Читать книгу The Greatest Historical Novels & Stories of D. K. Broster - D. K. Broster - Страница 97

It had been arranged that Hector should come to Ewen’s lodging early next morning, and that they should both go to wait upon Mr. Galbraith. Ewen therefore remained in his room writing a letter to Alison, but when it was already three-quarters of an hour past the time appointed, and still the young man did not arrive, Ardroy began to get uneasy about him. When an hour and a quarter had elapsed he was walking about his room really anxious. What had the boy been doing? Should he go to the Strand in search of him? But then he might so easily miss him on the way. When another twenty minutes had ticked itself away among the sun, moon and stars of Mrs. Wilson’s great clock, he strode into his bedroom for his hat. He could wait no longer; he must go and look for the truant.

And then he heard his landlady’s voice, explaining to someone that she thought Mr. Cameron must by now have gone out.

“No, I have not,” said Ewen, appearing on the threshold of his bedroom. “Is that you at last, Hector? What on earth has delayed you so?”

“I’ll tell you in a moment,” said young Grant rather hoarsely. “I have made what haste I could.” And indeed his brow was damp, and he sank down in a chair in the sitting-room as if exhausted. Ewen asked him if he were ill, for he was clearly under the sway of some emotion or other; and, when Hector shook his head, said “Then ’tis this business of the slander on you. Have you discovered something?”

“No, no, it is not that,” said Hector. And then he got it out with a jerk. “Ewen, Doctor Cameron was this morning condemned to death, without trial.”

A club seemed to strike Ewen’s head—like that musket butt in the wood. Yet this news was expected.

“How did you hear it?” he asked after a moment’s silence.

“I . . . O Ewen, I would have given anything to get to you in time, but I swear that it was only by chance that I was on the spot, and then it was too late. I tried to send a messenger. In truth it should have been you, not I, but it was not my fault!”

A light broke on Ardroy. “You mean that you actually heard him sentenced?”

Hector nodded, and went on in the same apologetic tone, “It was all chance and hurry. Had your lodging not been so far away——”

“You have seen Archie this morning! Where was he brought up for sentence, then?”

“At the Court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall.”

Ewen sat down at the table. “Tell me about it.—No, I do not blame you, Hector; why should I? Yet I would have given much . . .” He clenched his hand a second on the edge of the table. “Tell me everything.”

So Hector told him. The story began with his going for an early walk along the riverside, and finding himself, when he got to Westminster, in the presence of a considerable crowd, which, as he then discovered to his surprise, was waiting in the hopes of getting a glimpse of the Jacobite as he was brought by coach from the Tower to have sentence passed upon him. “After the first astonishment my thoughts were all of you, Ewen,” said Hector earnestly, “and I was for coming at once to fetch you. But it appeared that the Court was already assembled, and that the prisoner might arrive at any moment. I tried to get a hackney-coach—I could not; I tried to send a messenger—no one would stir. Then I thought, ‘If I cannot warn Ewen, who, after all, has probably heard of this from some other source, I will at least do my best to get a sight of the Doctor, to tell him how he seems’. I had no hope of entering Westminster Hall, since the press was so great; and moreover those who went in appeared to have tickets of admission. And the crowd moved and pushed to such an extent that I began to fear I should not get the slightest glimpse of Doctor Cameron when he came; and after a while, indeed, I found myself penned with one or two others into an angle of the building where I could see nothing. However, there was in this angle a small door, and when the man nearest it, in a fit of annoyance, began to beat upon it, it was suddenly opened by an official, who grumblingly consented to find places for four or five of the nearest—and this he did.”

“And so you heard—or saw?”

“I did both, though with difficulty, being at the back of the court, which was crammed with persons like myself, and suffocatingly hot. The proceedings were quite short. The Doctor was extremely composed, neither defiant nor a whit overwhelmed; he appeared, too, in good health. Nor did he attempt to deny that he was the person named in the Act of Attainder.”

“Did he make no defence—had he not an advocate?”

“No. The only defence which he made was to say that he could not have acted otherwise than he did, having to follow Lochiel, his brother and Chief, that in the troubles he had always set his face against reprisals or harsh treatment, of which he gave some instances, and that his own character would bear investigation in the same light. Then came that barbarous sentence for high treason, pronounced by one of the three judges present—the Lord Chief Justice, I think it was—and, Ewen, it was not imagination on my part that he laid particular emphasis on those words respecting the hanging, ‘but not till you are dead’, glowering at the Doctor as he uttered them. Many people remarked it, and were talking about it afterwards. But Doctor Cameron was perfectly calm, and merely made a civil bow at the end; after that, however, he asked earnestly that the execution of the sentence, which had been fixed for this day fortnight, might be deferred a little in order to enable him to see his wife, to whom he had already had permission to write bidding her come to him from France. And he added that she and their seven children were all dependent upon him, and that it would be worse than death to him not to see her again. So the Court decided to instruct the Attorney-General that the sentence should not be carried out until a week later, on the seventh of June, in order to permit of this. Then the Doctor was removed, and everyone fought their way out again; and I came away feeling that if I really believed my rashness and carelessness last September were the cause of Archibald Cameron’s standing there . . . and where I suppose he may stand in three weeks’ time—even though no one accused me of it I would blow my brains out to-night!”

“Be reassured, Hector, they are not the cause!” said Ardroy in an emotionless voice. But his face was very haggard. “ ’Tis I am the person most immediately responsible, for it was I who found that accursed hut in the wood at Glenbuckie and persuaded him to lie hid in it. . . . Yes, I expected this news, but that makes it no easier to bear—Hector, he must be saved somehow, even if it should mean both our lives!”

“I am quite ready to give mine,” answered young Grant simply. “It would be the best means, too, of clearing my honour; far the best. But we cannot strike a bargain with the English Government, Ewen, that they should hang us in his place. And I hear that the Tower is a very strong prison.”

“Let us go to Westminster and see Mr. Galbraith,” said his brother-in-law.

They walked for some distance in silence, and when they were nearing the top of St. James’s Street Ewen pulled at his companion’s arm.

“Let us go this way,” he said abruptly, and they turned down Arlington Street. “Just from curiosity, I have a desire to know who lives in a certain new house in the bottom corner there.”

Hector, usually so alert, seemed too dulled by his recent experience to exhibit either surprise or curiosity at this proceeding. They walked to the end of Arlington Street.

“Yes, that is the house,” observed Ewen after a moment’s scrutiny. “Now to find out who lives in it.”

“Why?” asked Hector. And, rousing himself to a rather perfunctory attempt at jocularity, he added, “Remember that you are in company with Alison’s brother, Ardroy, if it’s the name of some fair lady whom you saw go into that house which you are seeking.”

“ ’Twas a man whom I saw come out of it,” replied Ewen briefly, and, noticing a respectable-looking old gentleman in spectacles advancing down Arlington Street at that moment, he accosted him with a request to be told who lived at Number Seventeen.

“Dear me,” said the old gentleman, pushing his spectacles into place, and peering up at the tall speaker, “you must, indeed, be a stranger to this part of the town, sir, not to know that Number Seventeen is the house of Mr. Henry Pelham the chief minister, brother to my Lord Newcastle.”

“I am a stranger,” admitted Ewen. “Thank you, sir.” He lifted his hat again, and the old gentleman, returning the courtesy, trotted off.

“Mr. Pelham the minister?” remarked Hector with reviving interest. “And whom pray, did you see coming out of Mr. Pelham’s house?”

“That is just what it might be useful to discover,” replied Ewen musingly, “now that one knows how important a personage lives there.”

“But I suppose that a good many people must come out of it,” objected the young officer. “Why does the particular man whom you happened to see so greatly interest you?”

“Because he was a Highlander, and it was close upon midnight. And as a Highlander—though, naturally, a Whig—if one could interest him on a fellow-Highlander’s behalf . . . and he an intimate of Mr. Pelham’s——”

“How did you know that he was a Highlander, since I take it that he was not wearing the Highland dress?”

“Because I heard him rate his servant in Erse.”

“That’s proof enough,” admitted Hector. “Would you know him again if you saw him?”

“I think so. However, the chances are against my having the good fortune to do so.” Ewen began to walk on. “I wonder what Mr. Galbraith will have to say about this morning’s affair.” And he sighed heavily; there was always much to be said—it was rather, what was to be done.