Читать книгу The Greatest Historical Novels & Stories of D. K. Broster - D. K. Broster - Страница 48

Conjecture or knowledge, Donald’s statement was correct, though, as an excuse for theirs, his father’s presence was scarcely sufficient, since nearly a quarter of a mile of water intervened between Ewen Cameron of Ardroy and his offspring. He could not even see his small sons, for he sat on the farther side of the tree-covered islet in the middle of the loch, a young auburn-haired giant with a determined mouth, patiently splicing the broken joint of a fishing-rod.

More than four years had elapsed since Ardroy had returned with his wife and his little son from exile after Culloden. As long as Lochiel, his proscribed chief, was alive, he had never contemplated such a return, but in those October days of 1748 when the noblest and most disinterested of all the gentlemen who had worn the White Rose lay dying in Picardy of brain fever (or, more truly, of a broken heart) he had in an interval of consciousness laid that injunction on the kinsman who almost felt that with Lochiel’s his own existence was closing too. All his life Lochiel’s word had been law to the young man; a wish uttered by those dying lips was a behest so sacred that no hesitations could stand in the way of carrying it out. Ewen resigned the commission which he bore in Lochiel’s own regiment in the French service, and breathed once more the air of the hills of home, and saw again the old grey house and the mountain-clasped loch which was even dearer. But he knew that he would have to pay a price for his return.

And indeed he had come back to a life very different from that which had been his before the year 1745—to one full of petty annoyances and restrictions, if not of actual persecution. He was not himself attainted and thereby exempted, like some, from the Act of Indemnity, or he could not have returned at all; but he came back to find his religion proscribed, his arms taken from him, and the wearing of his native dress made a penal offence which at its second commission might be punished with transportation. The feudal jurisdiction of the chiefs was shattered for ever, and now the English had studded the Highlands with a series of military outposts, and thence (at a great expenditure of shoe-leather) patrolled all but the wildest glens. It was a maimed existence, a kind of exile at home; and though indeed to a Highlander, with all a Celt’s inborn passion for his native land, it had its compensations, and though he was most happily married, Ewen Cameron knew many bitter hours. He was only thirty-three—and looked less—and he was a Jacobite and fighter born. Yet both he and his wife believed that he was doing right in thus living quietly on his estate, for he could thereby stand, in some measure, between his tenants and the pressure of authority, and his two boys could grow up in the home of their forefathers. Keith, indeed, had first opened his eyes at Ardroy, and even Donald in England, whither, like other heroic Jacobite wives in similar circumstances, Lady Ardroy had journeyed from France for her confinement, in order that the heir should not be born on foreign soil.

Besides, Lochiel had counselled return.

Moreover, the disaster of Culloden had by no means entirely quenched Jacobite hopes. The Prince would come again, said the defeated among themselves, and matters go better . . . next year, or the year after. Ewen, in France, had shared those hopes. But they were not so green now. The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had rendered French aid a thing no more possible; and indeed Jacobite claims had latterly meant to France merely a useful weapon with which to threaten her ancient foe across the Channel. Once he who was the hope of Scotland had been hunted day and night among these Western hills and islands, and the poorest had sheltered him without thought of consequences; now on the wide continent of Europe not a crowned head would receive him for fear of political complications. More than three years ago, therefore, poor, outcast and disillusioned, he who had been “Bonnie Prince Charlie” had vanished into a plotter’s limbo. Very few knew his hiding-places; and not one Highlander.