Читать книгу The Greatest Historical Novels & Stories of D. K. Broster - D. K. Broster - Страница 56

That evening there seemed to be bestowed on Loch na h-Iolaire a new and ethereal loveliness, when the hunter’s moon had changed the orange of her rising to argent. Yet the two men who stood on its banks were not looking at the silvered beauty of the water but at each other.

“Yes, quite sure,” said the elder, who had just made his way there from the house. “The wean was, I think, on the mend before I came; a trifle of treatment did the rest. He’ll need a little care now for the next few days, that is all. A beautiful bairn, Ewen. . . . You can come back and see him now; he’s sleeping finely.”

“It’s hard to believe,” said Ewen in a low voice. “But you have saved him, Archie; he was very ill when you got here this morning, I’m convinced. And now he is really going to recover?”

“Yes, please God,” answered Archibald Cameron. “I could not find you at first to tell you; then I guessed, somehow, that you would be by the lochan.”

“I have been here all afternoon, since you turned me out of the room; yet I don’t know why I came—above all to this very spot—for I have been hating Loch na h-Iolaire, for the first time in my life. It so nearly slew him.”

“Yet Loch na h-Iolaire is very beautiful this evening,” said his cousin, and he gave a little sigh, the sigh of the exile. “Those were happy days, Ewen, when I used to come here, and Lochiel too; we’ve both fished in this water, and I remember Donald’s catching a pike so large that you were, I believe, secretly alarmed at it. You were a small boy then, and I but two and twenty. . . .” He moved nearer to the brink. “And what’s that, pray, down there—hidden treasure?”

Ewen came and looked—the moon also. Through the crystal clear water something gleamed and wavered. It was the Culloden broadsword hilt, cause of all these last days’ happenings.

“That thing, which was once a Stewart claymore, is really why you are here, Archie.”

* * * * *

But the more obvious cause lay asleep in the house of Ardroy clutching one of his mother’s fingers, his curls dank and tumbled, his peach-bloom cheeks wan, dark circles under his long, unstirring lashes—but sleeping the sleep of recovery. Even his father, tiptoeing in ten minutes later, could not doubt that.

Without any false shame he knelt down by the little bed and bowed his head in his hands upon the edge. Alison, a trifle pale from the position which she was so rigidly keeping—since not for anything would she have withdrawn that prisoned finger, though it would have been quite easy—looked across at her husband kneeling there with a lovely light in her eyes. And the man to whom, as they both felt, they owed this miracle (though he disclaimed the debt) who had a brood of his own oversea, wore the air, as he gazed at the scene, of thinking that his own life would have been well risked to bring it about.