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Thinking it over afterwards, Ewen knew why it had been such a comfort to tell Archie; it was that Dr. Cameron seemed to understand so well what he had suffered that he never tried to belittle the cause of it. Instead of attempting to minimise this he said that he would have felt exactly the same had such a terrible mischance befallen him. Only how could Ewen at any stage have imagined that Donald, if he heard of his lapse, would ever believe that he had made a disclosure willingly?

“I blame you for that, my poor Ewen,” he said, shaking his head. “You must surely have known that he would as soon suspect me as you, who have been like an elder son to him, who so nearly threw away your life for him at Fort William. . . . I think that’s the worst part of your confession, but as you say that I am not to suppress anything I must tell him that too, though it will hurt him.”

Ewen raised his colourless face, to which, however, a measure of tranquillity had already returned. “I am sorry for that; but you must not keep back a word. Tell him how I allowed myself to fall asleep when I suspicioned it might be dangerous; tell him that I insulted Lord Loudoun somewhat unworthily—he would not have done that—tell him everything. You are only a proxy, you know, Archie—though a very satisfactory one,” he added gratefully. “There’s no other man save Lochiel that I could have told. Dhé, but I feel as if Ben Nevis had been lifted off me!”

Archibald Cameron gave his arm a little pressure. “Now ’tis my turn to make a confession to you. When I first came into this room I found myself emulating that Captain Greening of yours—whom, by the way, I should rejoice to meet on some good lonely brae, with a precipice near by. But, like your talking, my dear lad, my overhearing was accidental.”

“Do you mean that I was saying things in my sleep again? Archie, this is intolerable!”

“You bade me loose your arm when I touched you, and spoke of preferring to be ‘cut in pieces’ and of ‘another way’. You have just told me what that ‘other way’ was. Ewen, what was the first way, and who took it with you? You have not told me everything, after all.”

The young man was looking on the floor, and there was colour enough in his face now. “I do not very much wish to revive that memory. . . . But if you must know, I was near being flogged by order of the Lowland officer who captured me. He had been going to shoot me first—I’ll tell you of that anon. It was because he wanted . . . what they wanted and got at Fort Augustus.—No, do not look so horrified, Archie; he did not carry it out (though I’ll admit I believed he was going to). It was only a threat.”

“Then, if it was only a threat,” remarked Dr. Cameron, looking at him closely, “why did you call me a ‘damned torturer’ when I touched you?”

“I . . . Really, Archie, I cannot be responsible for everything I say in my sleep. I apologise, but if you were worth your salt you would give me some drug to cure me of the cursed habit!”

“I’m afraid the drug does not exist, my dear boy. When your mind is at peace you will not do it any more. And don’t you think that it would conduce to that state if you told me why you called me so unpleasant a name?”

Ewen gave him a little shake. “Mo thruaigh, Archie Cameron,” he said with vivacity, “I begin to think it was because you merit it with this persistence of yours! If I said that, I suppose I must have been remembering that when one has had a bayonet through one’s arm not long before, it is conveniently sensitive, that is all. But after a few experiments, Major Guthrie found that it was not sensitive enough. They knew better how to do things at Fort Augustus.”

Archibald Cameron still gazed at him, compressing his lips. “So the Lowlander tried ‘experiments’, did he? And do you still consider yourself a traitor, Ewen? I’d give you a rather different name, and so, I fancy, will Lochiel.”

“But I don’t mean you to tell Lochiel that! No, Archie, that was not confession—you got it out of me unfairly!”

“Unfortunately you made me promise to tell him everything,” retorted his cousin, smiling. “To turn to another aspect of this matter, then,” for Ewen was really looking unhappy, “it was, I suppose, to this Major Guthrie with a fancy for experiments that you were betrayed by the English officer who was your prisoner here—I might almost say your guest—last August. I hope that he did not go so far as to take part in these proceedings, too?—Bless us, what is wrong now?”

For this partial change of topic had proved far from soothing. With a sharp exclamation Ewen had got up from the bed.

“Good God, Archie, how did you hear that story? It’s not true—Major Windham did not betray me—he saved me!”

“Did he? Well, I’d far liefer hear that than the other thing. But that was what Lachlan MacMartin told us, when he came hotfoot to us at Achnacarry at the beginning of May.”

“Lachlan—Lachlan went to Achnacarry!” exclaimed Ewen in amazement.

“Yes, he appeared there one day nearly crazy with rage and remorse because you had been captured while he had left you in order to get food. He wanted Donald to march against Fort Augustus and deliver you.”

Ewen had begun to limp distractedly about the room. “I did not know that. But, great heavens, what a story to get abroad about Major Windham! Archie, he saved my life at the last minute; I was actually up against the wall before the firing-party when he dashed in between at the risk of his own. I should not be here now for you to bully but for him. It is true that I, too, God forgive me, was deluded enough for a short time to think his goodness calculated treachery, but at least I did not spread it abroad. And that is only part of what he has done and given up for me.” He gave his cousin a sketch of the rest. “I cannot think how Lachlan got such a mistaken notion into his head, for he was not there when I was found and taken, and he can hardly have met with that scoundrel Guthrie, who is capable of any lie.”

“What has become of Lachlan—is he here at Ardroy?”

“No, he has never returned, and no one knows anything of him; he has undoubtedly been either captured or killed, and much more probably killed, I fear. But I wish he had not spread this slander; ’tis at least to be hoped that no word of it reaches poor Windham!”

“I like to see in you, Ewen,” said his cousin, “the same concern for another man’s honour as for your own. But you know the Erse proverb, ‘A lie goes but on one leg’.”

“Like me,” commented Ewen with a smile. “Yet you think that in France I may go on two again?”

“You will certainly have a better chance of it. Then I may tell Lochiel, when I get back to Badenoch, that you consent to be reasonable?”

“Yes, thanks to you, I will go—since he is going. But I must wait a chance of getting off.”

“There’s a chance now,” said his cousin quickly; “but you must start for the coast to-morrow.”

“To-morrow!” Ewen’s face fell. “So soon!” His glance swept round the room and lingered for a moment on the heathery distances visible through the window. “Very well,” he said with a little sigh. “Tell me what I must do—no,” he caught himself up, “first tell me a little about Donald. Those wounds of his, are they healed? Archie, I hope due care is being taken of him on Ben Alder?”

“You look as if you think I ought not to have left him,” said Dr. Cameron, smiling. “But he has had Sir Stuart Threipland of Edinburgh with him, and the wounds are healing, though slowly. And I assure you that I have been too busy following Mercury of late to pay much attention to Æsculapius; I have been to and fro in Lochaber and Moidart a great deal more regularly than the post. More by token I am become a sort of banker. For I suppose you did not hear in your captivity, Ewen, that at the beginning of May two French ships landed six barrels of gold—forty thousand louis d’or—in Moidart for the Prince; and with some ado, owing to the reluctance of Clanranald’s people to lose sight of it, I got it conveyed to Loch Arkaig, and it has been buried there against future requirements.—I know what you are going to say, ‘If only we had had that money earlier, when we needed it so!’ ”

Those were indeed the words which leapt to the young man’s lips. Yet since over the ruined fortunes of to-day there still danced, like-will-of-the-wisps, the hopes of to-morrow, he fell to discussing the possible uses of this money with the man to whose endeavours (as he soon discovered) it was due that the French had not carried it off again when they heard the news of the disaster at Culloden. Archibald Cameron had indeed played post and banker to some purpose! Ewen looked at him with admiration not free from concern.

“Archie, are you duly careful of your own safety in these constant journeyings of yours, seeing that you are proscribed by name?”

His cousin smiled. “You may be sure that I am careful. Am I not pre-eminently a man of peace?”

Nevertheless not even Balmerino, the dauntless old soldier, was to make a more memorable end on the scaffold than Archibald Cameron. But his time was not yet—not by seven years; though, all unknowing, he had just been talking of what was to bring him there—the belated French treasure, fatal as the fabled gold of the river maidens to nearly every man who touched it.

“Now, for your getting off to France,” he resumed. “There has lately been a French privateer off Loch Broom, and she may very well be hanging off the coast farther south, therefore you should start for Moidart without a day’s delay. Since the twenty-fifth of July the coast is not so closely watched for the Prince as it was; the cordon of sentries has been removed. Make for Arisaig or Morar; at either you will be able to find a fisherman to take you off at night to the French vessel if she is still there. You speak French, so the rest should be easy.”

“And will Lochiel and the Prince try to leave by her?”

“I doubt it, for I fear she will be gone by the time Donald could reach the coast, or His Royal Highness either. But do not delay your departure on that account, Ewen, for the larger the party getting off from shore the more hazardous is the attempt—at least if there are any soldiers left in those parts now. (There cannot, at any rate, be many.) Now I must be getting on my way.”

“You will not pass the night with us?” suggested Ewen. “Aunt Margaret seems to have a high opinion of the garrets as a refuge.”

Dr. Cameron shook his head. “I must push on; ’tis only five o’clock. God bless you, my dear Ewen, and bring us to meet again—even though it be not in Scotland!”

“I wish I were coming with you to Ben Alder,” said Ewen rather wistfully, halting after his visitor down the stairs.

“Trust me to do your business with Donald as well as you could do it yourself—nay, better, for I suspect that you would leave out certain episodes.—You’ll be rid of this fellow at last, Miss Margaret,” he said to the figure waiting at the foot of the stairs. “I’ve sorted him!”

“ ’Tis you have the skill, Archibald Cameron,” replied the lady, beaming on him. “None of my prayers would move him. You’ll drink a health with us before you go?”

And under the picture of King James the Third and Eighth the three of them drained their glasses to the Cause which had already taken its last, its mortal wound.

* * * * *

Next day Ewen kept his word, and set about his departure. A garron was found for him to ride, and two of his men who had followed him through the campaign were to accompany him to the coast. Yielding to pressure, he had agreed to take young Angus MacMartin with him to France as his personal servant. He could not refuse it to Neil’s memory and to old Angus’s prayers that a MacMartin should be about him still.

He was to leave at dusk, since travelling by night would be less hazardous, and a little before sundown he went up to Slochd nan Eun to take leave of his foster-father, with whom he had had little converse since his return, for Angus had been ill and clouded in mind. But he had borne the loss of his two sons with an almost fierce resignation; it seemed as if he had asked no better fate for them, especially for Neil. He had recovered from his illness now, but he was rather frail and still at times a little confused. A daughter looked after him in the old cottage which had once rung with the laughter of many children, and with Ewen’s own; but the old man was alone, crouched over the fire, with a plaid across his knees when Ewen, helping himself on the ascent with a staff, arrived at the door.

Half blind though he was, Angus’s hearing was as keen as ever, and, even with the unfamiliar halt in it, he knew his foster-son’s step.

“Mac ’ic Ailein, is it you? Blessings on your head! You have come to say farewell to me, who shall never see you again.”

Tremblingly and slowly he arose, and embraced the young man. “Neil and Lachlan shall go with you, son of my heart, that you take no harm before you embark on the great water.”

“Neil is dead, foster-father, do you not remember?” asked Ewen gently. “He gave his life for me. And Lachlan—I fear Lachlan is dead also.”

“It is true that I do not see them any more,” replied the old man, with a singular detachment, “for I grow blinder every day; yet I hear Neil’s pipes very well still, and when the fire burns up I know that Lachlan has put on a fresh peat for me. Good sons both, but I have between my hands a son who is dearer, though I did not beget him—O my tall and beautiful one, glad was the day when you came back after the slaughter, but gladder this day, for you carry your head out of reach of your foes!” He passed his hand lingeringly over the bright locks. “And yet . . . all is not well. I do not know why, but all is not well. There is grief on the white sand . . . grief and mourning, and a sound of tears in the wind that blows there.”

“Indeed there is grief,” said Ewen sighing, “grief enough in my heart at going, at leaving Alba and my father’s house. I was almost for staying, Angus, did I take to the heather; but the brother of Mac Dhomhnuill Duibh has been here, and he bids me go. The Chief himself is going. But we shall return——”

“Some will return,” broke in Angus, sinking his head upon his breast. “Aye, some will return.” Sitting there, he stared with his almost sightless eyes into the fire.

Ewen stood looking down at him. “Shall I return?” he asked after a moment.

“I shall not see you, treasure of my heart . . . But these eyes will see my own son come back to me, and he too grieving.”

“But I fear that Lachlan is dead, foster-father,” repeated Ewen, kneeling on one knee beside him. “Is it not his wraith that puts the peats on the fire for you?”

“It may be,” answered the old man. “It may well be, for when I speak to him he never answers. Yet one night he stood here in the flesh, and swore the holy oath on his dirk to be avenged on the man who betrayed you to the saighdearan dearg. My own two eyes beheld him, my two ears heard him, and I prayed the Blessed One to give strength to his arm—for it was then that you were gone from us, darling of my heart, and fast in prison.”

“But you surely do not mean, Angus,” said his foster-son, puzzled, “that Lachlan came back here after I was captured? You mean that you saw his taibhs. For in the flesh he has never returned to Slochd nan Eun.”

“Yes, for one night he returned,” persisted the old man, “for one night in the darkness. None saw him but I, who opened to him; and he would not go near the house of Ardroy, nor let any see him but his father, because he was sick with grief and shame that he had left you on Beinn Laoigh to the will of your enemy. Ah, Mac ’ic Ailein, did I not feel that many things would come upon you because of the man to whom the heron led you! But that I never saw—that he would betray you to the saighdearan dearg! May Lachlan soon keep his oath, and the raven pick out the traitor’s eyes! May his bones never rest! May his ghost——”

Ewen had sprung up, horrified. “Angus, stop! What are you saying! That man, the English officer, did not betray me: he saved me, at great risk to himself. But for him the redcoats would have shot me like a dog—but for him I should not have escaped from their hands on the way to Inverlochy. Take back that curse . . . and for Heaven’s sake tell me that you are mistaken, that Lachlan did not swear vengeance on him, but on the man who took me prisoner, a Lowland Scot named Guthrie. That is what you mean, Angus, is it not?”

But Angus shook his grey head. “My son swore vengeance on the man who was your guest, the English officer who found you in the bothy on Beinn Laoigh, and delivered you up, and told the soldiers who you were. Lachlan found this out from the talk as he skulked round the Lowlander’s camp in the dark. Vengeance on the Lowlander he meant to have if he could, but he swore it for certain against the other, the English officer, because he had broken your bread. So he took oath on the iron to rest neither day nor night till that evil deed was repaid to him—he swore it here on the biodag on which you both saw blood that day by the lochan, and which you bade him not throw away. I think he meant to hasten back and lie in wait for the English officer as he returned over the pass of Corryarrick, and to shoot him with the musket which he had stolen from one of the redcoats. But whether he ever did it I do not know.”

Bewildered, and with a creeping sense of chill, Ewen had listened mutely in order that he might, perhaps, contrive to disentangle the true from the false in this fruit of the old man’s clouded brain. But with these last words came a gleam of comfort. No, Lachlan had not succeeded in any such attempt, thank God. And since then—for it was in May that Windham had returned over the Corryarrick—his complete disappearance pointed to but one conclusion, that he was gone where he could never keep his dreadful and deluded vow. Ewen drew a long breath of relief; yet it was rather terrible to hope that his foster-brother was dead.

Still, he would take what precaution he could.

“If, when I am gone, Angus,” he said, “Lachlan should return here, charge him most straightly from me that he abandon this idea of vengeance; tell him that but for the English officer I should be lying to-day where poor Neil is lying.—I wonder if anyone gave Neil burial,” he added under his breath.

But Angus heard. He raised himself. “Lachlan buried him when he came there after yourself, Eoghain, and found you gone, and was near driving the dirk into his own heart, as he told me. Yes, he stayed to bury his brother; and so when he came to the camp of the redcoats they had taken you to Kilcumein. But all night long he prowled round the tents, and heard the redcoats talk—he having the English very well, as you know—and tried to get into the tent of their commander to kill him while he slept, and could not. So he hastened to Achnacarry, and found Mac Dhomhnuill Duibh, and besought him to go with the clan and besiege the fort of Kilcumein and take you out of it; but the Chief had not enough men. So Lachlan came here secretly, to tell me that he had not been able to stay the redcoats from taking you, and that Neil had been happier than he, for he had died outside the door before they entered to you; and all that was left for him was to slay the Englishman—and so he vowed. But now, it seems, the Englishman is not to be slain?”

“A thousand times, no!” cried Ewen, who had listened very attentively to this recital, which certainly sounded as if it had come originally from Lachlan’s own lips, and some of which, as he knew from Archie, was true. “Remember that, if Lachlan should come here.—But I cannot understand,” he went on, frowning, “how, if Lachlan overheard so much of the soldiers’ talk, he did not overhear the truth, and learn how Major Windham ran in and saved me from being shot. Surely that is the matter which must most have engaged their tongues, and in that there was no question of delivering me up.”

“I do not know what more my son heard,” said Angus slowly, “but, when a man hates another, does not his ear seek to hear the evil he may have done rather than the good?”

“Yes, I suppose he did hate Major Windham,” said Ewen thoughtfully. “That was the reason then—he wanted a pretext. . . . Indeed I must thank God that he never got a chance of carrying out his vow. And, from his long absence, I fear—nay, I am sure—that he has joined poor Neil. Alas, both my brothers slain through me, and Neil’s children fatherless!”

“But Angus Og goes with you, is it not, son of my heart, that he too may put his breast between you and your foes?”

‘That he shall never do’, thought Ewen. “Yes, he goes with me. Give me your blessing, foster-father; and when I come again, even if your eyes do not see me, shall your hands not touch me, as they do now?” And he guided the old hands to his shoulders as he knelt there.

“No, I shall not touch you, treasure of my heart,” said Angus, while his fingers roved over him. “And I cannot see whether you will ever come back again, nor even whether you will sail over the great water away from your foes. All is dark . . . and the wind that comes off the sea is full of sorrow.” He put his hands on Ewen’s head. “But I bless you, my son, with all the blessings of Bridget and Michael; the charm Mary put round her Son, and Bridget put in her banners, and Michael put in his shield . . . edge will not cleave thee, sea will not drown thee. . . .” He had slid into reciting scraps of a sian or protective charm, but he did not go through to the end; his hands fell on to his knees again, and he leant back and closed his eyes.

Ewen bent forward and threw some peats on to the fire. “Tell me one thing, foster-father,” he said, looking at him again. “Even if I never leave the shores of Moidart, but am slain there, or am drowned in the sea, which is perhaps the meaning of the wind that you hear moaning, tell me, in the days to come shall a stranger or a son of mine rule here at Ardroy?”

Angus opened his eyes; but he was so long silent that Ewen’s hands began to clench themselves harder and harder. Yet at last the old man spoke.

“I have seen a child running by the brink of Loch na h-Iolaire, and his name is your name.”

Ewen drew a long breath and rose, and, his foster-father rising too with his assistance, he kissed him on both cheeks.

“Whatever you have need of, Angus, ask of Miss Cameron as you would of me.”

“You are taking away from me the only thing of which I have need,” said the old man sadly. “Nevertheless, it must be. Blessings, blessings go with you, and carry you safely away from the white sands to her who waits for you . . . and may my blessings draw you back again, even though I do not greet you at your returning.”

* * * * *

When Ewen came slowly down the path again he found himself thinking of how he had descended it last August behind Keith Windham, nearly a year ago. The story of Lachlan’s vow had perturbed him, but now he saw it in a far less menacing light. Either his foster-brother’s unquiet spirit was by this time at rest, or the whole thing was a dream of that troubled imagination of the old seer’s, where the distinction between the living and the dead was so tenuous.

Soon he forgot Keith Windham, Angus and everyone. Loch na h-Iolaire lay before him under the sunset, a sunset so tranquil and so smiling that in its sleepy brightness, which mirrored all the mountains round, the loch seemed to hold the very heart of content. Ewen had the sensation that his heart, too, was drowned there. And by his own will he was saying farewell to loch and mountain, island and red crag. He remembered how Alison had said that he would be hard put to it to choose between her and them. Was she right?

There was a place where for a little there was no bank, but marshy ground, and where the water came brimming into the reeds and grasses, setting them faintly swaying. He went to it, and, stooping with difficulty, dipped a cupped hand into the water and raised it to his lips. Perhaps that sacramental draught would give him to see this scene as bright and sharp in dreams, over there in the land of exile whither, like his father, like all who had not counted the cost, he was going.

As he drank there was a loud croak over his head, and, looking up, he saw a heron winging its slow, strong way over the loch towards the sunset. It might almost have been the same heron which he and Alison had watched that evening last summer, when it had seemed to arrive from the western coast like a herald from him who had landed there. Now it was going towards the coast once more, as he, the outlaw, was going, and as his Chief and his fugitive Prince would soon be going. In a little year, between two flights of a heron seen over Loch na h-Iolaire, the whole adventure of ruin had been begun and consummated.

Well, if one’s life remained to one it was in order to come back some day and renew the struggle. Ewen took off his bonnet. “God save King James!” he said firmly, and turned away from the mirrored mountains to take the same path as the heron.