Читать книгу The Greatest Historical Novels & Stories of D. K. Broster - D. K. Broster - Страница 91

“Inversnaid,” said Ewen to himself in a thick voice. “Inversnaid on Loch Lomond—that is where I must go. Which is the way, if you please?”

He had asked the question, it seemed to him, of so many people whom he had passed, and not one had answered him. Sometimes, it was true, these people bore a strong resemblance to trees and bushes, but that was only their cunning, because they did not want to tell him the way to Inversnaid. He was not quite sure who he himself was, either, nor indeed what he was doing here, wandering in this bare, starlit wood, stumbling over roots and stones. But at least he understood why Ewen Cameron had thought him drunk, when he had only received a blow on the head—poor Hector!

“Poor Hector!” he repeated, putting up a hand to it. It was bandaged, as he could feel. Who had done that? Doctor Kincaid? But he could not see Loch Treig anywhere; this was a wood, and the wood people refused to tell him the way to Inversnaid.

It was not very dark in the wood, however, for it was a clear, windy night, and the starlight easily penetrated the stripped boughs of it; only under the pines were there pools of shadow. It was now some time since Ewen had discovered that he was lying out in the open, under a tree, and no longer sitting in that little hut which he faintly remembered, where Archie and he had been together one day; some time since he had got with difficulty to his feet, had lurched to that very hut, and, holding on tight to the doorway, had looked in at its black emptiness, and wondered why the door lay on the ground. Yet it was while he stood propped there that the name of Inversnaid had come to him with an urgency which he could not interpret, and he had turned at once in what he felt was the direction of Loch Lomond. He was in no state to realise that it was much less the absence of a warrant against him than the impossibility of transporting him, in his then inert condition, over miles of the roughest country to Inversnaid which had saved him, in spite of the resistance which he had offered, from being taken there as a prisoner himself.

Ah, here was a tree or bush of some kind, covered with red flowers, holding a lantern—very odd, that! No, two of them, both with lights. The first was a female bush—a rose-tree, by the look; one must be polite to it. He tried to doff his hat, but he had none. “Madam, will you tell me the shortest way to Inversnaid?”

The kind bush replied that she would take him there; and then she drew an arm through hers, while the other lantern-bearing tree did the same. And so, at last, he found someone to help him on his journey.

* * * * *

“He’s clean crazed, James,” said Mrs. Stewart, showing an anxious face above her red and green flowered shawl as she looked round the lurching figure which she was guiding at the man who was performing the same office on the other side. “I don’t know what we are going to do with him now that we have found him.”

“Pit him tae bed and gar him bide quiet,” responded the practical James. “Haud up, sir; ye maun lift yer feet a wheen higher, if ye please.”

“I remember now, the blade came off the axe,” said Ewen suddenly, his eyes fixed as though he were seeing something ahead. He had been silent for some time, though talkative at first. “If it had not, I should have killed that officer, and some of the other redcoats too, perhaps.”

“Ay, I mak nae doot o’ it,” agreed James Stoddart soothingly, and they went on again, while behind the three pattered the little barefoot girl whom the soldier had chased that afternoon. It was she who, having hung about in the wood instead of going home, had played Mercury, and had given Mrs. Stewart, already horrified by the news of Doctor Cameron’s capture, the further tidings that the other gentleman had been left lying as if he were dead, at the spot of the disaster. Yet, though she had been afraid to go near him, she reported having seen him move. On that Mrs. Stewart had summoned the only person likely to be of use, James Stoddart, her gardener and factotum, and had set out for the hut in the wood.

“I doubt this is not the way to Loch Lomond,” said Ewen, stopping dead all at once. “Madam, you are misleading me, and that is worse than not answering.” He looked down at Mrs. Stewart rather threateningly.

“Man,” said James Stoddart stoutly, “dinna haver, but trust the leddy! She kens whaur tae tak ye. Come on noo, we’re gey near the place.” (And this was true, in the sense which he gave to the phrase, for Ewen’s previous wanderings in the wood had all the time been leading him back in the direction of the house above the Calair.)

“Come, Mr. Cameron,” added Mrs. Stewart gently.

“My name is Grant,” retorted Ewen with some irritation. “Hector Grant, an officer in the French service.” And under his breath he promptly began to sing snatches of ‘Malbrouck’.

But when he got to ‘Ne sait quand reviendra’, he broke off. “Yes, he’s gone, and God knows when he will return. . . . ‘Madame à sa tour monte,’ it says. Will you go up into your tower, madam, to look-out for him?—But there was a man who looked in—through the roof. That is not in the song.” He wrinkled his brows, and added, like a pettish child, “When shall we be through this wood? I am so weary of it!”

* * * * *

Yet for the rest of the night he walked in it, always trying to find the way to Loch Lomond, long after Mrs. Stewart and James Stoddart had somehow got him into the house, and into the bed which Archie Cameron had occupied but the night before. And not until she had him lying there, still babbling faintly of doors and axes and eyes in the roof and Inversnaid and Loch Treig, and also of a stolen horse and some letter or other, and once or twice of his brother-in-law Ewen Cameron, did Mrs. Stewart, just outside the room, bring forth her pocket-handkerchief.

“The Doctor betrayed and taken, this gentleman that tried to save him clean broke in his wits—O James, what a weary day’s work! And to think that but this morning I was baking, and the bread never came forth better! Had I the second sight, as I might have, being Highland——”

“If ye had it, mem,” broke in James Stoddart “—not that I believe any has it; ’tis an idle and mischievous supersteetion—ye and the laird wad ne’er have ta’en the Doctor intil the hoose, and ye’d hae been spared a’ this stramash.”

But Mrs. Stewart was already drying her eyes. “If it comes to that,” she retorted with spirit, “a body might think it wiser never to have been born, and that would be a poor choice.”

“There’s ae man will be wishing the nicht he hadna been, I’m thinkin’,” observed the gardener uncompromisingly, “and that’s Doctor Cameron.”

“Doctor Cameron will be wishing no such thing,” returned his mistress. “He’s a brave man, and used to running risks, though he’ll be grieving indeed for the blow his taking is to the Prince. Ah me, what will the laird say when he hears the news!”

“Humph,” said her downright companion, “the Doctor will be grieving for mair than Prince Charlie. He kens weel they’ll hang him, the English.”

“Nonsense, James,” retorted Mrs. Stewart. “The English have not sufficient cause nor evidence against him. He has done nothing they can lay their fingers on. But no doubt they’ll put him in prison, and for long enough, I fear.”

“Nay, ye’ll see, mem, he’ll not bide lang in prison,” predicted James Stoddart, shaking his head with a certain gloomy satisfaction. And yet, Presbyterian and Lowlander though he was, he was perfectly staunch to his master’s political creed, and no tortures would have drawn any admissions from him. “A kind and bonny gentleman too, the Doctor,” he went on, “but for a’ he never said aught as he went aboot his business in these pairts, whatever it was, he kenned fine what wad happen him if the redcoats catched him. I saw it whiles in his ee.”

“You have too much imagination, James Stoddart,” said Mrs. Stewart a trifle severely—and most unjustly. Turning from him she tiptoed back into the room for a moment. “I think the poor gentleman is quieting down at last,” she reported, returning. “I shall go to bed for a while. Do you sit with him and give him a drink if he asks for it—and for God’s sake hold your tongue on the subject of the Doctor’s being hanged!”

“I’ve nae need tae hauld it,” responded the irrepressible James. “If the gentleman didna ken it too, and ower weel, wadna he hae keepit his skin hale on his back and his heid frae yon muckle dunt it’s gotten?”