Читать книгу The Flight of the Heron - Historical Novel - Страница 5

The sun had been up for a couple of hours, and now, by six o’clock, there was scarcely a cloud in the sky; even the peaked summit of Ben Tee, away to the north-east, had no more than the faintest veil floating over it. On all the western slopes the transfiguring light, as it crept lower and lower, was busy picking out the patches of July bell-heather and painting them an even deeper carmine; and the mountains round were smiling (where sometimes they frowned) on Loch na h-Iolaire, to-day a shining jewel which to-morrow might be a mere blot of grey steel. It was going to be a very fine day, and in the West of Scotland such are none too plentiful.

Loch na h-Iolaire, the Loch of the Eagle, was not large—little more than a mile long, and at its greatest breadth perhaps a quarter of a mile wide. It lay among the encircling hills like a fairy pool come upon in dreams; yet it had not the desolate quality of the high mountain tarns, whose black waters lie shoreless at the foot of precipices. Loch na h-Iolaire was set in a level space as wide as itself. At one end was a multitude of silver-stemmed birches, of whom some loved the loch (or their own reflection) so dearly that they leaned over it until the veil of their hair almost brushed its surface; and with these court ladies stood a guard of very old pines, severe and beautiful, and here and there was the feathered bravery of a rowan tree. Everywhere underfoot lay a carpet of bogmyrtle and cranberry, pressing up to the feet of the pungent-berried junipers and the bushes of the flaming broom, now but dying fires. And where this shore was widest it unexpectedly sent out into the lake a jutting crag of red granite, grown upon in every cranny with heather, and crowned with two immense Scots pines.

The loch’s beauty, on this early summer morning of 1745, seemed at first to be a lonely and unappreciated loveliness, yet it was neither. On its northern shore, where the sandy bank, a little hollowed by the water, rose some three feet above it, a dark, wiry young Highlander, in a belted plaid of the Cameron tartan, was standing behind a couple of large juniper bushes with a fowling-piece in his hands. He, however, was plainly not lost in admiration of the scene, for his keen eyes were fixed intently on the tree-grown islet which swam at anchor in the middle of the loch, and he had all the appearance of a hunter waiting for his quarry.

Suddenly he gave an exclamation of dismay. Round the point of the island had just appeared the head, shoulder and flashing arm of a man swimming, and this man was driving fast through the barely rippled water, and was evidently making for the shore in his direction. The Highlander dropped out of sight behind the junipers, but the swimmer had already seen him.

“Who is there?” he called out, and his voice came ringing imperiously over the water. “Stand up and show yourself!”

The discovered watcher obeyed, leaving the fowling-piece on the ground, and the swimmer, at some ten yards’ distance, promptly trod water, the better to see.

“Lachlan!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing there?”

And as the Highlander did not answer, but suddenly stooped and pushed the fowling-piece deeper into the heather at his feet, the occupant of the loch, with a few vigorous strokes, brought himself in until he was able to stand breast-high in the water.

“Come nearer,” he commanded in Gaelic, “and tell me what you are doing, skulking there!”

The other advanced to the edge of the bank. “I was watching yourself, Mac ’ic Ailein,” he replied in the same tongue, and in the sulky tone of one who knows that he will be blamed.

“And why, in the name of the Good Being? Have you never seen me swim before?”

“I had it in my mind that someone might steal your clothes,” answered Lachlan MacMartin, looking aside.

“Amadain!” exclaimed the swimmer. “There is no one between the Garry and the water of Arkaig who would do such a thing, and you know it as well as I! Moreover, my clothes are on the other side, and you cannot even see them! No, the truth, or I will come out and throw you into the loch!” And, balancing his arms, he advanced until he was only waist-deep, young and broad-shouldered and glistening against the bright water and the trees of the island behind him. “Confess now, and tell me the reason in your heart!”

“If you will not be angry I will be telling you,” replied Lachlan to his chieftain Ewen Cameron, who was also his foster-brother.

“I shall make no promises. Out with it!”

“I cannot shout it to you, Mac ’ic Ailein; it would not be lucky.”

“Do you think that I am coming out to hear it before I have finished my swim?”

“I will walk in to you if you wish,” said Lachlan submissively, and began to unfasten his plaid.

“Do not be a fool!” said the young man in the loch, half laughing, half annoyed; and, wading to the bank, he pulled himself up by the exposed root of a birch-tree, and threw himself unconcernedly down among the heather and bogmyrtle. Now it could be seen that he was some inches over six feet and splendidly made; a swift runner, too, it was likely, for all his height and breadth of shoulder. His thick auburn hair, darkened by the water to brown, was plaited for the nonce into a short pigtail like a soldier’s; his deepset blue eyes looked out of a tanned face, but where the sunburn ended his skin was as fair as a girl’s. He had a smiling and determined mouth.

“Now tell me truly why you are lurking here like a grouse on Beinn Tigh,” he repeated.

The half-detected culprit glanced from the naked young man at his feet to the only partially concealed fowling-piece. “You will not be pleased, I am thinking.”

“All the more reason for knowing, then,” responded his chieftain promptly, hugging his bent knees. “I shall stay here until you tell me . . . dhé, how these vegetables prick! No, I do not want your plaid; I want the truth.”

“I am here,” began Lachlan MacMartin with great unwillingness, “because there is something in the loch which may bring you ill-fortune, and——”

“In the loch! What, an each uisge, a water-horse?” He was smiling.

“No, not a water-horse. But my father says——”

“Ah, it is a matter of the two sights? Angus has been ‘seeing’ again! What was the vision?”

But at that moment the speaker himself saw something, though not by the supernatural gift to which he was referring. He stretched out a wet, accusing arm and pointed towards the juniper bush. “What is that gun doing here?” And at the very plain discomposure on its owner’s face a look of amusement came into his own. “You cannot shoot a water-horse, Lachlan—not with a charge of small shot!”

“It is not a water-horse,” repeated his foster-brother. He suddenly crouched down in the heather close to the swimmer. “Listen, Mac ’ic Ailein,” he said in a low, tense voice. “My father is much troubled, for he had a ‘seeing’ last night across the fire, and it concerned you, but whether for good or ill he could not tell; neither would he tell me what it was, save that it had to do with a heron.”

“It is a pity Angus cannot be more particular in his predictions,” observed the young man flippantly, breaking off a sprig of bogmyrtle and smelling it. “Well?”

“You know that I would put the hair of my head under your feet,” went on Lachlan MacMartin passionately. “Now on the island yonder there lives a heron—not a pair, but one only——”

The young chieftain laid a damp but forcible hand on his arm. “I will not have it, Lachlan, do you hear?” he said in English. “I’ll not allow that bird to be shot!”

But Lachlan continued to pour out Gaelic. “Eoghain, marrow of my heart, ask me for the blood out of my veins, but do not ask me to let the heron live now that my father has seen this thing! It is a bird of ill omen—one to be living there alone, and to be spying when you are swimming; and if it is not a bòcan, as I have sometimes thought, it may be a witch. Indeed, if I had one, I would do better to put a silver bullet——”

“Stop!” said the marrow of his heart peremptorily. “If my father Angus has any warning to give me, he can tell it into my own ear, but I will not have that heron shot, whatever he saw! What do you suppose the poor bird can do to me? Bring your piece here and unload it.”

Out of the juniper bush and the heather Lachlan, rising, pulled the fowling-piece, and, very slowly and reluctantly, removed the priming and the charge.

“Yet it is an evil bird,” he muttered between his teeth. “You must know that it is unlucky to meet a heron when one sets out on a journey.”

“Yes,” broke in Ewen Cameron impatiently, “in the same way that it is unlucky to meet a sheep or a pig—or a snake or a rat or a mouse, unless you kill them—or a hare, or a fox, or a woman, or a flat-footed man . . . and I know not what besides! Give me the gun.” He examined it and laid it down. “Now, Lachlan, as you have not yet promised to respect my wishes in this matter, and a gun is easily reloaded, you shall swear on the iron to obey me—and that quickly, for I am getting cold.”

Startled, the Highlander looked at his young chieftain to see whether he were serious when he suggested the taking of so great and inviolable an oath. But, unable from his expression to be sure, and being blindly, fanatically devoted to him, he obediently drew his dirk from its sheath, and was about to raise it to his lips to kiss it when his foster-brother caught his arm.

“No, I was jesting, Lachlan. And . . . you do not keep your biodag very clean!”

“Not clean?” exclaimed its owner, lowering the formidable, hiltless blade. Then he bit his lip. “Dhia gleidh sinn! you are right—how came that rust there?”

“Rust? It is blood!” Ewen took it from him by its black handle of interlaced design and ran a finger down it. “No, I am wrong; it was only the early sun on the steel.”

For the weapon lay across his palm, spotless and shining, the whole foot and a half of it.

The dark Lachlan had turned very pale. “Give it to me, Mac ’ic Ailein, and let me throw it into the loch. It is not well to keep it if we both saw . . . what we saw.”

“No,” said his master with more composure, “it is a good dirk, and too old a friend for that—and what I imagined can only have been some memory of the times when it has gralloched a deer for us two.” He gave it back. “We are neither of us taibhsear like your father. I forbid you to throw it away. Nor are you to shoot that heron—do you hear?”

If his young chief was not, Lachlan MacMartin was plainly shaken by what had happened. He thrust the dirk deep into the heather as though to cleanse it before he returned it to the sheath. “I hear,” he muttered.

“Then see that you remember!” Shivering slightly, the young man sprang to his feet. “Now, as you have forced me to land on this side of the loch, Lachlan, I shall dive off the creag ruadh. A score of times have I meant to do it, but I have never been sure if there were enough water below. So, if a water-horse gets me, you will know whose was the fault of it!” And laughing, disregarding entirely his foster-brother’s protests, which went so far as the laying of a detaining hand on his bare shoulder, he slid down the bank, ran along the narrow strip of sand below it, and disappeared round a bend of the shore. A moment or two later his white figure was seen clambering up the heather-clad side of the red crag which gave the whole property its name. A pause, then he shot down towards the lake in the perfect dive of the athlete; and the water received him with scarcely a splash.

“The cross of Christ be upon us!” murmured Lachlan, shutting his eyes; and, though he was no Papist, he signed himself. When he opened them the beloved head had reappeared safely, and he watched it till the island once more hid it from his view.

* * * * *

Still tingling with his dive, Ewen Cameron of Ardroy, when he had reached the other side of the little island, suddenly ceased swimming and, turning on his back, gave himself to floating and meditation. He was just six-and-twenty and very happy, for the sun was shining, and he felt full of vigour, and the water was like cold silk about him, and when he went in to breakfast there would be Alison, fresh as the morning, to greet him—a foretaste of the mornings to come when they would greet each other earlier than that. For their marriage contract was even now in his desk at Ardroy awaiting signature, and the Chief of Clan Cameron, Lochiel himself, Mac Dhomhnuill Duibh, Ewen’s near kinsman by marriage as well as his overlord, was coming to-morrow from his house of Achnacarry on Loch Arkaig to witness it.

Lochiel indeed, now a man of fifty, had always been to his young cousin elder brother and father in one, for Ewen’s own father had been obliged to flee the country after the abortive little Jacobite attempt of 1719, leaving behind him his wife and the son of whom she had been but three days delivered. Ewen’s mother—a Stewart of Appin—did not survive his birth a fortnight, and he was nursed, with her own black-haired Lachlan, by Seonaid MacMartin, the wife of his father’s piper—no unusual event in a land of fosterage. But after a while arrived Miss Cameron, the laird’s sister, to take charge of the deserted house of Ardroy and to look after the motherless boy, who before the year had ended was fatherless too, for John Cameron died of fever in Amsterdam, and the child of six months old became ‘Mac ’ic Ailein,’ the head of the cadet branch of Cameron of Ardroy. Hence Ewen, with Miss Cameron’s assistance—and Lochiel’s supervision—had ruled his little domain for as long as he could remember, save only for the two years when he was abroad for his education.

It was there, in the Jacobite society of Paris, that he had met Alison Grant, the daughter of a poor, learned and almost permanently exiled Highland gentleman, a Grant of Glenmoriston, a plotter rather than a fighter. But because Alison, though quite as much in love with her young chieftain as he with her, had refused to leave her father alone in exile—for the brother of sixteen just entering a French regiment could not take her place—Ewen had had to wait for four long years without much prospect of their marriage. But this very spring Mr. Grant had received intimation that his return would be winked at by the Government, and accordingly returned; and so there was nothing to stand in the way of his daughter’s marriage to the young laird of Ardroy in the autumn. And Alison’s presence here now, on a visit with her father, was no doubt the reason that, though her lover was of the same political creed as they, never questioning its fitness, since it was as natural to him as running or breathing, he was not paying very particular attention to the rumours of Prince Charles Edward’s plans which were going about among the initiated.

With deliberate and unnecessary splashings, like a boy, Ewen now turned over again, swam for a while under water, and finally landed, stretched himself in the sun, and got without undue haste into a rather summary costume. There was plenty of time before breakfast to make a more ordered toilet, and his hair would be dry and tied back with a ribbon by then. Perukes and short hair were convenient, but, fashionable or no, he found the former hot. When he was Lochiel’s age, perhaps, he would wear one.

Before long he was striding off towards the house, whistling a French air as he went.