Читать книгу D. K. Broster Collection - D. K. Broster - Страница 66

“My dear Hector!” began Ardroy, half-laughing, half-sighing, when the door of that locality was shut on them.

“Oh, I know what you are going to say, Ewen!” Hector did not let him say it in consequence. “Yes, I’ve done no good—I may even have done harm—but I could not stay a free man when I had brought all this trouble upon you . . . as I have done—don’t shake your head! But I had a faint hope that I could gull them into some sort of an exchange. At any rate, I have brought you all kinds of messages from Alison.”

“You saw her? How is Keithie? And—most important of all—did Archie get safely away?”

“ ’Tis ‘Yes’ to all of your questions. I did see Alison; Keithie, I understand, is as well as ever he was—and Doctor Cameron was clear away from the MacMartins before I myself arrived there on Saturday evening. Nor has he been captured since, or one would have heard it in the neighbourhood.” Here Hector looked at the windows. “I wonder how much filing those bars would need?”

Ewen could not help laughing. “You go too fast, Eachainn! I hope shortly to be invited to walk out of the door in the ordinary way, and against you—since I do not believe that they have your stolen papers—they can prove nothing. It was self-sacrificing of you in the extreme to come here and give yourself up, but my arrest, I feel sure, was due in the first instance to Doctor Kincaid’s sense of duty, of which he made mention just now, and not to any information about Doctor Cameron rifled from your pockets.”

His hand at his chin, Hector looked at him. “I wish I could believe that. Yet it is my doing, Ewen, for this reason: if I had not been so damnably ill-tempered at Ardroy the other evening I’d not have come upon that spy where I did next day, and have lost my papers; my loss was the direct cause of your going to warn Lochdornie and hence meeting Doctor Cameron in his stead; and if you had not met him he could not have come back to Ardroy with you, and have been seen by that curst interfering physician of yours. You see I know all about that from Alison, with whom I contrived a meeting through your little hero of a son; I came upon him trotting up to Slochd nan Eun in the dark to carry a warning.”

“Donald went up to Slochd nan Eun! Did Alison choose him as the messenger?”

“Not a bit of it. ’Twas his own notion, stout little fellow. I found him by the loch and sent him back, since I knew that whoever was sheltering with Angus MacMartin was already gone. It was from Donald that I first learnt who it was. He’s a brave child, Ewen, and I congratulate you on giving me such a nephew!”

And yet, thought Ewen all at once, it is really Donald who is the cause of everything; if he had not pushed Keith into the loch I should never have ridden for Doctor Kincaid and come upon Hector. . . . Nay, it goes further back: if Keithie had not first thrown in that treasure of Donald’s . . . Perhaps in justice I ought to blame my cousin Ian for giving it to him!

Hector meanwhile was looking round their joint prison. The room stood at the corner of the block of buildings in the fort nearest to the loch, and was actually blessed with a window in each of its outer walls. It was therefore unusually light and airy, and had a view across and down Loch Linnhe. In some ways, though it was less lofty, it had already reminded Ewen of the tower room at Fort Augustus where he had once gone through such mental anguish.

“This place might be worse,” now pronounced the newcomer. “I doubt this room was not originally intended to keep prisoners in.” Going to one of the windows he shook the bars. “Not very far to the ground, I should suppose, but there seems to be a considerable drop afterwards down that bastion wall on the loch-side.”

But Ewen, scarcely heeding, was murmuring that he ought never to have brought Doctor Cameron to Ardroy.

Hector turned round from his investigations. “Yet he’s clear away now, Ewen, that’s certain.”

“But the authorities must guess that he is in Scotland.”

“ ’Tis no more than a guess; they do not know it. Even from that unlucky letter of mine I do not think they could be sure of it.”

“Hector, what was in that letter?” asked his fellow-captive. “And why were you carrying it? On someone else’s account, I suppose? It was very unfortunate that you were charged with it.”

Lieutenant Grant got rather red. He stuffed his hands into his breeches pockets and studied the floor for a moment. Then he lifted his head and said with an air of resignation, “I may as well make a clean breast of it. Ever since my mishap I have been wondering how I could have been so misguided, but I had the best intentions, Ewen, as you’ll hear. I wrote the letter myself.”

“Wrote it yourself! and carried it on you! To whom was it then?”

“To Cluny Macpherson.”

“But you were on your way to Cluny Macpherson—or so I understood!”

“Yes, I was. But you know, Ewen, how jealously the secret of his hiding-place in Badenoch is kept, and how devilish hard it is to come at him, even when one is accredited as a friend. I had no doubt but that from the information I had been given I should meet with some of his clan, but whether they would consent to guide me to his lair on Ben Alder was quite another matter. So, thinking over the problem that morning, it occurred to me that I would write him a short letter, in case I found difficulty in gaining access to his person. You will ask me why in Heaven’s name I wrote it beforehand and carried it on me, but it was really my caution, Ewen, that was my undoing. I saw that it would not be wise to write it in a shape which any chance person could read, and that I must turn most of it into cipher. But I could not write my letter and then turn portions of it into cipher—a laborious process, as you know—sitting on a tussock of heather in a wind on Ben Alder, with an impatient gillie of Cluny’s gibbering Erse at me. So I wrote down my information as shortly as I could and turned it into cipher before setting out, in order to have it ready to hand over should need arise. And I still believe that the cipher may defy reading, though when you came upon me by Loch Treig, knowing that the letter was gone from me, with the Doctor’s and Lochdornie’s names in it, I——” He made one of his half-French gestures.

“Yes,” said Ewen meditatively, “as things turned out, your notion was not a fortunate one. Was the letter directed to Cluny?”

“No; that foolishness at least I did not commit, since I meant to give it, if at all, straight into the hands of one of his men.”

“That’s something, certainly. And if the man who took it was a spy—and not an ordinary robber, which is always possible—I should say the letter had been sent straight to Edinburgh or to London.”

“Why not to the old fellow here? ’Tis true that if he had it he could not read the cipher, but that Captain Jackson might.”

“I think the letter was never brought here, because, if it had been, even though neither of them could read a word of it, they would know that it had been taken from you on Tuesday, and would hardly have wasted their time in allowing you to pretend that you were at Ardroy until Saturday, nor have sent for Doctor Kincaid to testify that you were not the ‘Mr. Sinclair’ whom he saw there, worse luck, on Thursday.”

“Unless they wished to give me more rope to hang myself in,” commented Hector, with a slight access of gloom. “But as to that,” he added after a moment, more cheerfully, “I’m more like to be shot as a deserter by the French than hanged as a conspirator by the English.”

“You should have thought of that before coming here and giving yourself up!” exclaimed Ewen. “Are you serious, Hector?”

“No,” confessed Lieutenant Grant with a grin. “Lord Ogilvie will see to it that he does not lose one of his best officers in that manner. I’ll report before my leave’s up, never fear. By the way, I was carrying my commission on me, as a safeguard, though I denied it; and the scoundrel who took my papers has that too, a bad meeting to him!”

“I thought you were lying to those officers just now,” observed Ardroy. “But again, had your commission been brought here, I am sure that Captain Jackson could never have resisted the temptation of clapping it down in front of you when you denied that you had it.”

“I wonder,” remarked Hector rather irrelevantly, “who has done the more lying of late, you or I? Nay, you, past a doubt, for you have had vastly more opportunity. And you don’t enjoy it, more’s the pity!”