Читать книгу The Greatest Historical Novels & Stories of D. K. Broster - D. K. Broster - Страница 76

The snow gave no signs of ceasing. It had never been blinding, it had never swirled in wreaths against one, yet this steady and gentle fall, only beginning about mid-day, had contrived to obliterate landmarks to a surprising degree, and to make progress increasingly difficult. When Ewen had started this morning he had not anticipated a snowstorm, though the sky looked heavy, and even now the fall was not enough to stop him, but he found his surroundings getting darker than was pleasant, and began to think that he might possibly be benighted before he reached the little clachan for which he was bound.

Although it was the second week in February, Ardroy was still west of Loch Linnhe—in Sunart, in fact. At first, indeed, when, leaving his hiding-place on Meall Breac, he had wandered from croft to croft, seeking shelter at each for no more than a night or two, he had known that it would be folly on his part to attempt to cross the loch, since all the way southward from Fort William the soldiers must be on the look-out for him. Yet he had not gone far up Glen Clovulin when he heard that those whom he had so unluckily encountered that morning at Ardgour were a party on their way from Mingary Castle to relieve the guard quartered at Ballachulish over the body of James Stewart, in order that it should not be taken down for burial. They could not possibly have known at that time of his and Hector’s escape; perhaps, even, in their ignorance, they might not have molested the boat’s crew had they landed.

But five weeks had elapsed since that episode, and it might be assumed that even Fort William was no longer keeping a strict look-out for the fugitives. Ewen was therefore working his way towards the Morven district, whence, crossing Loch Linnhe into Appin, he intended to seek his uncle’s house at Invernacree, and once more get into touch with his own kin. To Alison, his first care, he had long ago despatched a reliable messenger with tidings of his well-being, but his own wandering existence these last weeks had cut him off from any news of her, since she could never know where any envoy of hers would find him.

Pulling his cloak—which from old habit he wore more or less plaid-fashion—closer about him, Ewen stopped now for a moment and took stock of his present whereabouts. The glen which he followed, with its gently receding mountains, was here fairly wide, so wide in fact that in this small, close-falling snow and fading light he could not see across to its other side. He could not even see far ahead, so that it was not easy to guess how much of its length he still had to travel. “I believe I’d be wiser to turn back and lie the night at Duncan MacColl’s,” he thought, for, if he was where he believed, the little farm of Cuiluaine at which, MacColl being an Appin man and a Jacobite, he had already found shelter in his wanderings, must lie about two miles behind him up the slope of the farther side of the glen. He listened for the sound of the stream in the bottom, thinking that by its distance from the track he could roughly calculate his position. Even in that silence he could hardly hear it, so he concluded that he must be come to that part of the valley where the low ground was dangerously boggy, though the track, fortunately, did not traverse it, but kept to higher ground. He was therefore still a good way from the mouth of the glen.

But while he thus listened and calculated he heard, in that dead and breathless silence, not only the faint far-off murmur of water, but the murmur of human voices also. Hardly believing this, he went on a few steps and then paused again to listen. Yes, he could distinctly hear voices, but not those of persons talking in an ordinary way, for the speakers seemed rather to be repeating something in antiphon, and the language had the lilt of Gaelic. Once more Ardroy went forward, puzzled as to the whereabouts of the voices, but now recognising the matter of their recitation, for there had floated to him unmistakable fragments about the snare of the hunter, the terror by night, and the arrow by day. A snow-sprinkled crag suddenly loomed up before him, and going round it he perceived, somewhat dimly at first, who they were that repeated Gaelic psalms in the darkening and inhospitable landscape.

A little below the track, on the flatter ground which was also the brink of the bog, rose two shapes which he made out to be those of an old man and a boy, standing very close together with their backs to him. A small lantern threw a feeble patch of light over the whitened grass on which it stood; beside it lay a couple of shepherd’s crooks and two bundles.

Ewen was too much amazed to shout to the two figures, and the snow must have muffled his approach down the slope. The recitation went on uninterrupted:

“ ‘There shall no evil happen unto thee,’ ” said the old man’s voice, gentle and steady.

“ ‘Neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling,’ ” repeated the younger, more doubtfully.

“ ‘For he shall give his angels charge over thee.’ ”

“ ‘To keep thee in all——’ ” The lad who had turned his head, broke off with a shrill cry, “Sir, sir, he has come—the angel!”

“ ‘To keep thee in all thy ways,’ ” finished the old man serenely. Then he too looked up and saw Ewen standing a little above them, tall, and white all over the front of him with snow.

“I told you, Callum, that it would be so,” he said, looking at the boy; and then, courteously, to Ewen, and in the unmistakable accents of a gentleman, “You come very opportunely, sir, to an old man and a child, if it be that you are not lost yourself, as we are?”

Ewen came down to their level, and, in spite of the falling snow, removed his bonnet. “I think I can direct you to shelter, sir. Do you know that you are in danger of becoming bogged also?”

“I was beginning to fear it,” said the old man, and now there was a sound of weariness, though none of apprehension, in his voice. “We are on our way to Duncan MacColl’s at Cuiluaine, and have lost the path in the snow. If it would not be delaying you overmuch, perhaps you would have the charity to put us into it again.”

“You are quite near the track, sir,” replied Ardroy. “But I will accompany you to Cuiluaine. Will you take my arm? The shortest way, and perhaps the safest, to regain the path, is up this slope.”

The old man took the proffered support, while the boy Callum, who had never removed his soft, frightened gaze from the figure of the ‘angel’, caught a fold of Ewen’s wet cloak and kissed it, and the rescuer began to guide both wayfarers up the whitened hill-side.

“But, sir,” protested the old traveller, breathing a little hard, when they were all back upon the path, “we are perhaps taking you out of your own road?”

They were, indeed, since Ewen’s face was set in the opposite direction. But there was no question about it; he could not leave the two, so old and so young, to find their doubtful way to Cuiluaine alone. “I shall be glad enough to lie at Mr. MacColl’s myself to-night,” he answered. “I was almost on the point of turning back when I heard your voices. Do I go too fast for you, sir?”

“Not at all; and I hope I do not tire this strong arm of yours? We were just coming in our psalm a while ago to ‘And they shall bear thee in their hands, that thou hurt not thy foot against a stone’.” He turned round with a smile to the boy following behind. “You see how minutely it is fulfilled, Callum!—Are you of these parts, sir?”

“No,” answered Ewen. “I am a Cameron from Lochaber.”

“Ah,” observed the old man, “if you are a Cameron, as well as being the Lord’s angel to us, then you will be of the persecuted Church?”

“An Episcopalian, do you mean, sir? Yes,” answered Ewen. “But not an angel.”

“Angelos, as you are no doubt aware, Mr. Cameron, means no more in the original Greek than a messenger.” He gave the young man the glimpse of a beautiful smile. “But let us finish the psalm together as we go. You have the Gaelic, of course, for if we say it in English, Callum will not be able to join with us.”

And, going slowly, but now more securely, on the firmer ground, they said the remaining four verses together. To Ewen, remembering how as a child he had wondered what it would be like to ‘go upon the lion and adder’, and whether those creatures would resent the process, the whole episode was so strange as to be dreamlike. Who was this saintly traveller, so frail looking and so old, who ventured himself with a boy of sixteen or so through bogs and snow in a Highland February?

Ere they reached Duncan MacColl’s little farm up the other side of the glen he had learnt his identity. His charge was a Mr. Oliphant, formerly an Episcopal minister in Perthshire, who had been moved by the abandoned condition of ‘these poor sheep’ in the Western Highlands to come out of his retirement (or rather, his concealment, for he had been ejected from his own parish) to visit them and administer the Sacraments. He was doing this at the risk of his liberty, it might be said of his life, for transportation would certainly kill him—and of his health in any case, it seemed to Ewen, for, indomitable and unperturbed though he seemed in spirit, he was not of an age for this winter travelling on foot. When he had learnt his name Ewen was a little surprised at Mr. Oliphant having the Gaelic so fluently, but it appeared that his mother was Highland, and that for half his life he had ministered to Highlanders.

The light from the little farmhouse window on the hill-side above them, at first a mere glow-worm, cheered them through the cold snowy gloom which was now full about the three. Nearer, they saw that the door, too, stood open, half-blocked by a stalwart figure, for Duncan MacColl was expecting Mr. Oliphant, and in considerable anxiety at his delay. He greeted the old man with joy; he would have sent out long before this to search for him, he said, but that he had no one of an age to send—he was a widower with a host of small children—and was at last on the point of setting forth himself.

“But now, thank God, you are come, sir—and you could not have found a better helper and guide than Mr. Cameron of Ardroy,” he said warmly, ushering them all three into the living-room and the cheerful blaze. “Come ben, sirs, and you, little hero!”

“ ’Twas not I found Mr. Cameron,” said Mr. Oliphant, with his fine, sweet smile. “He was sent to us in our distress.”

“Indeed, I think it must have been so,” agreed MacColl. “Will you not all sit down and warm yourselves, and let the girl here dry your cloaks? You’ll be wise to take a dram at once.” He fussed over the old priest as a woman might have done, and, indeed, when Ewen saw Mr. Oliphant in the light he thought there could hardly be anyone less fitted for a rough journey in this inclement weather than this snowy-haired old man with the face of a scholar and a saint.

But there was for the moment no one but the boy Callum with them in the kitchen when Mr. Oliphant turned round from the fire to which he had been holding out his half-frozen hands.

“Angelos, will you take an old man’s blessing?”

“I was about to ask for it, sir,” said Ewen, bending his head; and the transparent hand was lifted.

So Ardroy had a private benediction of his own, as well as that in which the house and all its inmates were included, when Mr. Oliphant read prayers that night.

* * * * *

Ewen was up betimes next morning, to find the snow gone from the ground, and a clear sky behind the white mountain-tops.

“Ay, I was surprised to see that fall,” observed Duncan MacColl. “We have had so strangely mild a winter; there were strawberries, they say, in bloom in Lochiel’s garden at Achnacarry near Christmas Day—though God knows they can have had little tending. Did ye hear that in Lochaber, Mr. Cameron? ’Twas a kind of a portent.”

“I wish it may be a good one,” said Ewen, his thoughts swinging regretfully back to forfeited Achnacarry and his boyish rambles there. “By the way, you have no news, I suppose, of someone who owns a very close connection with that name and place—you know whom I mean?”

“ ‘Mr. Chalmers’?” queried the farmer, using the name by which Doctor Cameron often passed. “No, I have heard nothing more since I saw you a few weeks syne, Mr. Cameron, until last Wednesday, when there was a cousin of mine passed this way and said there was a rumour that the Doctor was in Ardnamurchan again of late.”

“Do you tell me so?” exclaimed Ewen. “To think that all this time that I have been in Ardgour and Sunart I have never heard a whisper of it, though I know he was there before Christmas. Yet it is possible that he has returned, mayhap to his kinsman Dungallon.” For Doctor Cameron’s wife was a Cameron of Dungallon, and there were plenty of the name in Ardnamurchan.

“I think it will likely be no more than a rumour,” said Mr. MacColl. “Forbye, from what he told me last night, there will soon be another man in Ardnamurchan who’ll need to walk warily there, though not for the same reason.”

“You mean Mr. Oliphant? Yes, I know that he is set on going there, despite the presence of the garrison at Mingary Castle. And ’tis an uncommon rough journey for a man of his age and complexion. He should have someone with him besides that lad. Could not some grown man be found to accompany him?”

Duncan MacColl shook his head. “Not here, Mr. Cameron. I would offer to go myself, but that I have the whole work of the farm on my hands just now, for my herdsman is ill. Yet it’s true; he needs a stronger arm than yon Callum’s.”

Ewen stood in the doorway reflecting, a tribe of shy, fair children peeping at him from odd corners unnoticed. The idea which had come to him needed weighing. He did greatly long to get back across Loch Linnhe, and if he offered himself as Mr. Oliphant’s escort he would be turning his back upon Appin and all that it meant, even if it were but for a short time. On the other hand, supposing Archie were in Ardnamurchan after all . . . As so often, two half-motives coalesced to make a whole. And when Mr. Oliphant had breakfasted he made his proposal.

“But, my dear Mr. Cameron, you admitted last night that you were already on your way towards Appin!”

Ewen replied that this morning, because of some news which Mr. MacColl had just given him, he was, on the contrary, desirous of going into Ardnamurchan. “And if you would allow me to be your escort, sir,” he added, “I should account it a privilege.”

And he meant what he said. There clung to this gentle and heroic old man, going on this entirely voluntary and hazardous mission, that air of another sphere which either attracts or repels. Both from instinct and from training it strongly attracted Ardroy, who felt also that for once in his life he could render a real service to the Church of his baptism, continually persecuted since the Revolution and now, since Culloden, driven forth utterly into the wilderness—and become the dearer for it.

“You make a sacrifice, however, Mr. Cameron,” said the old priest, looking at him with eyes as keen as they had ever been. “Be sure that it will be repaid to you in some manner.”

“I want no repayment, sir, other than that of your company. To what part of Ardnamurchan do you propose to go?”

Mr. Oliphant told him that his plan was to visit, in that remote and most westerly peninsula of Scotland (and indeed of Britain) the hamlet of Kilmory on the north and of Kilchoan on the south. But Ewen and Duncan MacColl succeeded in dissuading him from going to the latter because of its dangerous proximity to Mingary Castle with its garrison. The inhabitants of Kilchoan could surely, they argued, be informed of his presence at Kilmory, and come thither, with due precautions against being observed.

“ ’Tis a strange thing,” broke out Ewen during this discussion, “that the Episcopalian people of England, whose established Church is Episcopal, and whose prayerbook we use, should acquiesce in this attempt to stamp out the sister Church in Scotland!”

“Mr. Cameron,” said Duncan MacColl impressively, “when the One whom I will not name enters into an Englishman he makes him not only wicked but downright foolish! I’ve not been in England myself, but I’ve remarked it. Now in this country that One works otherwise, and there’s more sense in a Scot’s misdoings.”

There was a twinkle in Mr. Oliphant’s eyes at this dictum, for like most of the best saints he had a strong sense of humour. “I’m glad that you can find matter for patriotism even in the Devil’s proceedings, Mr. MacColl!”