Читать книгу D. K. Broster Collection - D. K. Broster - Страница 47

“And then,” said the childish voice, “the clans charged . . . but I expect you do not know what that means, Keithie; it means that they ran very fast against the English, waving their broadswords, and all with their dirks in their left hands under the targe; and they were so fierce and so brave that they broke through the line of English soldiers which were in front, and if there had not been so many more English, and they well-fed—but we were very hungry and had marched all night. . . .”

The little boy paused, leaving the sequel untold; but the pause itself told it. From the pronoun into which he had dropped, from his absorbed, exalted air, he might almost have been himself in the lost battle of which he was telling the story this afternoon, among the Highland heather, to a boy still younger. And in fact he was not relating to those small, inattentive ears any tale of old, unhappy, far-off things, nor of a battle long ago. Little more than six years had passed since these children’s own father had lain badly wounded on the tragic moorland of Culloden—had indeed died there but for the devotion of his foster-brothers.

“And this,” concluded the story-teller, leaving the gap still unbridged, “this is the hilt of a broadsword that was used in the battle.” He uncovered an object of a roundish shape wrapped in a handkerchief and lying on his knees. “Cousin Ian Stewart gave it to me last week, and now I will let you see it. . . . You’re not listening—you’re not even looking, Keithie!”

The dark, pansy-like eyes of his little hearer were lifted to his.

“Yes, My was,” he replied in his clear treble. “But somesing runned so fast down My’s leg,” he added apologetically. “It comed out of the fraoch.”

Not much of his small three-year-old person could be seen, so deep planted was it in the aforesaid heather. His brother Donald, on the contrary, was commandingly situated on a fallen pine-stem. The sun of late September, striking low through the birch-trees, gilded his childish hair, ripe corn which gleamed as no cornfield ever did; he was so well-grown and sturdy that he might have passed for seven or eight, though in reality a good deal younger, and one could almost have imagined the winged helm of a Viking on those bright locks. But the little delicate face, surmounted by loose dark curls, which looked up at him from the fading heather, was that of a gently brooding angel—like that small seraph of Carpaccio’s who bends so concernedly over his big lute. Between the two, tall, stately and melancholy, sat Luath, the great shaggy Highland deerhound; and behind was the glimmer of water.

The historian on the log suddenly got up, gripping his claymore hilt tight. It was big and heavy; his childish hand was lost inside the strong twining basketwork. Of the blade there remained but an inch or so. “Come along, Keithie!”

Obediently the angel turned over, as small children do when they rise from the ground, took his brother’s outstretched hand and began to move away with him, lifting his little legs high to clear the tough heather stems.

“Not going home now, Donald?” he inquired after a moment, tiring, no doubt, of this prancing motion.

“We will go this way,” replied the elder boy somewhat disingenuously, well aware that he had turned his back on the house of Ardroy, his home, and was making straight for Loch na h-Iolaire, where the two were never allowed to go unaccompanied. “I think that Father is fishing here somewhere.”