Читать книгу The Jacobite Trilogy: The Flight of the Heron, The Gleam in the North & The Dark Mile - D. K. Broster - Страница 25

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And thus it was that a few hours later Major Windham started back to Beinn Laoigh again with bread and meat and wine, and an orderly who plainly thought him mad. Lieutenant Paton had seen them clear of the camp, whose commander was fortunately wrapped in slumber. Keith would not need to pass its sentries on his return, for the track up from the Tarff joined the road to the pass on the farther side of it.

He found that he had noted the position of the shieling hut better than he could have hoped, considering the disagreeable preoccupation of his mind during the ride thence with Major Guthrie, and by good chance there was a moon not much past the full. In her cold light the mountains looked inexpressibly lonely and remote as Keith rode up the sheep track to the pasture where the harmless little shelters had stood. A faint exhausted smoke yet lifted itself from one or two of the blackened ruins. The stream was chanting its changeless little song, and in the moonlight Neil MacMartin still lay on guard outside the broken door of the one unburnt shieling. Keith bent over him as he passed; he was stiffening already in the plaid which was his only garment. And Ardroy?

Taking from Mackay the lantern which he had brought for the purpose, and the food and wine, Keith went rather apprehensively into the dark, low-roofed place. Except that he had flung his left arm clear, its occupant was lying as he had left him, long and quiet under the tartan covering; his eyes were closed and he did not look very different from his dead foster-brother outside. But as the light fell on his face he moved a little and faintly said some words in Gaelic, among which Keith thought he heard Lachlan’s name. He stooped over him.

“Ardroy,” he said gently, and laid a hand on the arm emerging from the tattered shirt-sleeve.

At the touch Ewen opened his eyes. But all that he saw, evidently, in the lantern-light, was the bright scarlet uniform above him. “What, again!” he said with an accent of profound weariness. “Shoot me in here, then; I cannot stand. Have you not . . . a pistol?”

Keith set the lantern on the floor and knelt down by him. “Ardroy, don’t you know me—Windham of the Royals? I am not come for that, but to help you if I can.”

The dried fern rustled as the wounded man turned his head a little. Very hollow in their orbits, but blue as Keith remembered them, his eyes stared up full of unbelief. “Windham!” he said at last, feebly; “no, it’s not possible. You are . . . someone else.”

“No,” said Keith, wondering how clear his mind might be, “it is really Windham, come to help you.” He was searching meanwhile for the flask of brandy which he had left, and finding it slipped down, untouched, among the sprigs of heather, he wetted Ewen’s lips with a little of the spirit.

“Yes, it is Windham,” said Ewen to himself. His eyes had never left his visitor’s face. “But . . . there were other soldiers here before . . . they took me out to shoot . . . I think I must have . . . swooned. Then I was . . . back in this place. . . . I do not know why. . . . Are you sure you . . . have not orders to . . . take me out again?”

“Good God, no!” said Keith. “I have nothing to do with shootings; I am alone, carrying despatches. Tell me, you are wounded—how severely?”

“My right arm . . . that is nothing much. . . . This thigh . . . badly. I cannot . . . move myself.”

“And what of food?” queried Keith. “I do not see any here—but I have brought some with me.” He began to get it out. “Are you not hungry?”

“Not now,” answered Ewen. “I was once . . . Captain Windham,” he went on, apparently gathering together what forces he had, “your coming . . . this charity . . . I cannot . . .”

“Do not try!” put in Keith quickly. “Not hungry? How long, then, is it since you have eaten?”

“Eaten!” said the Highlander, and what might be interpreted as a smile dawned on his bony face. “There is no food . . . in these hills. I have had nothing but water . . . for three days . . . I think. . . . That is why Lachlan has gone . . . to try . . .” The words tailed off as the spark of astonishment and animation in him went out quite suddenly, leaving his face the mask it had been when Keith entered.

Three days! No wonder that he was weak. Keith threw the water out of the bowl, poured some wine into it, and lifting Ewen’s head from the bracken held it to his lips. “Drink this!” he commanded, and had to say it two or three times before Ewen obeyed.

“But this is wine, Lachlan,” he murmured confusedly. “How did you come by wine?” Then his eyes turned on Keith as if he recognised him again, and the recognition was only a source of bewilderment.

Keith meanwhile was breaking bread into the wine. He knew that one must not give a starving man too much food at first. But the fugitive, far from being ravenous, seemed to find it difficult to swallow the sops which were put to his lips. Keith, however, persevered, and even added some meat to the bread, and patiently fed him with that, till Ewen intimated that he could eat no more. Keith’s next intention was then announced.

“Now I am going to dress your wounds, if they need it,” he said. “You’ll permit me?”

“Permit you!” repeated Ewen, gazing at him with a renewal of his former wonder.

Keith took the bowl, and went out for water. The moon was hidden behind a bank of cloud, but a planet hung like a great flower over one of the black mountain-tops. The grazing horses lifted their heads enquiringly, and Mackay, sitting propped against the shieling wall, scrambled sleepily to his feet.

“No, I am not going on yet. Get me that torn linen from my saddlebag.”

To his surprise, when he went back into the hut after even so momentary an absence, Ewen had fallen asleep, perhaps as the result of eating after so long a fast. Keith decided not to rouse him, and waited. But five minutes saw the end of the snatch of feverish slumber, for Ardroy woke with a little cry and some remark about the English artillery which showed that he had been back at Culloden Moor. However, he knew Keith instantly, and when the Englishman began to unbandage his wounded sword-arm, murmured, “That was a bayonet-thrust.”

The arm had indeed been transfixed, and looked very swollen and painful, but, as far as Keith could judge, gave no particular cause for anxiety. He washed the wound, and as he bound it up again saw clearly in the rays of the lantern, which for greater convenience he had set upon an old stool that he had found, a curious white seam on the palm of the hand; another ran across the fingers. He wondered for a moment what they were; then he guessed.

But when he came round and unbandaged Ewen’s thigh—and miserably enough was it bandaged—and found there a deep gash, in no satisfactory state, he was somewhat horrified. This injury called for a surgeon, and he had nearly said so; but, reddening, checked himself, recalling the deliberate denial of care to the Jacobite wounded at Inverness, and the actual removal of their instruments from the few of their own surgeons imprisoned with them. Would Ewen Cameron get real attention in Major Guthrie’s hands?

He glanced at him, lying with his eyes shut and his hands gripped together on his breast, but making neither sound nor movement, and wondered whether he were hurting him intolerably, and what he should do if he went off into another of those long swoons, and thereupon finished his task as quickly as he could and had recourse to the brandy-flask once more. And then he sat down at the bottom of the rough bed—for the heather and fern was spread on a rude wooden framework standing about a foot from the floor—and gazed at him with a furrowed brow. The lantern on the stool beside him revealed the Highlander’s pallor and exhaustion to the full, but, though his eyes were closed, and he lay quiet for a considerable time, he was not asleep, for he suddenly opened them, and said:

“I cannot understand; did you know that I was here, Captain Windham . . . or is it chance that has brought you . . . so opportunely?”

“It was chance the first time—for this is the second time that I have been here,” replied Keith. “I will tell you about it. I was on my way this afternoon from Inverness to Perth when some impulse made me attempt a very foolish short cut among the mountains. I think now that it must have been the finger of Fate pushing me, for thus I came upon this place just a moment or two before they dragged you out and set you against the wall . . . only just in time, in fact. I protested and argued with the officer in charge—a Major Guthrie, who has a camp on the Corryarrick road up there—and was fortunately able to prevent his shooting you in cold blood.” And, as Ewen gave a little exclamation, he hurried on in order not to give him time to ask (should he think of it) how he had accomplished this feat. “But he intends—at least I think he intends—to send a party in the morning and take you prisoner; and indeed, brute though he is, I hope that he will do so, for otherwise what will become of you, alone here?”

But Ewen left that question unanswered, and was equally far from asking on what ground he had been spared. The fact itself seemed enough for him, for he was trying agitatedly to raise himself a little. “It was you . . . though I saw no one . . . you saved my life, then!” he exclaimed rather incoherently. “And now . . . is it possible that you have come back again . . . out of your way! Captain Windham, this debt . . . this more than kindness . . .” He struggled to go on, but between emotion, weakness and recent pain it was more than he could do, and seeing him almost on the point of breaking down Keith stopped him quickly.

“For God’s sake don’t talk of debts, Ardroy—or, if you must, remember what I owe you! See, you are horribly weak; could you not eat a little more now?”

Ewen nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and put out a shaky left hand, apparently to show that he could feed himself. And while he nibbled in a rather half-hearted way at the slice of bread and meat which Keith put into it, Major Windham himself wandered slowly about the hovel. The ashes of last summer’s fires lay white in the middle of the floor, and through the hole in the roof which was the only outlet for the smoke a star looked in as it passed.

It seemed to Keith that before he went on his way he must tell Ardroy the means he had used to save him. Surely there was nothing blameworthy or unnatural in his having revealed who Ewen was, when he stood between him and imminent death? But from telling him the reason which Guthrie supposed or feigned to suppose lay at the back of his action, he mentally shied away like a nervous horse, the Lowlander had rendered the whole subject so horribly distasteful to him. Moreover it was not Guthrie who had suggested that Cameron of Ardroy might ‘inadvertently drop a hint’. How could he tell Ewen that he had said that about him?

He turned round, miserably undecided. Ewen had finished his pretence at a meal, and his eyes were fixed on his visitor. Keith had a sudden access of panic; he was sure that the Jacobite was going to ask him on what plea he had stopped his execution. He would put a question to him instead.

“How did you get so far with a wound like that?” he asked, coming back to his former place, and sitting down again. “You had Neil MacMartin to help you, I suppose? You mentioned Lachlan, too, just now.”

He had not anticipated more than a brief reply, but Ewen, once started, told him the whole story—not indeed, with any superfluity of words, and slowly, with pauses here and there. But the narrative was quite connected, though the speaker gave a certain dreamy impression of having half forgotten his listener, and of going on as if he were living his experiences over again rather than narrating them.

It appeared that he had received both his wounds in that desperate charge into which the clans of the right wing had broken, maddened by the cruel artillery pounding which they had endured, a charge so furious that it had pierced and scattered the English front line regiments, only to dash itself to pieces on the bayonets of Sempill’s behind them. At the second and severer injury he fell, and was unable to get to his feet again, for it seemed as if a muscle had been severed in his thigh, and he was besides losing blood very fast. Only the devotion of one of his followers got him away from the heap of dead and wounded strewn like seaweed along the front of the second line; this man, powerful and unhurt, tied up the gash as best he could, and succeeded in carrying his chieftain a little out of the carnage, but in doing so he was shot dead, and once more Ewen was on the ground among the fallen. This time he was lying among the dead and wounded of the Atholl men, with none of his own clan to succour him, and here a strange—and yet ultimately a lucky—mischance befell him. For a wounded Stewart, half crazed no doubt by a terrible cut on the head, crawled to him where he lay across his dead clansman and, cursing him for one of the Campbells who had taken them in flank, dealt him a furious blow on the forehead with the butt of a pistol. The result for Ewen was hours of unconsciousness, during which he was stripped by some redcoats who would certainly have finished him off had they not thought him dead already. He came to his senses in the very early morning, naked, and stiff with cold, but so thirsty that he contrived to drag himself as far as the little burn which crossed the end of the English line in the direction of their own. There, almost in the stream, and unconscious again, Lachlan and his brother, who had been searching for him since evening, almost miraculously found him.

His foster-brothers carried him to a farm-house on the moor, where, indeed, he was not the only wounded fugitive, but by noon that day, fearing (and with good reason) a search and a massacre, they somehow procured an old worn-out horse, and taking turns to ride it and to hold him on its back, succeeded in crossing the Water of Nairn and gaining the slopes of the Monadhliath Mountains. What happened then Ewen was not quite clear about; between pain, loss of blood, and exposure he was always more or less fevered, but he remembered an eternity of effort and of going on. At last the old horse fell dead; for a whole day Neil and Lachlan carried him between them till, weakened by want of food, they could get him no farther, and had taken shelter on Beinn Laoigh because the shieling hut at least gave him a roof from the cold and the rain. They did not know of Guthrie’s camp on the Corryarrick road, which indeed was pitched after they got to Beinn Laoigh; in any case they could not entirely avoid the road, for it would have to be crossed somewhere if they were ever to get back to Ardroy. But in these lonely mountains they were really faced with starvation, and Lachlan had at last been forced to go out scouting for food, and must either have gone far afield or have met with disaster, for he had been gone since the day before.

“But if he still breathes,” finished Ewen, “I know that he will return; and if he is in time perhaps he can contrive to get me away to some other hiding-place before the soldiers come for me to-morrow. But in any case, Captain Windham—no, I see that it is Major—I am not likely to forget this extraordinary charity of yours . . . nor your intervention yesterday. . . . Was it yesterday?” he added rather vaguely.

“Yes, since it must now be after midnight. The tartan attracted my notice first,” said Keith, “and then, by great good fortune, I looked again, and recognised you.”

“This is Neil’s kilt that I have on,” said Ewen with a faint smile. “There was not a stitch of my own left upon me. . . . You wore the philabeg too, once . . . it seems a long time ago. . . . But I do not think,” he went on, rather feverishly talkative now, “that you would have recognised me the day before, with a two weeks’ beard on me. It happened, however, that I had made poor Neil shave me as best he could with his sgian.”

“That was good fortune, too,” agreed Keith. “Certainly I should not have known you bearded.”

“And it is because I had been shaved that I am alive now?” Ewen gave a little laugh. “Do you know, Windham, that before ever I met you old Angus, my foster-father—you remember him?—predicted that our lives would cross . . . I think he said five times. And this is . . . I can’t count. . . . How many times have we met already?”

“The old man predicted five meetings!” exclaimed Keith, struck. “How strange! This is the third . . . yes, the third time we have met. If he is right, then we shall meet again, and more than once. I hope it may be in happier circumstances.”

“And that I can thank you more fitly,” murmured Ewen. “Last time . . . do you remember the house in the Grassmarket? . . . You told me the comedy would end some day, and the players be sorry they ever took part in it.”

Keith nodded. It was not the first time in the last twelve hours that he had remembered the house in the Grassmarket.

“But I, for one, do not regret it,” went on Ewen, with a touch of defiance. “Not for myself, that is. I would do it again. Yet there is poor Neil outside, killed defending me . . . and so many others on that horrible moor. . . . You were there, I suppose?”

“I was there,” said Keith. “But my hands are clean of the blood of massacre!” he added almost fiercely. “If I could have stopped—— We’d best not speak of it. But your cause is lost, Ardroy, and I suppose you know it. It only remains for you to escape the consequences, if you can.”

“I do not seem to be in very good trim for doing that,” said Ewen, and again he gave the shadow of a smile. “But, since we speak so frankly, I cannot think that our cause is lost while the Prince and Lochiel remain at large. We may be scattered, but—— The Prince has not been captured, has he?” he asked sharply, having evidently seen the change which the mention, not of the Prince but of Lochiel, had brought to Keith’s face.

“No, no, nor is it known where he is.”

“Thank God! And Lochiel?”

Keith shrank inwardly. Now it was coming. His momentary hesitation had a cruel effect on Ewen, who dragged himself to his elbow. “Windham,” he said hoarsely and imploringly, “surely he’s not . . . what have you heard? . . . My God, don’t keep me in suspense like this! If he’s captured tell me!”

“You mistake me,” said Keith, nearly as hoarsely. “He has not been captured. . . . I am sorry if I misled you.”

Ewen had relapsed again, and put a hand over his eyes. It was fairly clear that his Chief’s fate was even more to him than that of his Prince. And now that odious information must be imparted.

Keith tried to gain a little time first. “But Lochiel was wounded in the battle. Did you know that?”

Ewen removed his hand. “Yes, and have thanked God for it, since it caused him to be early carried off the field.”

“You saw him fall?”

“No, but afterwards we met with some of the clan, and got news of him.”

“That must have been a great relief to you,” murmured the Englishman. Suddenly he was possessed with a desire to find out how much Ewen knew about Lochiel. Half of him hoped that he knew very little—why, he could not have said—but the other half thought: If he knows a certain amount, Guthrie will take better care of him. “But you can have had no news of your Chief since then?” he hazarded.

“No,” answered the Highlander. “There has been no opportunity.”

Keith looked at him nervously. Ardroy was lying gazing upwards; perhaps he could see that peering star. Would it be possible to advise him, if he found himself in Major Guthrie’s custody, to pretend to have definite knowledge of Lochiel’s whereabouts, even though that were not the case? Dare he suggest such a thing? It was not one-half as offensive as what he had already suggested to Guthrie!

Ewen himself broke the silence. “Since we speak as friends,” he said, his eyes travelling to the open doorway “—and how could I regard you as an enemy after this?—I may tell you that I have, none the less, the consolation of knowing where Lochiel is at this moment—God bless him and keep him safe!”

Keith’s mouth felt suddenly dry. His unspoken question was answered, and the frankness of the acknowledgment rather took his breath away. Yet certainly, if Ardroy was as frank with Guthrie it might serve him well.

“You know where Lochiel is?” he half stammered.

Ewen shut his eyes and smiled, an almost happy smile. “I think he is where (please God) he will never be found by any redcoat.”

“You mean that he has gone overseas?” asked Keith, almost without thinking.

Ardroy’s eyes opened quickly, and for a second, as he looked up at the speaker, there was a startled expression in them. “You are not expecting me to tell you——”

“No, no,” broke in Keith, very hastily indeed. “Of course not! But I should be glad if he were so gone, for on my soul there is none of your leaders whom I should be so sorry to see captured.”

Yet with the words he got up and went to the doorway. Yes, Ardroy had the secret; and he wished, somehow, that he had not. The moment could no longer be postponed when he must tell him of his conversation with Guthrie, were it only to put him on his guard. Bitterly as he was ashamed, it must be done.

He stood in the doorway a moment, choosing the words in which he should do it, and they were hatefully hard to choose. Hateful, too, was it to leave Ardroy here helpless, but there was no alternative, since he could not possibly take him with him. Yet if Lachlan returned, and in time, and especially if he returned with assistance, he might be able to get his foster-brother away somewhere. Then Ewen Cameron would never fall into Guthrie’s hands. In that case what use to torment him with prospects of an interrogatory which might never take place, and which could only be very short?

No; it was mere cowardice to invent excuses for silence; he must do it. He came back very slowly to the pallet.

“I must tell you——” he began in a low voice, and then stopped. Ewen’s lashes were lying on his sunken cheek, and did not lift at the address. It was plain that he had fallen anew into one of those sudden exhausted little slumbers, and had not heard even the sentence which was to herald Keith’s confession. It would be unnecessarily cruel to rouse him in order to make it. One must wait until he woke naturally, as he had done from the last of these dozes.

Keith took the lantern off the stool and sat down there. And soon the wounded man’s sleep became full of disjointed scraps of talk, mostly incoherent; at one time he seemed to think that he was out after the deer on the hills with Lachlan; then he half woke up and muttered, “But it’s we that are the deer now,” and immediately fell into another doze in which he murmured the name of Alison. Gradually, however, his slumber grew more sound; he ceased to mutter and to make little restless movements, and in about five minutes he was in the deep sleep of real repose, which he had not known, perhaps, for many nights—a sleep to make a watcher thankful.

But Keith Windham, frowning, sat watching it with his chin on his hand, conscious that his time was growing very short, that it was light outside, and almost light in this dusky hovel, and that the pool of lantern-shine on the uneven earth floor looked strange and sickly there. He glanced at his watch. No, indeed, he ought not to delay any longer. He took up and blew out the lantern, went outside and roused Mackay, washed the bowl and, filling it with water, placed it and the rest of the food and wine within reach.

His movements had not roused the sleeper in the least. For the last time Keith stooped over him and slipped a hand round his wrist. He knew nothing of medicine, but undoubtedly the beat there was stronger. It would be criminal to wake Ardroy merely in order to tell him something unpleasant. There came to the soldier a momentary idea of scribbling a warning on a page of his pocket-book and leaving this on the sleeper’s breast; but it was quite possible that the first person to read such a document would be Guthrie himself.

He rearranged the plaid carefully, and stood for a moment longer looking at the fugitive where he lay at his feet, his head sunk in the dried fern. And he remembered the hut at Kinlocheil last summer, where he had done much the same thing. He had talked somewhat earlier on that occasion, had he not, of obligation and repayment; well, he had more than repaid. Ewen Cameron owed him his life—owed it him, very likely, twice over. Yet Keith was conscious again that no thought of obligation had drawn him to dash in front of those muskets yesterday, nor had the idea of a debt really brought him back now. What then? . . . Absurd! He was a man who prided himself on being unencumbered with friends. Moreover, Ewen Cameron was an enemy.

It was strange, then, with what reluctance, with what half-hopes, half-apprehensions, he got into the saddle and rode away under the paling stars, leaving his enemy to rescue or capture; very strange, since that enemy was likewise a rebel, that he should so greatly have desired the former.