Читать книгу D. K. Broster Collection - D. K. Broster - Страница 68

No more scope for lying, however, was to be afforded to either of the captives, nor were they invited to walk out of Fort William, though for a week, ten days, a fortnight, this was their waking hope every morning. But as this perennial plant daily bloomed and faded, Ewen began to think that Colonel Leighton was not, perhaps, so happy an exchange as some had fancied for the astute but determined Crauford, that he was keeping them there because he knew that he was incompetent and wanted to disguise the fact by a show of severity. Of course it was quite possible that he was only obeying orders from Edinburgh, or, as time went on, from London, but that they could not find out. “At any rate,” declared Hector, “he is stupid; bête comme une oie, a man one cannot reason with. I saw that at once.”

Stupid or clever, Colonel Leighton was the master of the situation. As the October days crawled by, shortening a little, so that one saw the glow from the sunset—when there was one—fall ever a little less far round on the wall, Lieutenant Grant’s temper grew shorter also. What right had Colonel Leighton to keep him imprisoned here, an officer of a foreign power against whom he had no producible evidence? He kept sending messages to that effect, and getting the invariable reply that since the Lieutenant-Governor had only his word that he possessed this status, Mr. Grant must produce his commission or something equivalent if he hoped to be believed. Long ago it had become plain that poor Hector’s chivalrous attempt at a bargain was worse than useless, for his surrendering himself had not released his brother-in-law; its only effect was to have introduced another inmate into the cage, and one who was as restless as any squirrel.

November set in, cold and very windy, and with it came a sinister reminder that there are even worse fates than bondage. There lay in Fort William a prisoner, brought thither from Inveraray, tied on a horse, at the beginning of October, for whom the sands of captivity were running out. On the seventh of November, a day of tempest, an armed procession set out down the side of Loch Linnhe, and in the midst was James Stewart of Acharn. Next morning, in the same high wind, he was taken across Loch Leven and hanged at Ballachulish in Appin, the scene of the murder of Campbell of Glenure, meeting his unjust fate with composure and with the psalm destined ever after to be associated in that country with his name, the thirty-fifth. Presumably to impress them with the wisdom of submissive conduct, the two imprisoned Jacobites were given a full account of the proceedings, and Ewen, with his mother’s Stewart blood on fire, chalked up one more count in the score against the Campbells.

November was to have seen that attempt on the liberty of George II. over which Ewen and his brother-in-law had come to loggerheads that night at Ardroy. But no news of any such attempt filtered through to the captives. Ewen was very glad, and Hector, presumably, sorry. It was a subject not mentioned between them, although the breach which it had made was healed.

And so another five or six weeks trailed by. James Stewart’s chain-encircled body, still guarded by soldiers, rattled and froze on the hillock by Ballachulish ferry, and Lieutenant Hector Grant of the régiment d’Albanie by this time much more nearly resembled a panther than a squirrel. He could think or talk of nothing but escape, and every day his denunciations of Ewen for his passivity became more fervid. He told him among other things that he was like a cow which stays in a byre merely because the farmer has put it there. In vain Ewen pointed out the small advantages to be reaped by escape, at least in his own case, since he could not possibly return to Ardroy; he would be rearrested at once. As Hector knew, he had twice written to a lawyer in Edinburgh to take up his case. “Yes, but what answer have you had?” Hector would reply. “You are over trusting, Mac ’ic Ailein; that old Leighton of the devil never forwards your letters, ’tis clear. He probably uses them as curlpapers for his wig.” Yet when Ewen offered his assistance in carrying out the very unpromising plans for his own escape with which Hector constantly dallied, the young man would not hear of it, alleging that he had got Ardroy into sufficient trouble already.

But at last Ewen’s own patience, not natural to him, but painfully acquired in the difficult years since his return from exile, was completely exhausted. For one thing, it fretted him more with every day that dawned that he knew nothing of Archie’s doings, nor had even learnt whence that aid was to come on which Doctor Cameron was building. So, one day about mid-December, when he and Hector had been discussing the various unsatisfactory plans for escape which the latter had concocted, he considerably startled that youth by saying, “Let us fix on Christmas Day, then, for the garrison will be more or less drunk, and we may have some small chance of walking out in the manner you propose.” (For the great obstacle to evasion in the orthodox way, by sawing through the bars of a window and letting themselves down, was the by now established impossibility of procuring a file or anything like it.)

Hector leaped up from his chair. “Enfin! You mean it, Ewen—you are at last converted? Dieu soit loué! And you suggest Christmas Day. You do not think that Hogmanay would be better?”

“No, for the garrison is English. It is on the evening of Christmas Day that we must look for the effect of their potations.”

“Christmas Day be it, then! Now we can plan to better purpose!”