor pointed to where a little table, covered with a white cloth, stood against the wall, with two or three footstools ranged before it. “And Jean herself will be brought hither. But I have said farewell to her already. . . . Ewen, be patient with her—though, indeed, she has the bravest heart of any woman living.”

“You do not need to urge that,” said Ardroy.

“I know that I do not. It is you who are to take her away from the Tower, too, God bless you!”

“Shall I . . . take her back to Lille?”

“It is not necessary; that is arranged for.” Archie got up suddenly; Ewen had a glimpse of his face, and knew that he was thinking of the fatherless children to whom she would return.

He sat there, rapidly and quite unconsciously fluttering over the leaves of the book lying on the table, and then said in a voice which he could scarcely command, “Archie, is there nothing else that I can do for you?”

Doctor Cameron came and sat down again. “There is something. But perhaps it is too hard to ask.”

“If it be anything which concerns me alone it is not too hard.”

“Then . . . I would ask you to be there to-morrow.”

Ewen recoiled. “I . . . I did not dream that you would ask that!”

“You would rather stay away?”

“Archie—what do you think I am made of?”

Archibald Cameron looked at him rather wistfully. “I thought—but it was, I see, a selfish thought—that I should like to see one face of a friend there, at the last. I have heard that a Tyburn crowd, accustomed to thieves and murderers, is . . . not a pleasant one; and I have been warned that there will be very many people there.”

“They will not be hostile, Archie; that I can stake my soul on. You do not know the sympathetic and indignant feeling there is abroad. But, if you wish it, I will be there; nay, if it is your wish, I will make it mine too. . . . Yet even you will not ask me to remain until the end of all?” he added imploringly.

“No,” said his cousin gravely but serenely, “not until that. Yet I think the end, thank God, will matter very little to me. In spite of the terms of the sentence and of Lord Chief Justice Lee, I have a good hope that I shall not be cut down until I am quite dead. . . . Ewen, Ewen, think it’s yourself that’s going to the gallows (as you nearly did once) and not I! You would not play the child over your own fate, I know that well!” For Ewen had his head on his arms, and his nails were digging into the table. He did not answer.

“I could wish it were not Tyburn,” Archibald Cameron went on, as if to himself. “My lords Kilmarnock and Balmerino were luckier to suffer on Tower Hill, and by the axe. Yet I must not complain, being but a commoner; indeed, I should think of the great Marquis of Montrose, who was hanged likewise—and from a very lofty ladder too. And I thank my God I was always easier ashamed than frightened. . . . Ewen, Mr. Falconar will be here in a few minutes. Do you wish to make some preparation before you take communion with me?”

Ewen roused himself, and mechanically knelt down by the table where he had been sitting, put his hands before his face and tried to say a prayer. But it was impossible. His whole soul was too pulsing with revolt to bow itself before that mystery of divine self-humiliation and pain and joy; he could not even say ‘Lord, I am not worthy’; his heart was nothing but a burning stone.

Nevertheless he still knelt there, rising only when he heard the bolts withdrawn, and there came in, first a very tall, thin man in lay dress, who walked with a limp, and then, on the arm of Rainsford himself, Mrs. Cameron. The Deputy-Lieutenant considerately dismissed the warder and himself took the man’s place, and, almost before Ewen, dazed with pain, had realised it, the service was beginning. Archibald Cameron, his hand in his wife’s knelt at some distance from the improvised altar; Ewen a little way behind them. And, save that it was not dark, but a June evening, the bare masonry of the place might almost have suggested an Eucharist in the catacombs; but Ewen did not think of that. He seemed to be able to think of nothing, though he did perceive that Mr. Falconar, who appeared to be greatly moved, was using, not the English Communion Office, but the proscribed Scottish Liturgy of 1637.

When the moment of communion approached, the two in front of him rose, and Archie glanced round at him, but Ewen shook his head, and so Doctor Cameron led his wife to one of the footstools and knelt beside her. But when Ewen saw them kneeling there without him, the ties of human affection drew him more strongly than his nonjuring training, with its strict doctrine of the Eucharist and his own fear of unworthy reception, held him back. So he got up after all, and knelt humbly on the floor by Archie’s side; and drinking of the cup after him whose viaticum it truly was, felt for the moment wonderfully comforted, and that the Giver of that feast, first instituted as it was in circumstances of betrayal and imminent death, had pardoned the hard and rebellious heart in him. And he remembered, too, that peaceful Eucharist by the winter sea in Kilmory of Ardnamurchan, and wished that Mr. Oliphant were here. Then he went back to the table where he had sat with Archie, and knelt down again there with his head against the edge, for a long time.

At last he looked up. The service was over; Mr. Falconar was gone. Archie, with his back to him, had his wife in his arms. Ewen thought that if he also went, the two might have a moment or two together—save for the presence of the Deputy-Lieutenant, who, considerate as ever, was looking out of one of the little windows. But he could not go without a last word. He got to his feet, approached a little way, and said his cousin’s name.

Doctor Cameron put his wife into a chair, and turned; and Ewen held out his hand.

“I shall not see you again to have speech with,” he said in Gaelic. His very hands felt numb in Archie’s clasp. “I wish I could die with you,” he whispered passionately.

Archie held his hands tightly. “Dear lad, what then would Alison do, wanting you, and your boys, and your tenants? You have work here; mine is over.”

“Gentlemen,” came Rainsford’s voice from behind, “there remains but eleven minutes ere the gates are closed.”

Time, the inexorable, had dwindled to this! Ewen caught his breath. “Good-bye,” he said after a second of struggle. “Good-bye, faithful and true! Greet Lochiel for me. I will keep the promise I have made you. Look for me there—give me a sign.” He embraced Archie and went out quickly, for the door was ajar, with the armed sentries close outside. Only Mrs. Cameron and General Rainsford remained behind.

But outside, beyond the sentries, was still Mr. Falconar, with his handkerchief to his eyes. As for Ewen, he leant against the wall to wait for Mrs. Cameron and folded his arms tightly across his breast, as if by that constraint he could bridle a heart which felt as though it were breaking. Perhaps he shut his eyes; at any rate, he was roused by a touch on his arm. It was Mr. Falconar, still painfully agitated.

“Sir, I shall spend this night praying less, I think, for him than for strength to carry me through this terrible business to-morrow without faltering.”

“You mean the attending Doctor Cameron to the scaffold,” asked Ewen in a voice which sounded completely indifferent.

“Yes,” said the clergyman. “I declare to you, sir, that I do not know how I am to come through it. Doctor Cameron’s composure shames me, who am supposed to uphold it. My great fear is lest any unworthy weakness of mine should shake his calm in his last moments—though that hardly seems possible.”

Ewen was sorry for him. “You cannot withdraw now, I suppose, for he must have a minister with him.”

“It is usual, I understand; but he does not need one, sir. He has not left it until the eleventh hour, like some, to make his peace with God. I must carry out as much of my office as he requires, but he does not need me to pray for him on the scaffold, priest though I be. I shall ask his prayers. I would ask yours, too, sir, that I do not by any weakness add to his burden to-morrow.”

Ewen looked at him with a compassion which was shot through by a strange spasm of envy. This man, who dreaded it so, would see Archie once more at close quarters, be able to address him, hear his voice, go with him to the very brink. . . .

Then through the half-open door came the Deputy-Lieutenant with Mrs. Cameron again on his arm. She looked half-fainting, yet she walked quite steadily. Mr. Falconar being now nearest the door, General Rainsford put her into his charge, and called hastily for the warder to take up his post again within. In a kind of dream Ewen watched the clergyman and the all but widow go down the stairs. His heart ached for her, little and brave and forlorn, her dress slipping slowly from one worn stone step to the next.

He had started to follow her, and had descended a step or two, when he was aware of a voice calling hurriedly but softly to him from above. He went back again, wondering.

It was the Deputy-Lieutenant who had called after him, and now met him at the top of the stairway. “Doctor Cameron has remembered something which he had intended to give his wife; but it was you whom he wished called back, if possible.” He pulled out his watch. “Four minutes, no longer, Mr. Cameron!”

So he was to have speech with Archie once more. And, the warder being still outside, and the Deputy-Lieutenant not seeming to purpose coming in again, for that brief fraction of time they would be alone. Had Archie made a pretext to that end?

He was standing in the middle of the room with something in his hand. “I forgot to give these to Jean, as I intended, for my eldest son.” And he held out to Ewen two shabby shoe-buckles of steel. “Bid Jean tell him from me,” he said earnestly, “that I send him these, and not my silver ones; and that if I had gold ones I would not send him the gold, but these, which I wore when skulking. For steel being hard and of small value is an emblem of constancy and disinterestedness; and so I would have him always to be constant and disinterested in the service of his King and country, and never to be either bribed or frightened from his duty.—Will you tell her that, Ewen?”

No, he had not been sent for under a pretext. Ewen took the buckles. “She shall have them; and I will faithfully repeat your message.” Then he was mute; it seemed as if Archie were gone already, as if the immeasurable gulf already severed them. Archibald Cameron saw the dumb misery on his face and put his hand on his arm.

“Don’t look like that, my dearest Ewen! I thank God I am ready to be offered, and you need have no apprehension for me to-morrow. It is poor Falconar I shall be sorry for.”

“Indeed,” said Ewen, finding his voice again, “he seems most painfully apprehensive; he was speaking to me just now. I fear, as he does, that his presence will be no support to you. I was about to ask him whether he could not procure another clergyman to take his place, but so few in London are nonjurors, and I suppose you would——”

He never finished. The colour came surging over his drawn face, as a wild arrow of an idea sped winging into his brain. “Archie,” he said breathlessly in Gaelic, “if a layman might . . . if it could be contrived . . . could not . . . could not I take his place to-morrow?”

In the Doctor’s face also the colour came and went for a moment. “My dear Ewen . . . if it is like to prove a trial to Falconar, how would you——”

“I’d rather stand with you in the cart than see you stand there from a distance, and be unable to get at you,” said Ewen with great earnestness. “I should be near you—I could speak to you. Mr. Falconar says you have no need of his ministrations. And I would not break down, I swear to you! Archie, would you be willing?”

“Willing!” exclaimed Archie in the same low voice. “I would give one of the few hours left me for your company! But it asks too much of you, Eoghain.”

“Not so much as to stand in the crowd and watch you like a stranger,” reiterated Ewen. “And—my God, the four minutes must be nearly gone!—’tis as if Providence had planned it, for Mr. Falconar is little under my height, and lame of a leg as I am at times. If I wore his dark clothes—’tis a pity he goes in lay dress, but that cannot be helped—and perhaps his wig, who would look at my face? And the clergyman always drives by himself to Tyburn, does he not?”

“I believe so,” said Doctor Cameron, considering, “and in a closed carriage. You would not be seen on the way, since you would not travel publicly and slowly, as I shall.”

“I only wish I could, with you! But, Mr. Falconar apart, would you not rather have some clergyman?” And, as Archie shook his head, Ardroy asked hastily, knowing that his time must be almost up, “Is there anything which I must do . . . there?—To be sure I can ask Mr. Falconar that.”

“I suppose it is usual to read a prayer. I should like the commendatory prayer from the Prayer Book . . . and I’d a thousand times rather you read that for me than poor Mr. Falconar.”

“Mr. Cameron,” said Rainsford, impatiently appearing at the door, “you must come instantly, if you please, or I shall be obliged to detain you as a prisoner also—but not here with Doctor Cameron. You have but just time to join Mrs. Cameron in the coach.”

“I have your leave, then, if I can contrive it?” whispered Ewen.

Archibald Cameron bent his head. “Good-bye,” he said in English. “Remember my message.”

And this time Ewen hurried from the room with but the briefest farewell glance, so afraid was he of being detained and prevented from carrying through his scheme.

By running down the stairs he reached the carriage just before it started. Mr. Falconar, hat in hand, was at the door of it, Mrs. Cameron invisible within.

“Give me your direction, sir,” said Ardroy hastily to the clergyman. “I must see you when I have escorted Mrs. Cameron home; ’tis of the utmost importance.” (‘Yes, he is much of a height with me,’ said something in his mind.)

Mr. Falconar gave it. “I shall await you this evening,” he said, and Ewen scrambled into the already moving coach.

But now, as they drove out under the archway of the Lion Tower, he must put aside his own plan, his own grief, and think of one who was losing even more than he. Jean Cameron was sitting upright in the corner, her hands clasped, looking straight in front of her, and alarming him not a little by her rigidity. Suddenly she said, without looking at him:

“He is not afraid.”

“No, madam,” answered Ewen, “no man was ever less afraid.”

“The pure in heart shall see God,” she murmured to herself. And a moment afterwards, somewhat to Ardroy’s relief, she broke into wild weeping.