Читать книгу The Greatest Historical Novels & Stories of D. K. Broster - D. K. Broster - Страница 81

“MY dear Ewen,” said old Invernacree, and he reached across and replenished his nephew’s glass, “my dear Ewen, have you not had your fill of wandering, that you cannot bide with us a few days?”

But Ewen shook his head. “I would that I could, for I have, indeed, had my fill of wandering—near three months of it. But I must push on to Edinburgh to-morrow, to consult an advocate, as I told you, sir.”

Mid-March had come and passed ere he finally sat at his uncle’s board, not sorry to see silver and napery again, and to look forward to a comfortable bed. There had been difficulties and delays innumerable over leaving the island of Coll—the want of a boat, stormy weather. Indeed, Ardroy had only crossed Loch Linnhe that morning early, before it was clear of the mountain mists, glad beyond measure to see ‘green Appin’ again at last, and the old white house, his mother’s early home, standing high among its ancient oaks with his own kin in it. And now, supper being over, he was alone with his uncle, the ladies having withdrawn—the middle-aged daughter, by his first wife, who kept house for the twice-widowed Alexander Stewart of Invernacree, and the pretty girl who was Ian’s own sister. Ian himself, to Ewen’s regret, was from home.

The candle-light fell on Ewen’s auburn head and air of content and shabby clothes—no others in the house would fit him—and on Invernacree’s silver hair and deeply furrowed face. To Ewen it had seemed almost more strange, these last few years, to see his uncle, so essentially a Highlander and a Jacobite of the old breed, in Lowland garb and without a scrap of tartan, than to see himself thus clad. Looking thoughtfully at him now, he saw how greatly the death of his elder son at Culloden Moor had aged him. But at the moment there was content on the old man’s face also, though tempered by his nephew’s refusal to contemplate a longer stay.

“Yes, I fear I must lose no more time,” resumed Ewen. “I had thought to be in Edinburgh, as you know, soon after Christmas, and now it is close upon Lady Day.”

“Ay,” said Invernacree. “Ay, I doubted from what he told me at the time that Ian somehow mismanaged that affair at the Narrows—either he or that young Frenchified brother-in-law of yours whom he brought here in your stead.”

“No, sir, I assure you that he did not!” protested his nephew warmly. “Neither Ian nor Hector was a whit to blame for what happened. If there was a blunder it was mine. I owe Ian more than I can easily repay, and if Hector had had his wish, we should have broken out of Fort William long before we did.”

“But it was young Grant, nevertheless, who brought trouble upon you in the first instance; he told me so himself.”

Ewen could not repress a smile. “Hector is indiscreet,” he said, thinking of someone else who had remarked that of him. “Yet I suppose he told you the whole story, so that you have not truly been without news of me for centuries, as my cousins have just been complaining.”

“Why, we have had much more recent news of you than Hector Grant’s,” exclaimed his uncle. “They must have been teasing you, the jades, for they cannot have forgotten who brought it. Can you guess who it was, Ewen?”

“I think so. Mr. Oliphant did make his way here, then, sir?” Ewen’s face had lit up.

“He did,” said the old man with an air of satisfaction. “We had the privilege of his presence under this roof for a se’nnight, and he left unmolested at the end of it for Ballachulish. It was from him that we learnt of the truly Christian deed of charity to an enemy which was the cause of your separation from him. But he feared—and justly it seems—that you might have become a prisoner in Mingary Castle on account of it.”

Ewen had coloured vividly and turned his head away. “I escaped the same day from Mingary,” he said hurriedly. And then, after a second or two, “Mr. Oliphant should have told you how unwillingly I was brought to that act—how, had it not been for his persuasion, I should not have done it at all.”

“Then, my dear Ewen, I honour you the more for having done it,” was his uncle’s reply. “But Mr. Oliphant said not a word of that. A saintly man; there are many here in Appin will long remember with thankfulness his stay among us, which, under God, we owe to you. He left a letter for you, which I was near forgetting; my memory, Ewen, grows old too. If you will come into my room I will give it to you now.” He rose, helping himself up by the table. “Fill your glass, nephew!”

Ewen rose and lifted it. “The King!” said Alexander Stewart, and they drank. In that house there was no need to pass their glasses over water-jug or finger-bowl, since, King George of England existing to all who ever broke bread there merely as the Elector of Hanover, there was no other King than James the Third and Eighth to avoid pledging by that consecrated subterfuge.

A tall, upright old man, though moving stiffly, Invernacree opened the door of his own study for his nephew. “Sit there, Ewen, under your mother’s picture. It is good to see you there; and I like to remember,” he added, looking him up and down, “that Stewart blood went to the making of that braw body of yours. I sometimes think that you are the finest piece of manhood ever I set eyes on.”

“My dear uncle,” murmured the subject of this encomium, considerably embarrassed.

“You must forgive an old man who has lost a son not unlike you—No matter; sit down, Eoghain mhóir, while I fetch you good Mr. Oliphant’s letter. He, I assure you, could not say enough of you and what you had done for him.”

“I cannot say enough of what he did for me,” murmured Ewen as he took the letter and put it in his pocket. “And in truth I went with him into Ardnamurchan half in hopes of meeting Doctor Cameron there, in which I was disappointed. Do you know aught of the Doctor’s recent movements, Uncle Alexander?”

“Nothing whatever. He did not come into Appin, and I have no notion where he may be now. Ian, though he alleged some other motive, has gone, I believe, to try to learn some news; the boy is made very restless by the rumours which go about. But rumours will not help us. I doubt our sun went down upon Culloden Moor, Ewen.”

“A man might have thought,” objected his nephew, “that the sun of the Stuart cause went down at Worcester fight; yet nine years afterwards Charles Stuart was riding triumphantly into London. ’Tis not yet nine years since Culloden.”

Old Alexander Stewart shook his head. “The Lord’s hand is heavy on his people. I never read, in the two first psalms for the sixteenth morning of the month, of the heathen coming into the Lord’s inheritance, and the wild boar out of the wood rooting up the Lord’s vine, and much more, only too appropriate, without thinking of that sixteenth of April seven years ago—and with good reason. You know,” he went on, looking into the fire, “that when Alan’s body was found, there was a little psalter in his pocket, and it was doubled open at the 79th psalm, as if he had been reading it while he waited there on the moor in the wind and the sleet. There was his blood across the page.”

“No, you never told me that, Uncle Alexander,” said Ewen gently.

“Ay, it was so; they brought the book to me afterwards. I put it away for a long time, though it was the last thing I had of his, but now I have the custom of reading the daily psalms out of it . . . to show that I gave him willingly to his God and his Prince—No, I am never likely to forget the Culloden psalms.”

He was silent, sitting perfectly still, so that the leaping flames might have been casting their flicker on the chin and brow of a statue. His nephew looked at him with a great pity and affection.

“I have sometimes wondered,” began Invernacree again, “whether the Almighty does not wish us to learn that His Will is changed, and that for our many unfaithfulnesses He does not purpose at this time to restore the kingdom unto Israel.”

With the older school of Jacobites religious and political principles were so much one that it was perfectly natural to them to speak of one hope in terms of the other, and his language held no incongruity for Ewen. In moments of depression he had himself harboured the same doubt and had given voice to it, as that evening with Archibald Cameron—but he was too young and vigorous to have it as an abiding thought, and he tried to comfort the old man now, pointing out that a new door had opened, from what Doctor Cameron had told him; that if France would not and could not help there were others willing to do so.

“Yes,” admitted his uncle, “it may be that all this long delay is but to try our faith. But I can recall Killiecrankie, the victory that brought no gain; I fought at Sheriffmuir nearly forty years ago, and I remember the failure at Glenshiel the year you were born—the failure which drove your father into exile. If this spring do not bring the assistance which I hear vaguely spoken of on all sides since Doctor Cameron’s arrival, then our sun has truly set; we shall never see the White Rose bloom again. The hope of it is perhaps no more than the rainbow which spans the loch here so constantly between storms, or those streamers which you see in the northern sky at night—we have been seeing them of late, very bright. But they mean nothing . . . if it be not ill weather next day. They come too late—after sunset.”

“But before dawn!” suggested Ewen.

“If you like, my dear boy, if you like, yes. You are young, and may yet see a dawn. Get you to bed now, and do not let an old man’s faithlessness make you despond. . . . Good-night, and God bless you!”

* * * * *

Up in the room which had been his mother’s as a girl, and which he always occupied when he visited Invernacree, Ewen broke the seal of Mr. Oliphant’s letter.

“My dear son,” wrote the old man, “I think you will guess how often I have thought of you and blessed you and prayed for you, even as David prayed, ‘Deliver my darling from the power of the dog’. And I am sure that you were delivered, if not without scathe; and I hope, my dear son, that you had not to pay by an unjust captivity for your good deed, which was good even though it were done in the spirit of the man who said ‘I go not’, and went. For you will remember that, for all his first refusing, it was he who was justified, and not the other.

“The unfortunate officer, your enemy, was still alive when the soldiers reached the place. I had written upon a piece of paper, which I then placed in his pocket, these words: ‘If you recover, you owe it to a man whom you greatly injured’. I would not mention your name lest it brought harm upon you, and I thought, too, that you would not have wished it. But I wrote what I did for the man’s own sake; it was right that he should know it—if indeed he would ever know anything again in this world. I had concealed myself, as I promised you, and I was not searched for. Moreover, I found help and shelter upon my road to Salen; yet I greatly missed my son’s strong arm and his heartening company. But I reflected that, even as he had been sent to me in my necessity, so he had been sent elsewhere in another’s.

“Yet I have the hope, angelos, that before long you will reach this house of your good uncle’s, which has been so kind a haven to me, and where it has been my delight to speak of you.

“The Lord bless and keep you, and lead you back safely to your own!”

* * * * *

Ewen put the letter carefully away in his breast, and going to the window stood looking out into the clear March night. The five-mile width of Loch Linnhe, shining faintly, lay before him; dark mountains lifted themselves on the farther side whence he had come, Shuna’s island bulk lay to the right, and the castle on the islet down below stood warden over the inlet of Laich. Away to the left a warm yellow moon was entangled in trees. But it was not under her rays that the water shone. Over the mountains facing him, though it was after ten at night, the sky was irradiated with a soft, white glow. As Ewen stood there it grew in intensity and widened; a faint, perfectly straight shaft of the same unearthly light shot up into the sky, then another. But Ardroy was thinking of other things: of the old priest’s letter; of how his presentiment about meeting one who had to do with Keith Windham had been fulfilled; and of how strangely—it was not a new thought now—he had resembled his own small son in his desire that vengeance should be meted out to the evil-doer who had wrought him such an injury. ‘He was wicked—it was right that he should be punished!’ had been Donald’s cry of justification on that September evening. The idea still had power to raise in Ewen some of the rueful dismay which had swept over him when it had first presented itself, one morning when he was pacing the sandy shores of Coll, half-deafened by the green Atlantic surges, and praying for the wind to change. . . . But all reflections were merged now into an impatience to begin to-morrow’s journey to Edinburgh, the next milestone on the road which was to bring him back to his wife and home. He turned away from the window and began to make ready for bed.

Yet when, after blowing out his candle, he went for a last look over the loch, he gave a smothered exclamation. The moon was gone, vanquished, and the whole of the sky from north-west to north-east was pulsing with light, with great eddying rivers and pools of that magic radiance. The miraculous glow was no longer a background to the dark mountains of Morven, nor did it now send forth those straight pencils of light; it streamed and billowed, as it seemed for miles, right over the house-top; and it was never still for an instant. It shimmered across the sky like ethereal banners, for ever changing their shape; like the swirling draperies of a throng of invisible dancers—as the Gaelic indeed names the Northern Lights; like reflections flickering through the curtain of space from some mighty effulgence behind it. Ewen had often seen the Aurora Borealis, but he could not remember ever having seen it so fine at this time of year. For a while he lay and watched from his bed what he could see of those bright and soundless evolutions; they were a commentary on his uncle’s words this evening; but he was too tired, and the bed, after three months of hard and varied lying, too seductive, for him to stay awake and ponder the matter.

When he woke some hours later and turned over, the night was quite dark; all the wonderful white dance of flame in the heavens was gone as if it had never been.