Читать книгу The Greatest Historical Novels & Stories of D. K. Broster - D. K. Broster - Страница 57

Since by nine o’clock that evening Dr. Kincaid had not put in an appearance, it could be taken for granted that he was not coming at all. This made it seem doubtful whether he had seen Hector by the roadside, and though such an encounter was highly desirable for Hector’s own sake, yet, if the doctor had missed him, it probably meant that the farmer at Inverlair had sent at once and got the injured man into shelter, as he had promised Ewen to do.

Alison was naturally distressed and increasingly anxious about her brother, now that her acute anxiety over Keithie had subsided, and her husband undertook to send a messenger early next morning to get news of the stricken adventurer. But to-night nothing could be done to this end. So, while his wife remained by the child’s side, Ardroy and his cousin sat together in his sanctum, and Ewen tried more fully to convey his gratitude. But once again Doctor Cameron would none of the thanks which he averred he had not deserved. Besides, it was rather good, he observed, to be at the old trade again.

Ewen looked thoughtfully at his kinsman as the latter leant back in his chair. Archibald Cameron had been greatly beloved in Lochaber where, after his medical studies in Edinburgh and Paris, he had settled down to doctor his brother Lochiel’s people—poor and ignorant patients enough, most of them. Small wonder, however, if he regretted that lost life, quiet, strenuous and happy; whether he did or no it was the second time in a few hours, thought Ewen, that he had referred to it. Ewen could not help thinking also what strange and dangerous activities had been the Doctor’s, man of peace though he was, since that July day in ’45 when his brother the Chief had sent him to Borrodale to dissuade the Prince from going on with his enterprise. He had become the Prince’s aide-de-camp, had taken part in that early and unsuccessful attack on Ruthven barracks during the march to Edinburgh, had been wounded at Falkirk, and shared Lochiel’s perils after Culloden, adding to them his own numerous and perilous journeys as go-between for him with the lost and hunted Prince; it was he who had conveyed the belated French gold from the sea-coast to Loch Arkaig and buried it there. Then had come (as for Ewen too) exile, and anxiety about employment; after Lochiel’s death fresh cares, on behalf of his brother’s young family as well as his own, and more than one hazardous return to the shores where his life was forfeit. If Archibald Cameron had been a soldier born and bred instead of a physician he could not have run more risks. . . .

“Why do you continue this dangerous work, Archie?” asked Ewen suddenly. “There are others who could do it who have not your family ties. Do you so relish it?”

Doctor Cameron turned his head, with its haunting likeness to Lochiel’s. He looked as serene as usual. “Why do I go on with it? Because the Prince bade me, and I can refuse him nothing.”

“But have you seen him recently?” asked Ewen in some excitement.

“This very month, at Menin in Flanders. He sent for me and MacPhair of Lochdornie and gave me this commission.”

“Menin! Is that where he lives now?”

Archibald Cameron shook his head. “It was but a rendezvous. He does not live there.”

“Tell me of him, Archie!” urged the younger man. “One hears no news . . . and he never comes! Will he ever come again . . . and could we do aught for him if he did?”

But Archibald Cameron, for all that he had been the Prince’s companion on that fruitless journey to Spain after the ’Forty-five, for all that he was devoted to him, body and soul, could tell the inquirer very little. The Prince, he said, kept himself so close, changed his residence so often; and a cloud of mystery of his own devising surrounded him and his movements. It had been a joy, however, to see his face again; an even greater to be sent upon this hazardous mission by him. Yes, please God, his Royal Highness would come again to Scotland some day, but there was much to be done in preparation first.

Ewen listened rather sadly. Too many of his questions Archie was unable to answer, and at last the questioner turned to more immediate matters.

“Did the Prince send for anyone else save you and Lochdornie to meet him at Menin?”

“There was young Glenshian, the Chief’s son—Finlay MacPhair . . . Fionnlagh Ruadh, as they call him.”

“Two MacPhairs! I had not fancied you so intimate with those of that name, Archie!”

“Nor am I,” answered Archibald Cameron quickly. “But one does not choose one’s associates in a matter of this kind.”

“Or you would not have chosen them?” queried Ewen. Doctor Cameron made no answer. “Why not?” asked Ardroy with a tinge of uneasiness. “I thought that MacPhair of Lochdornie was beyond suspicion. Of young Glenshian I know nothing.”

“So is Lochdornie beyond suspicion,” answered the elder man. He got up and sought on the mantelshelf for a pine chip to light the still unlighted pipe he was holding, lit the chip at a candle and then, without using it, threw it into the fire. “But he does not think that I am,” he ended drily.

“Archie! What do you mean?”

Doctor Cameron waited a moment, looking down into the fire. “You remember that Lochdornie and I were both over in the ’49 after the Loch Arkaig gold, and that with Cluny’s assistance we contrived to take away quite a deal of it?”

“Yes.”

“Six thousand pounds of that went to Lady Lochiel and her family. Lochdornie—he’s an honest man and a bonny fighter, but the notion was put into his head by . . . by some third person—Lochdornie accused me of taking the money for myself.”

“You are jesting, man!” cried Ewen in a tone of horror. “It’s impossible—you are making a mock of me!”

“No, I am not,” answered his kinsman, with the composure which had only for a moment left him. He sat down again. “That was why I went later to Rome, to the King, to clear myself.”

“And after that,” said Ewen, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes burning, “you can come over and work side by side with MacPhair of Lochdornie! Why, in your place, I could not trust my fingers near my dirk!”

Doctor Cameron looked at him rather sadly. “It’s well for you, perhaps, that you are not a conspirator, Ewen. A man finds himself treading sometimes in miry ways and slippery on that road, and he’s lucky who can come through without someone calling him a blackguard. Remember, Lochdornie’s a MacPhair, and our clans have so often been at variance that there’s some excuse for him. And indeed I can put up with a MacPhair’s doubts of me so long as our Prince does not think that any of the gold has stuck to my fingers; and that he does not, thank God! Heigh-ho, my poor Jean and the children would be going about at this moment in Lille with stouter shoes to their feet if it had!” He smiled rather ruefully. “Lochdornie and I sink our difference, and get on well enough for our joint purpose. At any rate, I do not have to suspect him; he’s as loyal as the day . . . and when all’s said, he has never thought me more than mercenary. ’Tis for the Prince’s sake, Ewen; he sent me, and I came.”

Ewen looked at him for a moment without speaking, and marvelled. To consent to work with a man who doubted one’s honesty was in his eyes a pitch of devotion more wonderful than was Doctor Cameron’s actual return to Scotland with a rope round his neck. He did not believe that his own pride would have permitted him to make so sharp a sacrifice.

“And to think that it was on Lochdornie’s account—or so I believed at the time—that I turned back yesterday!” he said in a tone which suggested that he was not likely ever to repeat the action.

“No, you did it for the sake of our dear Prince,” said his cousin instantly. “And wasn’t that the best motive you could have had?”

Ardroy did not answer; he was frowning. “Is young MacPhair of Glenshian in the Highlands too?”

“No, he remains in London. He is thought to be more useful there.”

“Why, what does he do there? But that brings to my mind, Archie—what is this cock-and-bull story which Hector has got hold of, about a plot to kidnap the Elector and his family? He called it ‘kidnap’, but I guessed the term to cover something worse. He coupled it, too, with the name of Alexander Murray of Elibank.”

“Hector is a very indiscreet young man,” said Doctor Cameron.

Ewen’s face clouded still more. “It is true, then, not an idle tale?”

“It is true,” said Doctor Cameron with evident reluctance, “that there is such a scheme afoot.”

“And I refused to believe or at least to approve it!” exclaimed Ewen. “That indeed was why Hector left the house in anger. I swore that the Prince, who was so set against the idea of an enemy’s being taken off, could not know of it, and that you of all men could not possibly have a share in it!”

“I have not, Ewen, and I don’t approve. It is a mad scheme, and I doubt—I hope, rather—that it will never come to the ripening. It is quite another business which has brought me to Scotland, a business that for a while yet I’ll not fully open, even to you.”

“I have no wish to hear more secrets,” retorted Ardroy with a sigh. “I like them little enough when I do hear them. It’s ill to learn of men who serve the same master and have notions so different. Yes, I must be glad that I do not have to tread those ways, even though I live here idly and do naught for the White Rose, as Hector pointed out to me the other night.”

He saw his cousin look at him with an expression which he could not read, save that it had sadness in it, and what seemed, too, a kind of envy. “Ewen,” he said, and laid his hand on Ewen’s knee, “when the call came in ’45 you gave everything you had, your home, your hopes of happiness, your blood. And you still have clean hands and a single heart. You bring those to the Cause to-day.”

“Archie, how dare you speak as if you had not the same!” began the younger man quite fiercely. “You——”

“Don’t eat me, lad! God be thanked, I have. But, as I told you, I am not without unfriends. . . . We’ll not speak of that any more. And, Ewen, how can you say that you do naught for the White Rose now when only yesternight you threw aside what might have been your child’s sole chance of life in order to warn the Prince’s messenger? If that bonny bairn upstairs had died I’d never have been able to look you in the face again. . . . You have named him after poor Major Windham, as you said you should. I see you still have the Major’s ring on your finger.”

Ewen looked down at the ring, with a crest not his own, which he always wore, a memento of the English enemy and friend to whom he owed it that he had not been shot, a helpless fugitive, after Culloden.

“Yes, Keithie is named after him. Strangely enough Windham, in his turn, though purely English, was named for a Scot, so he once told me. Six years, Archie, and he lies sleeping there at Morar, yet it seems but yesterday that he died.” Ardroy’s eyes darkened; they were full of pain. “He lies there—and I stand here, because of him. I might well name Keithie after Keith Windham, for there had been no Keithie if Windham had not rushed between me and the muskets that day on Beinn Laoigh.”

“You have never chanced upon that brute Major Guthrie again, I suppose?”

The sorrow went out of the young man’s face and was succeeded by a very grim expression. “Pray that I do not, Archie, for if I do I shall kill him!”

“My dear Ewen . . . do you then resent his treatment of you as much as that?”

“His treatment of me!” exclaimed Ewen, and his eyes began to get very blue. “Dhé! I never think of that now! It is what he brought about for Windham. Had it not been for his lies and insinuations, poor Lachlan would never have taken that terrible and misguided notion into his head, and—have done what he did.” For, it was Lachlan MacMartin, Ewen’s own foster-brother, who, misapprehending that part which the English officer had played in his chieftain’s affairs, had fatally stabbed him just before Ewen’s own escape to France, and had then thrown away his own life—a double tragedy for Ardroy.

“So you charge Major Guthrie with being the real cause of Keith Windham’s death?” said his cousin. “ ’Tis a serious accusation, Ewen; on what grounds do you base it?”

“Why, I know everything now,” replied Ewen. “Soon after my return to Scotland I happened to fall in with one of Guthrie’s subalterns, a Lieutenant Paton, who was in charge of the English post there was then at Glenfinnan. He recognised me, for he had been in Guthrie’s camp on the Corryarrick road, and in the end I had the whole story, from which it was clear that Guthrie had talked about Windham’s ‘betrayal’ of me—false as hell though he knew the notion to be—so openly in those days after my capture that it became the subject of gossip among his redcoats too. And when Lachlan went prowling round the camp in the darkness, as I learnt afterwards from his father that he did, he overheard that talk, and believed it. It was Guthrie, no other, who put the fatal dirk in Lachlan’s hand. . . . And it is a curious thing, Archie,” went on the speaker, now pacing about the room, “that, though I have not the two sights, as some men, I have for some time felt a strange presentiment that before long I shall meet someone connected with Keith Windham, and that the meeting will mean much to me. For Alison’s sake, and the children’s—and for my own too—I hope the man is not Major Guthrie.”

“I hope so too,” returned Doctor Cameron gravely, knowing that at bottom, under so much that was gentle, patient and civilised, Ardroy kept the passionate and unforgiving temper of the Highlander. “But is it not more like to be some relative of Major Windham’s? Had he no kin—did he not leave a wife, for instance?”

His cousin’s eyes softened again. “I knew so little of his private affairs. I never heard him mention any of his family save his father, who died when he was a child.” He looked at the ring again, at its lion’s head surrounded by a fetterlock, and began to twist it on his finger. “I sometimes think that Windham would have been amused to see me as the father of two children—especially if he had been present at my interview with Donald last Monday.” His own mouth began to twitch at the remembrance. “He used to laugh at me, I know, in the early days of our acquaintance. At Glenfinnan, for instance, and Kinlocheil . . . about the guns we buried, and he remembered it, too, when he was dying. I wish he could have seen his namesake.”

“I expect,” said Archibald Cameron, “that he knows, in some fashion or other, that you do not forget him.”

“Forget him! I never forget!” exclaimed Ewen, the Celt again. “And that is why I pray God I do not meet the man who really has my friend’s blood upon his hands.”

“If the Fates should bring you into collision, then I hope it may at least be in fair fight—in battle,” observed Doctor Cameron.

“What chance is there of that?” asked Ewen. “Who’s to lead us now? We are poor, broken and scattered—and watched to boot! When Donald’s a man, perhaps . . .” He gave a bitter sigh. “But for all that I live here so tamely under the eyes of the Sassenach, I swear to you, Archie, that I’d give all the rest of my life for one year—one month—of war in which to try our fortunes again, and drive them out of our glens to their own fat fields for ever! I could die happy on the banks of Esk if I thought they’d never cross it again, and the King was come back to the land they have robbed him of! . . . But it’s a dream; and ’tis small profit being a dreamer, without a sword, and with no helpers but the people of dreams, or the sidhe, perhaps, to charge beside one . . . in a dream. . . .”

The exaltation and the fierce pain, flaring up like a sudden fire in the whin, were reflected in Archibald Cameron’s face also. He, too, was on his feet.

“Ewen,” he said in an eager voice, “Ewen, we may yet have an ally better than the sidhe, if I can only prepare, as I am here to do . . . for that’s my errand,—to make ready for another blow, with that help.”

Ardroy was like a man transformed. “Help! Whose? France is a thrice-broken reed.”

“I’ll not tell you yet. But, when the hour strikes, will you get you a sword to your side again, and come?”

“Come! I’d come if I had nothing better than yon claymore hilt in the loch—and if your helper were the Great Sorrow himself! Archie, when, when?”

“In the spring, perchance—if we are ready. No, you cannot help me, Ewen; best go on living quietly here and give no cause for suspicion. I shall hope to find my way to Crieff by Michaelmas, and there I shall meet a good many folk that I must needs see, and after that Lochdornie and I can begin to work the clans in earnest.”

Ewen nodded. Thousands of people, both Highland and Lowland, met at the great annual cattle fair at Crieff, and under cover of buying and selling much other business could be transacted.

“O God, I wish the spring were here!” he cried impatiently.

* * * * *

In his dreams that night it was come, for the birds were singing, and he had plunged into Loch na h-Iolaire after the drowned hilt; and when he reached the surface again it was a whole shining sword that he held. But, while he looked at it with joy and pride, he heard a voice telling him that he would never use it, and when he turned he saw, half behind him, a young man whom he did not know, who put out a hand and laid it on the steel, and the steel shivered into atoms at his touch. Ewen tried in wrath to seize him, but there was no one there, and he held only the fragment of a blade from that lost battle on the moor. He woke; and in an hour had forgotten his dream.