Читать книгу The Stalking-Horse - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 4

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Glenleven departed with confidence that for all her fortitude and respect for the marriage-tie, the day could not be far distant when Lochmore by his oafishness would destroy the one and the other.

And so, indeed, it might have fallen out but for a dark event in the distant Highlands at about that time, and its curious repercussion in the politically indifferent bosom of the Earl of Lochmore.

There were rumours in London that spring of an affair in the North, in which some Macdonalds had perished. But to London the Highlands were as remote as the American colonies, and there was as much, or as little, knowledge of and interest in their affairs. Even those whose acquaintance with Scottish matters was a little wider than that of the general, and who troubled to repeat the rumours, described the matter vaguely as an affray between Campbells and Macdonalds.

It was in vain that Lady Lochmore sought the detailed truth of these disquieting stories. Some accounted that the affair had its source in the eternal feud between the two clans concerned; others asserted that the source was political, a punishment upon some stiff-necked Jacobites who had refused to take the oath of allegiance and so profit by King William's offer of amnesty. But none could tell her what particular Macdonalds were involved. Few indeed among her London friends could even understand what such a question meant.

In those uneasy days she leaned more than usual upon Glenleven, departing from the prudent coolness she had practised towards him ever since he had so boldly wooed her. The anxiety which she conceived that he must share, since he was of the same blood, set up a bond between them. In his anxiety to please her, Glenleven ransacked every likely quarter for news. But he could discover little. Trouble there had certainly been in the Highlands, and Macdonalds had been the sufferers by it; but what branch of that great clan was concerned could not be ascertained. The further one investigated, the more was one confused by the conflict of assertions. One day the tale would be that the Macdonalds of Keppoch had been the victims; on the next the Macdonalds of Glengarry would be named. Macdonald of Sleat was mentioned once, and once Macdonald of Invernaion. Not to add to her ladyship's distress Glenleven withheld this last rumour from his kinswoman.

Since her father had died at the end of the previous year, her brother Ian was now the head of the sept, and to Glenleven it seemed far from improbable that in whatever might have occurred Ian Macdonald should have been involved. He was of a wild, impulsive nature, as romantic and unpractical as his sister, and governed by two great passions: love of the House of Stuart and abhorrence of the House of Argyll. Consequently, thought Glenleven, who in all Scotland likelier than his cousin Ian to have refused the oath of allegiance to King William, and, thereby, to have provoked the vengeance of the Campbells?

And then, when conjecture could go no further, the whole truth was brought to Lady Lochmore by Ian Macdonald himself.

Attended by two grooms, who though breeched like Sassenachs, came bonneted and wrapped in their plaids, he rode in the dusk of an April evening into the courtyard of Lochmore's little mansion in the Strand.

The earl and his wife had dined, but were still at table when Ian, booted and spurred and dusty, strode into their presence.

Like his sister he was tall—a half-head taller than she—and like her he was black-haired and pallid, with the same dark-blue eyes and the same sensitive mouth.

"I come," he announced to Lochmore, "to beg shelter for the night. That and to embrace you, Ailsa. I am for France."

"For France?" the earl and his countess made echo together.

"To carry my sword to King James. To join the army that is mustering for the invasion of England. To lend a hand in sending this knavish Dutchman back to his cheese and his schnapps."

Lochmore was flung into a panic, for there was a servant present. "In God's name!" he cried.

The servant, however, was a Macdonald, who had followed her ladyship from Scotland. He had been staring at his chieftain goggle-eyed in incredulity. He was grinning broadly now at his chieftain's outspokenness. Nevertheless Lochmore was not reassured.

"I'll not have such words uttered in my house Ian. Are you mad? You're not in the Highlands now, where treason may be bawled to the winds."

Holding his sister to him with one encircling arm, Invernaion's face grew dark with scorn.

"Ye may be naught but a Lowland Scot, Lochmore; yet a Scot ye still are, and there'll be blood in your veins. Has it not curdled at what's happened yonder?"

"And where may yonder be?"

"Man!" Invernaion stared at him, and then at his sister. The blankness of her countenance, the question in her glance informed and amazed him. It was to her he spoke. "Is it possible ye've not heard what happened at Glencoe two months since?"

She shook her dark head. "There have been rumours, vague tales of an affray between Campbells and Macdonalds. But we do not even know what Macdonalds are concerned, and this although in my anxiety I have sought news everywhere. Nothing is known in London of the trouble."

Macdonald smiled without mirth. "It'll be known at Kensington, no doubt, whence the vile order came for that massacre. It failed to be as complete as was intended only because the scoundrel Campbells who did the Dutchman's bloody work happened to be blundering fools as well as cut-throats. But it's complete enough to cry to Heaven for vengeance. Not a hamlet, not a house has been left standing in Glencoe. There are some heaps of charred ruins there, as a monument to the false-hearted villainy of William of Orange. The Glen of Weeping has justified its name.

"You'll not say now, Lochmore, that I am to be dainty in picking my words when I speak of such a man?"

"You must be," his sister answered him. "Not for Dutch William's sake, but for your own, and for as long as you tread the soil where he is master."

"I give thanks that I shall not tread it long. Had it not been for the need to see you again and to tell you all, so that you may understand what moves me, I should have taken ship from Scotland."

He held her at arm's length, and looked with a fond, sad smile into eyes that were so like his own. "But it's a long tale and an ugly, lassie; and I am a weary, hungry man. And so are the lads who ride with me. Maybe ye'll give orders for their comfort."

Order for their comfort was given, and order was instantly taken for his own.

When, at last, refreshed with meat and wine, he sat back, it was to give them the full tale for which they waited. And it was a tale of horrors magnified by the treachery in which those horrors had been perpetrated.

He spoke as an eye-witness of the actual facts. For it had happened by an odd chance that on the 12th February he was on his way to the house of a friend on Loch Leven, to whose new-born child he was to stand godfather. He travelled accompanied, as now, by only a couple of his lads.

Delayed on the road by foul weather, they had reached the head of the defile of Glencoe as night was falling. And as it was a wild, stormy night of wind and blinding snow, he decided to call a halt and seek until morning the hospitality of the old chieftain Mac Ian.

Welcomed as a brother by that patriarchal Macdonald, he discovered that he was not that night the only guest. He was surprised to find two redcoat officers at Mac Ian's hospitable board, and none too pleased to discover a Campbell in the senior of these, Captain Campbell of Glenlyon.

It was explained to him that the captain and his lieutenant, a man named Lindsay, were in command of a company of a hundred and twenty redcoats of Argyll's Regiment, who for twelve days now had been quartered upon Macdonald hospitality in the glen. He had never quite understood by what pretence they had imposed themselves upon Mac Ian; but he had vaguely heard that they were marching against some of Glengarry's people who had been harrying the country. He had heard nothing of any such harrying, and the mere fact that these men were Campbells should have rendered them suspect. It may be, however, that any uneasiness Mac Ian might have felt was allayed by the fact that their captain's niece was married to the chieftain's younger son, Alexander Macdonald. The kinship thus established may, moreover, have been accounted to supply a reason why Glenlyon should quarter there himself and his men.

"That night," Invernaion continued, "after the two officers had departed to their quarters, which were at Inveriggan's, old Mac Ian and I sat long in talk over a bottle of old French brandy. He was in high spirits, relieved by the presence of these troops from anxieties that had been weighing upon him in connection with the manner in which he had taken the oath of allegiance. Never was bitterer deception, bitterer irony than that of his relief. You'll know the facts of the oath?"

They did not, and he, therefore, proceeded to relate them. Enthralled by his narrative, and the sense of tragedy which his tone and manner brought to it, they sat watching him with eyes that glittered in the candlelight.

"You'll know at least, maybe, that proclamation was made in Scotland of a general amnesty to all so-called rebels who should by the thirty-first of December last have sworn allegiance to the Dutchman.

"I know now that this was a trap in which the Campbell dog, Breadalbane, working through his knavish tool, the Master of Stair, hoped to take the Camerons and the Macdonalds. For it was added to the proclamation that after that date any who had not taken the oath would be pursued as enemies and traitors.

"Breadalbane's malice and covetousness built hopes upon our staunch loyalty to the rightful King. What he did not know was that we had represented to King James our inability to hold out, and that his majesty had intimated to us that he would not take it amiss that we should submit to the usurping dynasty provided that we held ourselves in readiness to rise against it when the time should come.

"So, one by one, we took the oath, until all save only Mac Ian had made that enforced profession of loyalty. Since our course was resolved, I don't know what delayed his submission. Maybe the postponement was prompted by repugnance, maybe merely by vanity to show himself more stiff-necked than his peers. We shall never know.

"Anyway, postpone he did until the last moment.

"On the thirty-first of December, accompanied by his principal vassals, old Mac Ian presented himself at Fort William to take the oath. To his dismay he was told that there was no one there competent to administer it. The nearest magistrate was at Inverary. In panic, as he told me, and cursing now a procrastination which might come to cost him his life and his estates, he made off in all haste for Inverary. But that is no light journey in the depths of winter. He was six days in performing it. Still, he carried a letter to the sheriff from the Governor of Fort William, which did bear witness to the fact that he had presented himself to take the oath on the thirty-first. The sheriff, although a Campbell, took a lenient view, administered the oath, and promised to send a letter of explanation to Edinburgh together with the certificates.

"Mac Ian returned home relieved, but in a relief that needed confirmation, for he knew the malice that was astir. This confirmation the old man thought that he possessed at last. This quartering of troops upon his people, he took to be a sign of the government's confidence in him; and it was stressed by the friendliness towards him and his of these troopers and their officers, who for twelve days now had been enjoying his bounteous hospitality."

He paused there a moment, his young face set and grim.

"I doubt," he said, slowly and sadly, "if in the history of the human race, with all the cruelty and the treachery that disgrace it, there is an instance of a blacker, fouler treachery than this. Compared with Glenlyon and the vile masters who sent him to the work, Judas, himself, becomes almost a saintly figure."

Then, with a sigh, he resumed his narrative.

"I was awakened, in the middle of the night as I thought, but actually, as I afterwards learnt, at five o'clock in the morning, by a shot in the room below.

"As I sat up in bed, listening, I caught distinctly above the howling of the wind, the sound of other shots in the open.

"With a sense of evil heavy upon me I jumped from the bed, hastily pulled on some garments, and with my plaid wrapped about me, went below. As I descended the stairs a woman's scream came to me from outside, then another shot, and a long wail that ended abruptly.

"I flung open the door of the main room below, and stood horror stricken on the threshold. The chamber was in disorder. Chairs were overturned, and some shards of broken earthenware littered the floor. In a corner two redcoats were besetting a woman who defended herself feebly. It was Mac Ian's wife. Mac Ian himself lay, limp as a sack, prone across the table at which he and I had sat the night before; the table at which the officers had dined with us. He was dead; and just within the open doorway stood Lindsay still grasping the pistol with which he had shot him. Afterwards I was to learn that he had pistolled him even as Mac Ian was bidding him welcome to a morning draught, and calling his servants to come and minister to the soldier's needs.

"I was without weapons; but I advanced into the room.

"'What is this?' I cried. 'What is happening here?'

"Lindsay stared at me. 'Invernaion!' he said, and laughed. 'Faith, I'd forgotten you. After all, you're a Macdonald, and our orders are that by daylight there shall not be one of that damned name left alive in Glencoe!'

"He called over his shoulder, and in prompt answer to it, three redcoats with firelocks emerged from the darkness into the lamplight.

"'Here, my lads!' A wave of the ruffian's arm pointed me out to his men. 'Here's another of the damned brood.'

"That was all the command he gave them; all the command they needed; for they had those general orders that not a Macdonald, man, woman or bairn, was to live to see that day's light in Glencoe. They ranged themselves, and they were already raising their muskets.

"There was no reflection in what I did. Action anticipated thought. Before I even realized what I was doing, the room was in darkness. I had seized a chair that stood near me, and at a blow I had swept the lamp in fragments from the table. I leapt at the place where I had last seen the soldiers standing. The chair, used like a flail, met a yielding resistance, and I knew that one of them had gone down before me. I bounded through the gap left by his fall. Another bound, and I was in the open, where it was pitch dark and snowing hard. Curses followed me; then shots; then the blundering footsteps of those murderers.

"I turned to my right, whereabouts I knew of a ravine up which I proposed to make my way. I was not followed. In that darkness and with the hard-driven snow to render blindness absolute, the redcoats must have realized not merely the fruitlessness, but even the danger of pursuit.

"I stumbled upwards for perhaps a half-mile, and I came at last, bruised and with torn legs and hands, to a shallow cave, into which I was glad enough to creep for shelter from the pitiless weather. There at peep of day, I was joined by three other fugitives, one of whom was John Macdonald, Mac Ian's elder son.

"Glenlyon, you see, was a fool as well as a butcher. The plan of which he was given the execution, failed—God be thanked!—through his blundering. Had he kept to cold steel not a Macdonald would have escaped, and his orders would have been fulfilled to the letter. It was the shots that gave the alarm, and enabled three-fourths of the dwellers in the glen to take to the hills.

"The direct victims of that butchery numbered in men, women and children, something over thirty. But what may have been the total indirect number had not been ascertained when I departed. Scantily clad as most of them would be when they fled through the snow, many must have perished of exposure. Their lot is even more pitiful than that of the slaughtered.

"Late on the following day, by when the redcoats had departed, we crept down to the ruined glen. All that was to be seen of its prosperous hamlets were the smoking ruins of the houses the soldiers had fired. Nothing had they left behind them save the corpses on the dunghills. The whole glen had been laid waste; the cattle, sheep and goats had been herded away.

"A heap of ashes was all that remained of the domain of Glencoe, and the unfortunates who crept back, returned to find themselves without means of subsistence, face to face with famine."

He paused again wearily in that long narrative, paused as if overcome with the horror of it.

He poured himself a glass of claret, and slowly drank it under the sombre eyes of his silent audience before continuing. He spoke very quietly and slowly now.

"That evening in Glencoe I swore an oath upon the charred remains of old Mac Ian that I would take no rest nor thought for my own concerns until the authors of that abomination should have been brought to account; that I would spend myself without stint to accomplish this, and shrink from nothing that should forward that sacred task—sacred, indeed, to every man who bears the name of Macdonald.

"Of what I was constrained to suffer I will not speak. That is of no moment. I went to Edinburgh, there to ascertain precisely who might be responsible. And there, by cautious investigation, I gradually pieced the vile thing together, learnt of the parts played by Breadalbane and Stair. Their evil spite would not suffer them to receive the tardy oath of the Macdonalds of Glencoe. Enraged that so many whom they had hoped to enmesh in their pride and so ruin, should have escaped by stifling that pride, they vented all their evil fury upon the few whom a legal technicality left at their mercy Vile as this was, viler still was the method adopted to execute their will, the treachery, the abuse of hospitality imposed upon their instruments, so that the massacre of the Macdonalds of Glencoe should be complete.

"But just as Breadalbane and Stair stand in responsibility above Glenlyon and Lindsay, so the usurper William stands above Breadalbane and Stair. For whilst either of these, or both jointly, conceived the order for the massacre, this William of Orange signed it. Oh, I know what I am saying, Lochmore. In Edinburgh my investigations were very complete. If things were not as I have said, if King William had not set his signature to that terrible order, justice could be moved against those malefactors.

"And so, the oath I swore not merely includes King William, but aims first of all at him as the master criminal in this."

Again he paused, and when next he spoke he had again reduced to a quiet note a voice into which vehemence had gradually crept.

"Listen, Lochmore, and you, too, Ailsa. This may surprise you. When I took my oath of allegiance to King William, I took it, as I believe that Lochiel took it, without any mental reservations. Lochiel announced the intention of coming to London to kiss his majesty's hands; and it was in my mind to do the like. All that is over now. In my eyes that have looked on the horrors of Glencoe, William of Orange is once more a usurper, to be removed from the throne of England by whatever means may present themselves.

"That is why I am on my way to France. And not merely to swell by one negligible sword the forces gathering to support King James. But to place myself unreservedly at his majesty's disposal, to be used in any way that he may account will help forward his restoration, as the necessary preliminary to retribution upon all those responsible in whatsoever degree for this odious crime against the Macdonalds."

He rose now, white-faced and fanatical of eye.

"For what you are, Lochmore, you owe thanks to his majesty's grandfather. What you have, came to you from his bounty. As a man of honour you will own the debt. As a man of honour I adjure you to seize every chance of repaying it."

Lochmore, from being deeply moved, deeply shocked by what he had heard, was now deeply startled. He grumbled dully that God was his witness that he owed little to King William or King William's friends. But this, he protested, did not help him to perceive what it might lie in his power to do. Invernaion told him, and what Invernaion left unsaid was added by his sister, with a fervour even deeper than her brother's.

There was public opinion to be influenced, faltering loyalties to be sustained, slothful negligence to be put to shame. All this could be done here in London, and in this she was prepared—nay, eager—to do her part if Lochmore would either lead her or second her.

Thus for the first time in that full year of their unhappy marriage did a point of contact between them offer itself, did a matter present itself of which they could make a common interest, and so perhaps be yet drawn together, notwithstanding disparities. Instead, however, it was destined to lead to their final severance.

In the mention of what was to do, Lochmore perceived merely what his wife might do, influences which she might wield. For him there would be no such opportunities. Friendless as he perceived himself among her friends, he was not to be duped by her treasonable enthusiasm. He commanded none of the sympathy necessary to make his seditious proposals heeded. And from the resentful consideration of this and of his position among the Tories who were her principal courtiers, he passed to a no less resentful review of his position among the Whigs to whom he had so fruitlessly paid court.

He grew, perhaps, more deeply and sullenly conscious of his isolation than he had ever been before. He perceived the hopelessness of his case. Vaguely it was borne in upon him that at some point in his career he had moved in the wrong direction, and that his only chance of redemption lay now in an entirely fresh start. And just as he perceived this, so he perceived, too, that his brother-in-law offered him tonight the chance of making this fresh start in an arresting, even dazzling, manner. Let him range himself with Invernaion actively and militantly under the banner of King James; and when the King came to his own again Lochmore's would be a position of eminence, whence he could deal as cavalierly as he pleased with both Whig and Tory who had dealt so cavalierly with him. They should realize in bitterness the error of their sneers when they found him sneering down upon them in his turn, with a sneer that should have power to ostracize.

At least that is how Lady Lochmore more or less, and tentatively, explained afterwards to her brother the phenomenon of which they were now the witnesses, the sudden tempestuous impulse upon which Lochmore announced the unexpected intention of going to Saint Germains with his brother-in-law.

"It need not be publicly announced," he said. "Indeed, that would be rank folly. Ailsa will give it out that I have gone on the grand tour." And to this after a moment's thought he added with a little laugh of bitterness: "Considering what my relations with my dear wife are supposed to be, none will be incredulous, or even astonished."