Читать книгу Collected Works (Historical Novel) - D. K. Broster - Страница 118

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June 15th, 1755.

“If the moon looks through the roof she will see us all in bed!” a little boy had gleefully announced this evening, sitting up suddenly in that retreat. “—Can the moon look through the roof?”

Nobody knows for certain, though it is commonly held that she cannot. Yet, even if she has that power, and high as she was riding on this clear June night above the old house of Invernacree in Appin, she would not have seen all its inmates in bed. The child who had spoken of her, yes, and his elder brother, both very soundly and rosily slumbering; these she would indeed have seen; and in their respective apartments their great-uncle, old Alexander Stewart of Invernacree, to whom these, his dead sister’s grandchildren, were paying a visit; and his two daughters, Grizel and Jacqueline, between whom there lay twenty-five years’ difference in age, seeing that Invernacree had married twice; and Morag Cameron, the children’s nurse, who had come with them from their own home of Ardroy, in Lochaber, while their mother lay in of the daughter whose presence would be such a surprise to Donald and little Keithie when they returned. All the servants likewise would the moon have seen laid out on their truckle beds or pallets—all save a young maid who was awake with the toothache, and wishing she had access to the skill of the wise woman at home.

But in one of the larger bedrooms there were two persons—two men—who had not even begun to undress, though it was fully an hour since they had come upstairs. The younger was sitting on the edge of the old four-poster bed, with an arm round one of the columns at the foot; it might be presumed that he usually occupied this bed himself, and so he did; for he was Ian Stewart, the son of the house. He was of the dark type of Highlander, lithe and dark-haired, with deep blue eyes under black lashes, lean and sensitive in feature and looking about five and twenty. The other, of larger build altogether, unusually finely made in fact, fair complexioned and some ten years his senior, was his first cousin and very good friend, Ewen Cameron of Ardroy, the father of the two little boys in the green bedchamber, come to fetch them both home again. He was now leaning over the back of a high chair, gazing at his kinsman with eyes more markedly blue than his, because they were not so dark.

“Yes, my father is set upon my marrying soon,” said the young man on the bed with a sigh. “One can well understand it, Ewen; he is old, and desires to see a grandson before he dies. But if Alan had lived——”

“No, there would not then have been the same necessity,” agreed Ardroy. Alan Stewart, the elder brother, had been killed, unmarried, at Culloden, nine years before. “Yet, Ian, you have taken no vow against wedlock, have you? Or is there someone . . . ?”

Ian Stewart ran his finger round and round a detail of the acanthus carving on the bedpost. “There is no one,” he confessed. “Indeed I wish there were. My father would not then have to look about for a suitable match—for which the choice is none so wide neither, since I naturally cannot marry a lady from a Whig family.”

“And has Uncle Alexander found anyone?”

“Two,” said Ian with a little grimace. “Miss MacLaren, and Maclean of Garroch’s second daughter—the eldest is promised. I have no objection to either of them . . . save that I do not desire to marry either. I want someone of my own choice. Now do not, Ewen, tell me that arranged matches generally turn out very well, as I can see that you are upon the point of doing, for you have no right to possess an opinion on that subject, you who had the luck to marry the woman you chose for yourself and waited for!”

Ewen Cameron smiled and, coming round, threw himself into the chair on which he had been leaning. “I was not going to say anything of the sort. I wish I could help you, Ian; and I am sure that Alison would if she could. She’d not be a true woman if she did not hanker after the chance.”

“If only I had the means to travel a little!” said his cousin regretfully. “Still and on, to go from place to place looking for a wife as one might search for a brood mare would not content me neither. A spaewife once told me that I should love a woman who would be other than she seemed—not a very pleasant prophecy, was it?—But enough of my affairs. Tell me, Ewen, how are matters between you and the new Chief of Glenshian since he succeeded his father last autumn, and is now become almost your neighbour?”

Very likely Ewen Cameron of Ardroy could prevent his sentiments from appearing on his face if he so wished—he looked as though he could—but with his present companion there was evidently no need to hide the signs of a most uncompromising antipathy to the individual just named. His bright blue eyes seemed to change colour till they were the match of his cousin’s dark blue ones; his already decided chin appeared still more decided. “I am glad to say that I have not seen even his shadow near Ardroy, and I think it will be many a long day before Finlay MacPhair of Glenshian comes near my house. I know too much about him.”

Ian looked at him curiously. “But is he aware of that?”

“Very well aware of it. I sometimes wonder that in the couple of years which have passed since I was enlightened as to his true character he has neither made overtures to me nor——” Ewen paused.

“Nor what?”

“—Nor found means to send a gillie behind me some dark night with a sgian dubh. We were both in Edinburgh last autumn—in fact I saw him, though he did not see me.” Ardroy seemed to be going to add something else, but apparently changed his mind. “However, I know now that he will not touch me, and I have sworn not to touch him. It is checkmate.”

Ian had got off the bed. “Ewen,” he said, and his tone was grave, “are you jesting? Do you indeed go in danger of that man, because if so——”

“No, no,” said Ardroy lightly. “I was not meaning that about the gillie; my tongue ran away with me.”

“Then ’tis the first time I have ever known it do so,” retorted his cousin, surveying him doubtfully. “And what is the discreditable secret that you know about Glenshian?”

Ewen put his elbow on the arm of the chair and shaded his brow with his hand. “There is nothing to be gained by sharing it.” His voice had grown all at once very sombre. Ian stood still and looked at him.

“Oh, very well,” he said at length, a trifle piqued. “I have no wish to pry into your relations with Glenshian, though they seem devilish uncomfortable ones. And why you should have sworn not to defend yourself against him passes my comprehension. I always thought you had more common sense than most.”

“I did not swear that,” answered Ewen after a pause. “I made a vow, two years ago, that it was not for me to take vengeance.” He dropped his hand now, and young Stewart could see that he was very pale. “I cannot explain why I took such an oath . . . perhaps I was fey with grief . . . but I have never regretted it, and even if I should regret it in the future, still I must hold by it.”

“Two years ago,” “fey with grief”—Ian realised to what his cousin must be referring, to the execution of his kinsman, Archibald Cameron, which had been so great a sorrow to him and which he had risked his life to avert. His own slight resentment vanished; he laid a hand for a moment on Ewen’s shoulder, and then went past him and, drawing the window-curtains aside, looked out. Yet he wondered what could possibly be Finlay MacPhair’s connection with the tragedy—no, he must have misunderstood Ewen; there could be none. And he would not reopen so painful a subject.

“I hope we do not disturb Uncle Alexander by our talk,” observed Ewen, rousing himself. “Is not this room of yours next to his?”

“My father grows a little hard of hearing,” said Ian in reply. He dropped the curtain. “And the wind blows to-night. Speaking of my father’s deafness, by the way, I think that was the reason why I overheard you telling him something about your brother-in-law, Hector Grant—that he had come into an inheritance; or was I mistaken?”

“No, you were not mistaken,” answered his cousin, and rose suddenly to his towering height. “Hector has been left a small property in Glenmoriston by some remote kinsman of his father’s, and he will soon be coming over from his regiment in France to visit it. Indeed, Alison wonders whether he will not resign his commission and settle in Glenmoriston.”

“Oh, indeed,” said Ian drily. “But Mr. Grant will find the existence of a Highland laird but a poor thing after his life as an officer in France. Would he not be better advised to think twice before taking such a plunge?”

Ewen swung round on him. “I never knew that you disliked Hector!” he exclaimed in a tone of surprise.

“My dear Ewen, I don’t. But I cannot think him, somehow, suited to the Highlands.”

“He’s as Highland as yourself, laochain; his mother was a Macrae.”

“Maybe. But a lifetime spent in France has given him . . . too much French polish for my taste.”

“Is that your objection?” said Ewen, laughing. “I had not noticed the defect myself; and as to a ‘lifetime,’ why, he is only about two years older than you. He is younger than my wife.”

Ian made a gesture to dismiss Mr. Hector Grant. “Talking of Lady Ardroy, is the daughter like you or like her, Ewen? Your boys, I think, favour you both, one apiece.”

“You had better come with me when I return and see for yourself,” answered his cousin. “I shall insist upon Uncle Alexander sparing you for a night or two. You have not visited us, I think, since you gave Donald that claymore hilt which Keithie threw into the loch, two years ago last autumn. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I am going to bed!”

On that announcement his host remorsefully snatched up a candle to light him to his room, excusing himself for having selfishly, as he declared, called him into his, by the fact that he saw him so rarely.

But, coming back, Ian Stewart did not follow his kinsman’s example and go to bed. He sat down on the window-seat, where the curtain was already drawn aside, and gazed for a long time at the silver road which led across Loch Linnhe to the mountains beyond. The Celt in him had gone dreaming; dreaming as a girl is supposed to dream of the ideal lover. But his romance had never come to him, and soon it would be too late for it. He must mate, since it was his duty to beget children to come after him, without ever knowing that high rapture of which the poets sang, and the moonlight, and the flight of wild swans over the pool. There would be no Deirdre or white-breasted Bronwen for him, only a decorous young housewife, a MacLaren or a Maclean, whom he would respect and cherish, and to whom he would be faithful. In time, perhaps, would come affection too. Well, perhaps that was better in the end than passion, but youth was slipping away, and he had never known youth’s prerogative, to give, and hazard everything in the giving. His marriage would be as tepid an affair as that impassive moon now looking at him over the mountains of Ardgour.

Yet under that same roof, up in her little turret room, Ian’s young sister Jacqueline was smiling in her sleep, having heard something that evening which had pleased her. For her sentiments about Lieutenant—now Captain—Hector Grant differed entirely from her brother’s. In her dreams she did not seek the ideal lover, for it seemed to her that she had already met him, here in her father’s house, more than two years ago. She had been but seventeen then. If, on his way to his recent inheritance in Glenmoriston, he should come this way again? . . . She was dreaming that he had.

And away in northern France, where the same moon was silvering the steep-pitched roofs of Lille, a handsome young man in uniform was going home to his quarters, after a game of cards, with pockets somewhat lightened. But what did that matter? He was almost a man of substance now—no longer, at any rate, a mere landless Jacobite. In the deserted streets, whence all good burghers had long ago departed, and where his footfalls woke such echoes on the cobbles, he began to whistle a Scots air. And who knows whether, when at last he reached his couch, he was not visited by the image of a girl in far away Appin? But the moon could not be sure of this, for she sank to rest before he did.

She missed, therefore, by the hour of her setting, the conclusion of a novel and most interesting experiment in cattle-lifting not far from Ewen Cameron’s home at Ardroy in Lochaber.