Читать книгу Collected Works (Historical Novel) - D. K. Broster - Страница 111

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“Keithie wants to swim too!”

“Keithie cannot, and let us have no greeting over it, now,” said the handsome elderly lady who, coming at the end of the long, fine day to take the air by the side of Loch na h-Iolaire before sunset, had just been annexed by her younger great-nephew. Little Keith, in Morag’s guardianship, had been enviously watching his brother’s progress through the clear, very still water, but Donald was back now, and dressed, in the boat wherein Angus MacMartin, his instructor, had rowed him out a little way from shore.

“When Donald putched Keithie into the loch,” proceeded the small speaker, looking up earnestly at Miss Cameron, “Keithie swimmed and swimmed till Father came. Donald couldn’t swim then. Didn’t Keithie swim when you putched him in, Donald?” he inquired, raising his voice to carry to the boat. Nine months older than on the disastrous day to which he so uncompromisingly referred, Keith no longer used the possessive case of the personal pronoun to designate himself.

Donald, preferring to ignore this query entirely, cupped his hands together and shouted with all the strength of his healthy young lungs, “Angus says that you can come into the boat now, Keithie, if Aunt Margaret will allow it, and sail your wee ship. Will you come too, Aunt Margaret?”

“No, thank you, Donald, I will not,” replied his great-aunt with much firmness and in her ordinary voice. “I prefer something stable under my feet—Keithie!” she clutched at his impatient little form, “bide still! Do you want to fall in again?”

“Keithie didn’t fall in,” corrected the child, raising his eyes of velvet. “Donald pu——”

“Now, don’t say again that your brother pushed you,” admonished Miss Cameron. “It may be true, but you’d do better to forget it. You know that Donald is very sorry for having done it; and you yourself were very naughty to throw in his claymore hilt.”

“Yes,” admitted small Keith, and his features took on an angelic expression of penitence. “Keithie was very naughty.” He sighed. “But good now,” he added with a more satisfied air, and, as if to prove this statement, stooped, his hand still in Miss Cameron’s, picked up something at his feet, and held it out towards his brother in the boat, which Angus was now rowing in to shore. “Donald, Donald, you can throw my wee ship into the loch because I throwed——”

The elder boy, standing in the bows, gave a sound like a snort. “You know well that your ship floats!” he retorted indignantly. “ ’Tis not the same thing at all!”

“But the ship goes . . . goes like this sometimes,” explained Keith eagerly, illustrating with the little painted vessel itself the topsy-turvy position which he had not vocabulary enough to describe.

“Come now,” interrupted Aunt Margaret, who was always direct, yet not the less esteemed by her great-nephews on that account, “are you going with Angus or no, Keithie?”

“Wait, mem, if you please, till I make the boatie fast,” said the careful Angus. At three and twenty he was as reliable with his chieftain’s children, or with anything that was his, as any veteran. He brought the boat into the bank and knelt to pass the rope round the root of a birch-tree.

“I shall sail my wee ship round and round and round the island,” proclaimed Keith, skipping up and down. “I shall sail——”

“Preserve us, who’s yonder!” broke in Miss Cameron, her eyes caught all at once by the figures of a man and a woman under the trees on the southern shore of the loch. They were standing very close together, looking at each other; very still, and very silent too, else in the windless calm their voices must have floated over the water. The westering sun smote upon an auburn head . . .

“It’s Father—he’s come home at last!” cried Donald, and was out of the boat like a flash and tearing along the path towards them.

Angus jerked himself upright. “Indeed, indeed it’s himself!” said he in an awed and joyful voice. “Blessings be on the day!”

“Take the bairn and go,” commanded Miss Cameron, and in a second the young piper had tossed Keithie to his shoulder and was off to his master.

* * * * *

The sunset had been angry; now it was smoothed to serenity—a sea of the palest chrysoprase, with little islands of gold which had once glowed fiery rose, and far-stretching harbours clasped between promontories of pearl.

“I shall never forget it,” said Ewen to the two women, the old and the young, who stood with him where the Loch of the Eagle reflected that dying glory. “No one who was there will ever forget it: he went to his death as a man goes to a banquet. All London was talking of it, friends and foes alike—and now Scotland. See, when I came through Edinburgh this letter from London had already been published in a journal there.” He pulled out a newspaper and pointed, and the two ladies read:

“Doctor Cameron suffered last Thursday like a brave man, a Christian and a gentleman. In short I cannot express what I have heard of his behaviour. It was reckoned by the thousands that saw him more than human, and has left such an impression on the minds of all as will not soon be forgot. His merit is confessed by all parties, and his death can hardly be called untimely, as his behaviour rendered his last day worth an age of common life.”

“We have had another Montrose in our kinsman,” said Miss Cameron proudly. “But it does not surprise me. Did his body suffer the same fate as the great Marquis’s?”

“No, Aunt Margaret. It was not quartered, and though his head was struck off, it was not exposed on Temple Bar, but buried in the coffin.”

And he was silent, thinking of that midnight scene in the vault of the Chapel of the Savoy, where, in the presence of a little half-clandestine gathering of mourners and sympathisers, the mangled body of the last Jacobite martyr had been laid to rest. Again, he saw the torchlight run glimmering over the inscription on the coffin-lid, heard Hector sobbing like a woman, and bowed his own head before the overwhelming conviction which possessed him, that the determination to have vengeance on the informer which flourished so greenly in his heart was but a mean, a shrivelled, a dishonouring wreath to lay upon the grave of one who had died with such noble and unvindictive fortitude. Archie’s life was too precious to be paid for in such coin. The traitor must go untouched by his hand; and the renunciation should be his tribute to the dear and honoured memory of Archibald Cameron.

Not that he forgave . . . though Archie had forgiven. . . .

Ewen came back to the present. Miss Cameron was drying her eyes. Alison’s face was hidden against his breast. He held her close, and laid his cheek for an instant on her head, for he could feel rather than hear her little sobbing breaths, and he guessed that she was saying to herself, ‘Ewen, Ewen, what if it had been you!’

Then he saw Donald, preceded by Luath the deerhound, come bounding along the path under the birch-trees. In the boy’s hand was the hilt of the broken claymore from Culloden Moor. “I went to the house to fetch this, Father!” he cried, holding it aloft. “I told you that Angus dived and brought it up again. And I’ve had a notion,” he went on fast and excitedly, “that it could be mended, and have a new blade put to it. . . . Why is Mother crying?”

Holding Alison closer than ever, Ardroy took the broken blade and looked at it as if he were seeing more than what he held.

“No,” he said after a pause, “I think it can never be mended now. It never could have been. . . . I do not know, Donald, but that you’ll have to get you a new kind of sword when you are a man.”

He gazed over his wife’s dark head at the sunset, fading, fading. . . . How Archie had loved this land of mist and wind and clear shining which he had left like a malefactor and a hero! And these lochs and hills would doubtless yet breed more of his temper, but never a one who united to his courage and loyalty so much simple goodness—never a one.

All the colour was gone from the sunset now, save the faintest opal tones, like the last cadence of a song. The four of them turned from the loch-side, and began to go homewards under that June sky of the North which knows no real night; and the child with the broken sword led the way.