Читать книгу D. K. Broster Collection - D. K. Broster - Страница 70

One may arrange an escape with due regard for sheltering darkness and the festive preoccupation of one’s gaolers, may have accomplices in readiness, may join them undiscovered and get a certain distance away from one’s prison—only to find that Nature is not in a mood to lend her assistance, that she has, in fact, definitely resolved to hinder one’s flight. And in the Highlands at midwinter this lack of co-operation on her part may lead to serious consequences.

In other words, young Ian Stewart’s boat, with its four rowers, was having an increasingly rough and toilsome journey down Loch Linnhe this Christmas night. The party had waited undetected in the boat on the upper reach of the loch near the fort, the same luck had attended their reception of the two fugitives, on whose descent from their window and down the counterscarp to the shore fortune had also smiled, and, amid mutual congratulations, rescuers and rescued had started on the twenty miles’ homeward pull. The wind, as they knew, was dead against them, hence they could not help themselves by a sail, and the tide would shortly be against them also, but these were circumstances which had for some time been anticipated. What, however, was dismaying, though not at all beyond precedent on Loch Linnhe, was the rapidity with which this contrary wind was rising in strength, and the degree to which it was lashing up the waters of the loch to anger.

The boat itself was heavy and solid, and there was little risk of its being swamped, though now and again a wave would fling a scatter of spray over the bows. The real danger lay in the fact that its progress was being so retarded that dawn, even early day, might be upon them before they had covered nearly as much distance from Fort William as was desirable, seeing that with daylight they could be observed and reported upon from the shore. At the helm Ian Stewart, more and more uneasy, watched the pallid light spreading in the east, though the mist leant low upon the mountains of Ardgour to their right. In front, about a mile away, a single light in some small cottage on the shore indicated the Narrows, where the long spit of land from the Ardgour side pushed out till, in that one place, Loch Linnhe was only a quarter of a mile across instead of a mile and a quarter. Young Invernacree looked at the set faces of his men as they tugged at the oars, and turned to his cousin beside him.

“I had hoped to be through the Narrows before the tide made there, but I fear it is too late. You know with what force the flood rushes up through them at first, and with this wind and the men so spent I doubt we shall be able to pass for a while.”

Ewen nodded; he was beginning to have the same doubt. “Then let us pull in near the Ardgour shore, out of the tide rip, until the first force of it is over. Shall I relieve one of your gillies? Ay, you’d best let me—look there!”

For the bow rower at that very moment was showing signs of collapsing over his oar. Before Ian Stewart could prevent the substitution, even had he wished, Ewen was clambering carefully forward past the other oarsmen in the rocking craft, all unconscious on what a journey that change of place was to launch him.

He got the exhausted rower off the thwart to the bottom of the boat, and seized the oar, finding himself glad to handle it after three months of enforced inaction. Slowly but rather more steadily now the boat drew near to comparative shelter, and away from the oncoming flood racing through the neck of the Narrows. Nevertheless, the water was still far from smooth, for gusts of wind came tearing over the low-lying point of the spit. Had they ceased rowing they would have been blown back, or, worse still, got broadside on to the wind. ‘We had much better pull right in to land,’ thought Ewen, ‘lest another man should collapse.’ And the thought had not long formulated itself before the leader of the expedition came to the same conclusion, and, after vainly trying to shout it to his cousin, sent down by word of mouth from man to man the information that he was going to make straight for the shore near the cottage and beach the boat there.

Ewen nodded his head vigorously to show his approval, and, since he was the bow oar and must jump ashore with the rope, reached about behind him with one hand until he found it, realising as he did so that in such rough weather it would be no easy matter to perform this operation neatly. Preoccupied with seizing the right moment, and doubting whether, in the bluster of wind and waves, Ian could from the stern apprize him of this, he pulled on with the rest, glancing now and then over his shoulder to see how near they were getting to the dim grey beach with its line of foam. And the moment had come, for there was Ian waving his arm and shouting something which he could not catch, Hector also.

Rapidly shipping his oar, Ewen clutched the rope and jumped over the gunwale into cold and yeasty water above his knees, which sucked heavily at him as he waded hastily into shallower, trailing the rope with him. Braced for the strain, he was hauling in the slack of this when that—or rather those—fell upon him of which his kinsman’s shout had been intended to warn him. Two men in great coats, appearing (so it seemed to him) from nowhere, had dashed into the water with offers of help. Bewildered at first, Ewen was beginning to thank them, when, to his extreme dismay, he caught the gleam of scarlet under their coats. “No, no!” he shouted almost unconsciously, his one thought being that the whole boatload were delivering themselves into an ambush, for somehow he was aware that the door of the lighted cottage behind him had opened and was emitting more soldiers. Apart from Hector recaptured, he had a vision of his cousin Ian involved in very serious trouble. And obviously Ian’s gillies had the same idea, for instead of pulling in to the shore they were now vigorously backing water to keep off. What their young laird was shouting to them was probably furious orders to go on and land; but the receding and tossing boat itself tore the rope alike through Ewen’s hands and those of the soldiers from which he was now trying to snatch it. He himself made a desperate effort to reach the bows and scramble on board again, but it was too late; this could only be done now by swimming, and moreover one of the soldiers had by this time closed with him, and they were soon struggling up to mid-thigh in icy, swirling water.

At last Ewen tore himself from the man’s clutches with a push which sent his assailant under, spluttering. In front of him was the boat which he could not reach, with Ian standing up in the stern gesticulating and shouting something of which the wind carried away every syllable, while Ardroy on his side shouted to the rowers to keep off, and that he would fend for himself. Then, the better to show his intention, he turned his back on the boat, his face to the shore on which he was left. The ducked redcoat had arisen, dripping like a merman and cursing like the proverbial trooper; his companion was dodging to and fro in a few inches of water, waiting to intercept the marooned fugitive on his emergence from the swirl on the beach. Two more were hurrying down from the open door of the cottage; and Ewen was unarmed, half-drenched and hampered by the breaking water in which he stood. It looked like prison again, most undoubtedly it looked like it! He set his teeth, and began to plunge stumblingly through the foam towards the shore but away from the reinforcements.

* * * * *

And some three-quarters of an hour later, rather to his own astonishment, he was crouching, wet, exhausted, but free, behind a boulder on the slope of Meall Breac, at the entrance to Glen Clovulin. How he had got there he hardly knew, but it seemed to have been by dodging, by running, and by one short encounter of the nature of a collision, in which it was not he who had proved the sufferer. He had been favoured by the bad light and by the high, broken ground, an outcrop of the height of Sgurr nan Eanchainne, for which he had made at full speed, and which, by falling again into a sort of gulley, had made something of a wall between him and his pursuers—who never, in fact, pursued him so far.

The wind was dropping now, and the mist crawling lower; he was safe enough from the soldiers at any rate. Presumably the boat had got through the Narrows; he had not had time to look. He could not help wondering what were the present feelings of his cousin Ian, who had undertaken this exploit, involving a good deal of risk, for him, a kinsman, and had in the end only carried off a young man with whom he had no ties of blood at all. Still, from Ewen’s own point of view, this braeside, though windy and destitute of food, was greatly to be preferred to the room with the barred windows in Fort William. “Better peace in a bush than peace in fetters,” as the Gaelic proverb had it. But what he really wanted was peace at Ardroy.