BOOK IIICHAPTER XIXTHE WINTERAPRILis slow in Scotland, distrustful of her own identity, timid of her own powers. Half dazed from the long winter sleep, she is often bewildered, and cannot remember whether she belongs to winter or to spring.After the struggles and perplexities of the months that had elapsed since Balnillo and Christian Flemington met in Edinburgh, she had come slowly to herself amid storms of sleet. Beyond the Grampians, in the North, her awakened eyes looked on a country whose heart had been broken at Culloden. The ragged company that gathered round its Prince on that Wednesday morning was dispersed among the fastnesses of the hills, or lying dead and dying among the rushes and heather, whilst Cumberland’s soldiers finished their bloody business; the April snow that had blown in the faces of the clansmen as they hurled their unavailing valour on the Whig army had melted upon mounds of slain, and in the struggle of an hour the hopes of half a century had perished. Superior numbers, superior artillery, and superior generalship, haddone their work; when the English dragoons had recovered themselves after the Highland charge, they pursued almost to the gates of Inverness, returning again to the battlefield before night should darken upon the carnage, to despatch the wounded wretches who still breathed among their dead comrades.The country smelt of blood; reeked of it. For miles and miles round Inverness, where the search for fugitives was hottest, burnt hovels and blackened walls made blots upon the tardy green of spring. Women went about, white-faced and silent, trying to keep from their eyes the self-betraying consciousness of hidden terrors; each striving to forget the peat-stack on the moor where some hunted creature was lying, the scrub in the hollow that sheltered some wounded body, the cranny in the hill to which she must journey painfully after dark with the crusts in her apron.The shot still rattled out over the countryside where the search was going on, and where, when it had been successful, a few maimed and haggard men stood along some shieling wall in front of a platoon of Cumberland’s musketry. All down the shores of Loch Ness and among the hills above the Nairn water south-west of Culloden, the dark rocks raised their broken heads to the sky over God knows what agonies of suffering and hunger. The carrion-crow was busy in the land. One-fifth of Prince Charles’s army was dead upon the battle-field, and the church and tolbooth of Inverness were full of woundedprisoners, to whom none—not even the surgeons of their own party—were suffered to attend.And so April passed, and May was near her passing. Cumberland lay at Fort Augustus, to which place he had retired with Kingston’s Horse and eleven battalions of foot. The victorious army was the richer by much spoil, and money was free; the Duke’s camp was merry with festivities and races, and in the midst of it he enjoyed a well-earned leisure, enlivened by women and dice. He had performed his task of stamping out the danger that threatened his family with admirable thoroughness, and he had, besides, the comfortable prospect of a glorious return to London, where he would be the hero of the general rejoicing that was to follow. He was rooted at Fort Augustus, a rock of success and convivial self-satisfaction in the flood of tears and anguish and broken aspiration that had drowned half Scotland.The Prince had begun his wanderings in the West, hiding among the hills and corries of the islands, followed by a few faithful souls, and with a price of thirty thousand pounds on his head, whilst Cumberland’s emissaries, chief among whom was John Campbell of Mamore, Commandant of the West Highland garrisons, searched the country in every direction. The rank and file of his army—such of his men as were not dead or in prison—were scattered to the four winds; and those officers who had escaped after Culloden were in hiding, too, some despairing,some holding yet to the forlorn hope of raising his standard anew when the evil day should be over. Among these last was James Logie.He had come unhurt through the battle. Complete indifference about personal issues had wrapped him round in a protecting atmosphere, as it seems to enwrap and protect the unconcerned among men. He had left the field in company with the Prince and a few friends, with whom he reached the Ford of Falie on the Nairn River. They had held a rapid council at this place, Prince Charles desiring that the remnant of his army should rendezvous at Ruthven, in Badenoch, whilst he made his way to France; for his hopes were living still, and he still looked for support and supplies from the French king. He had taken leave of his companions at the ford, and had set off with half a dozen followers for the coast.Logie turned his face towards Angus. He had been a conspicuous figure in the Prince’s immediate circle, and he knew that he had no time to lose if he was to cross the Grampians alive. He thirsted to get back, and to test the temper of the east coast after the news of the reverse; like his master, he was not beaten yet. He did not know what had become of Ferrier and the Angus men, for he had been on the Prince’s staff; but the friends had met on the night before the battle, and it was a compact between them, that, should the day go against them, and should either or both survive the fight, they were to make for theneighbourhood of Forfar, where they would be ready, in case of necessity, to begin on their task of raising new levies for the cause.He had reached the Spey, and had gained Deeside in safety by the shores of the Avon, crossing the Grampians near the sources of the Isla.In the long winter that had passed since he joined the Prince in the field, James had not forgotten Flemington. His own labours in Angus and at the taking of theVenture, completely as they had filled his mind in the autumn, had sunk back into the limbo of insignificant things, but Archie was often in his thoughts, and some time before the advance on Inverness he had heard with indescribable feelings that he was intelligence officer to the Duke of Cumberland. The terrible thing to Logie was that Archie’s treachery seemed to have poisoned the sacred places in his own past; when he turned back to it now, it was as though the figure of the young man stood blocking his view, looking at him with those eyes that were so like the eyes of Diane, and were yet the eyes of a traitor.He could not bear to think of that October morning by the Basin of Montrose. Perhaps the story that a fatal impulse had made him lay bare to his companion had been tossed about—a subject of ridicule on Flemington’s lips, its telling but one more proof to him of the folly of men. He could scarcely believe that Archie would treat the record of his anguish in such a way; but then, neither could he have believed that thesympathy in Archie’s face, the break in his voice, the tension of his listening attitude, were only the stock-in-trade of a practised spy. And yet this horror had been true. In spite of the unhealed wound that he carried, in spite of the batterings of his thirty-eight years, Logie had continued to love life, but now he had begun to tell himself that he was sick of it.And for another very practical reason his generous impulses and his belief in Flemington had undone him. Perhaps if the young painter had come to Balnillo announcing an ostentatious adherence to the Stuarts, he might have hesitated before taking him at his own value; but his apparent caution and his unwillingness to speak, and the words about his father at St. Germain, which he had let fall with all the quiet dignity of a man too upright to pass under false colours, had done more to put the brothers on the wrong track than the most violent protestations. Balnillo had been careful, in spite of his confidence in his guest; but in the sympathy of his soul James had given Flemington the means of future access to himself. Now the tavern in the Castle Wynd at Stirling could be of use to him no longer, and he knew that only the last extremity must find him in any of the secret haunts known to him in the Muir of Pert.Madam Flemington had never reopened the subject of James Logie with Archie. In her wisdom she had left well alone. Installed in her little lodging in Hyndford’s Close, with her womanMysie, she had made up her mind to remain where she was. There was much to keep her in Edinburgh, and she could not bring herself to leave the centre of information and to bury herself again in the old white house among the ash-trees, whilst every post and every horseman brought word of some new turn in the country’s fortunes.News of the Highland army’s retreat to Scotland, of the Battle of Falkirk, of the despatch of the Duke of Cumberland to the North, followed one another as the year went by, and still she stayed on. With her emergence from the seclusion of the country came her emergence from the seclusion she had made for herself; and on the Duke’s thirty hours’ occupation of Holyrood, she threw off all pretence of neutrality, and repaired with other Whig ladies to the palace to pay her respects to the stout, ill-mannered young General whose unbeguiling person followed so awkwardly upon the attractive figure of his predecessor.Now that Archie was restored to her, Christian found herself with plenty of occupation. The contempt she had hitherto professed for Edinburgh society seemed to have melted away, and every card-party, every assembly and rout, knew her chair at its door, her arresting presence in its midst. Madam Flemington’s name was on a good many tongues that winter. Many feared her, some maligned her, but no one overlooked her. The fact that she was the widow of an exiled Jacobite lent her an additional interest; and asthe polite world set itself to invent a motley choice of reasons for her adherence to the House of Hanover—which it discovered before her reception by the Duke at Holyrood made it public—it ended by stumbling on the old story of a bygone liaison with Prince Charles’s father. The idea was so much to its taste that it was generally accepted; and Christian, unknown to herself, became the cast-off and alienated mistress of that Prince whom her party had begun to call ‘The Old Pretender.’ It was scarcely a legend that would have conciliated her had it come to her ears, but, as rumour is seldom on speaking terms with its victims, she was ignorant of the interested whispers which followed her through the wynds and up the staircases of the Old Town.But the reflected halo of royalty, while it casts deep shadows, reaches far. The character of royal light of love stood her in good stead, even among those to whom her supposed former lover was an abhorred spectre of Popery and political danger. The path that her own personality would surely open for her in any community was illumined and made smooth by the baleful interest that hangs about all kingly irregularities, and there was that in her bearing which made people think more of the royal and less of the irregular part of the business. Also, among the Whigs, she was a brand plucked from the burning, one who had turned from the wrong party to embrace the right. Edinburgh, Whig atheart, in spite of its backslidings, admired Madam Flemington.And not only Edinburgh, but that curious fraction of it, David Balnillo.The impression that Christian had made upon the judge had deepened as the weeks went by. By the time he discovered her true principles, and realized that she was no dupe of Archie’s, but his partisan, he had advanced so far in his acquaintance with her, had become so much her servant, that he could not bring himself to draw back. She had dazzled his wits and played on his vanity, and that vanity was not only warmed and cosseted by her manner to him, not only was he delighted with herself and her notice, but he had begun to find in his position of favoured cavalier to one of the most prominent figures in society a distinction that it would go hard with him to miss.He had begun their conversation at Lady Anne Maxwell’s party by the mention of Archie Flemington, but his name had not come up between them again, and when his enlightenment about her was complete, and the talk which he heard in every house that he frequented revealed her in her real colours, he had no further wish to discuss the man into whose trap he had fallen.David Balnillo’s discoveries were extremely unpalatable to him. If Christian had cherished his vanity, she had made it smart, too. No man, least of all one like the self-appreciative judge,can find without resentment that he has been, even indirectly, the dupe of a person to whom he has attached himself; but when that person is a woman, determined not to let him escape from her influence, the case is not always desperate. For three unblessed days it was wellnigh desperate with Balnillo, and he avoided her completely, but at the end of that time a summons from her was brought to him that his inclination for her company and the chance sight of Lord Grange holding open the door of her chair forbade him to disobey. She had worded her command as though she were conferring a favour; nevertheless, after an hour’s hesitation, David had taken his hat and repaired to Hyndford’s Close, dragging his dignity after him like a dog on a leash.If she guessed the reason of his absence from her side she made no remark, receiving him as if she had just parted from him, with that omission of greeting which implies so much. She had sent for him, she said, because her man of business had given her a legal paper that she would not sign without his advice. She looked him in the face as fearlessly as ever, and her glance sparkled with its wonted fire. For some tormented minutes he could not decide whether or no to charge her with knowledge of the fraud that had been carried on under his roof, but he had not the courage to do so. Also, he was acute enough to see that she might well reply to his reproaches by reminding him that he had only himself to thank for theiracquaintance. She had not made the advances; his own zeal had brought about their situation. He felt like a fool, but he saw that in speaking he might look like one, which some consider worse.He left her, assuring himself that all was fair in love and politics; that he could not, in common good breeding, withhold his help from her in her legal difficulty; that, should wind of Archie’s dealings with him get abroad in the town, he would be saving appearances in avoiding a rupture with the lady whose shadow he had been since he arrived in Edinburgh, and that it was his duty as a well-wisher of Prince Charles to keep open any channel that might yield information about Flemington’s movements. Whatsoever may have been the quality of his reasons, their quantity was remarkable. He did not like the little voice that whispered to him that he would not have dared to offer them to James.There was no further risk of a meeting with Archie, for within a few days of the latter’s appearance in Hyndford’s Close he had been sent to the Border with instructions to watch Jedburgh and the neighbourhood of Liddesdale, through which the Prince’s army had passed on its march to England. Madam Flemington knew that the coast was clear, and David had no suspicion that it had been otherwise. Very few people in Edinburgh were aware of Flemington’s visit to it; it was an event of which even the caddies were ignorant.And so Balnillo lingered on, putting off his return to Angus from week to week. His mouse-coloured velvet began to show signs of wear and was replaced by a suit of dark purple; his funds were dwindling a little, for he was not a rich man, and a new set of verses about him was going the round of the town. Then, with January, came the battle of Falkirk and the siege of Stirling Castle, and the end of the month brought Cumberland and the mustering of loyal Whigs to wait upon him at Holyrood Palace.David departed quietly. He had come to Edinburgh to avoid playing a marked part in Angus, and he now returned to Angus to avoid playing a marked part in Edinburgh. He was behaving like the last remaining king in a game of draughts when he skips from square to square in the safe corner of the board; but he did not know that Government had kept its eye on all his doings during the time of his stay. Perhaps it was on account of her usefulness in this and in other delicate matters that Madam Flemington augured well for her grandson, for when the Whig army crossed the Forth, Archie went with it as intelligence officer to the Duke of Cumberland.
APRILis slow in Scotland, distrustful of her own identity, timid of her own powers. Half dazed from the long winter sleep, she is often bewildered, and cannot remember whether she belongs to winter or to spring.
After the struggles and perplexities of the months that had elapsed since Balnillo and Christian Flemington met in Edinburgh, she had come slowly to herself amid storms of sleet. Beyond the Grampians, in the North, her awakened eyes looked on a country whose heart had been broken at Culloden. The ragged company that gathered round its Prince on that Wednesday morning was dispersed among the fastnesses of the hills, or lying dead and dying among the rushes and heather, whilst Cumberland’s soldiers finished their bloody business; the April snow that had blown in the faces of the clansmen as they hurled their unavailing valour on the Whig army had melted upon mounds of slain, and in the struggle of an hour the hopes of half a century had perished. Superior numbers, superior artillery, and superior generalship, haddone their work; when the English dragoons had recovered themselves after the Highland charge, they pursued almost to the gates of Inverness, returning again to the battlefield before night should darken upon the carnage, to despatch the wounded wretches who still breathed among their dead comrades.
The country smelt of blood; reeked of it. For miles and miles round Inverness, where the search for fugitives was hottest, burnt hovels and blackened walls made blots upon the tardy green of spring. Women went about, white-faced and silent, trying to keep from their eyes the self-betraying consciousness of hidden terrors; each striving to forget the peat-stack on the moor where some hunted creature was lying, the scrub in the hollow that sheltered some wounded body, the cranny in the hill to which she must journey painfully after dark with the crusts in her apron.
The shot still rattled out over the countryside where the search was going on, and where, when it had been successful, a few maimed and haggard men stood along some shieling wall in front of a platoon of Cumberland’s musketry. All down the shores of Loch Ness and among the hills above the Nairn water south-west of Culloden, the dark rocks raised their broken heads to the sky over God knows what agonies of suffering and hunger. The carrion-crow was busy in the land. One-fifth of Prince Charles’s army was dead upon the battle-field, and the church and tolbooth of Inverness were full of woundedprisoners, to whom none—not even the surgeons of their own party—were suffered to attend.
And so April passed, and May was near her passing. Cumberland lay at Fort Augustus, to which place he had retired with Kingston’s Horse and eleven battalions of foot. The victorious army was the richer by much spoil, and money was free; the Duke’s camp was merry with festivities and races, and in the midst of it he enjoyed a well-earned leisure, enlivened by women and dice. He had performed his task of stamping out the danger that threatened his family with admirable thoroughness, and he had, besides, the comfortable prospect of a glorious return to London, where he would be the hero of the general rejoicing that was to follow. He was rooted at Fort Augustus, a rock of success and convivial self-satisfaction in the flood of tears and anguish and broken aspiration that had drowned half Scotland.
The Prince had begun his wanderings in the West, hiding among the hills and corries of the islands, followed by a few faithful souls, and with a price of thirty thousand pounds on his head, whilst Cumberland’s emissaries, chief among whom was John Campbell of Mamore, Commandant of the West Highland garrisons, searched the country in every direction. The rank and file of his army—such of his men as were not dead or in prison—were scattered to the four winds; and those officers who had escaped after Culloden were in hiding, too, some despairing,some holding yet to the forlorn hope of raising his standard anew when the evil day should be over. Among these last was James Logie.
He had come unhurt through the battle. Complete indifference about personal issues had wrapped him round in a protecting atmosphere, as it seems to enwrap and protect the unconcerned among men. He had left the field in company with the Prince and a few friends, with whom he reached the Ford of Falie on the Nairn River. They had held a rapid council at this place, Prince Charles desiring that the remnant of his army should rendezvous at Ruthven, in Badenoch, whilst he made his way to France; for his hopes were living still, and he still looked for support and supplies from the French king. He had taken leave of his companions at the ford, and had set off with half a dozen followers for the coast.
Logie turned his face towards Angus. He had been a conspicuous figure in the Prince’s immediate circle, and he knew that he had no time to lose if he was to cross the Grampians alive. He thirsted to get back, and to test the temper of the east coast after the news of the reverse; like his master, he was not beaten yet. He did not know what had become of Ferrier and the Angus men, for he had been on the Prince’s staff; but the friends had met on the night before the battle, and it was a compact between them, that, should the day go against them, and should either or both survive the fight, they were to make for theneighbourhood of Forfar, where they would be ready, in case of necessity, to begin on their task of raising new levies for the cause.
He had reached the Spey, and had gained Deeside in safety by the shores of the Avon, crossing the Grampians near the sources of the Isla.
In the long winter that had passed since he joined the Prince in the field, James had not forgotten Flemington. His own labours in Angus and at the taking of theVenture, completely as they had filled his mind in the autumn, had sunk back into the limbo of insignificant things, but Archie was often in his thoughts, and some time before the advance on Inverness he had heard with indescribable feelings that he was intelligence officer to the Duke of Cumberland. The terrible thing to Logie was that Archie’s treachery seemed to have poisoned the sacred places in his own past; when he turned back to it now, it was as though the figure of the young man stood blocking his view, looking at him with those eyes that were so like the eyes of Diane, and were yet the eyes of a traitor.
He could not bear to think of that October morning by the Basin of Montrose. Perhaps the story that a fatal impulse had made him lay bare to his companion had been tossed about—a subject of ridicule on Flemington’s lips, its telling but one more proof to him of the folly of men. He could scarcely believe that Archie would treat the record of his anguish in such a way; but then, neither could he have believed that thesympathy in Archie’s face, the break in his voice, the tension of his listening attitude, were only the stock-in-trade of a practised spy. And yet this horror had been true. In spite of the unhealed wound that he carried, in spite of the batterings of his thirty-eight years, Logie had continued to love life, but now he had begun to tell himself that he was sick of it.
And for another very practical reason his generous impulses and his belief in Flemington had undone him. Perhaps if the young painter had come to Balnillo announcing an ostentatious adherence to the Stuarts, he might have hesitated before taking him at his own value; but his apparent caution and his unwillingness to speak, and the words about his father at St. Germain, which he had let fall with all the quiet dignity of a man too upright to pass under false colours, had done more to put the brothers on the wrong track than the most violent protestations. Balnillo had been careful, in spite of his confidence in his guest; but in the sympathy of his soul James had given Flemington the means of future access to himself. Now the tavern in the Castle Wynd at Stirling could be of use to him no longer, and he knew that only the last extremity must find him in any of the secret haunts known to him in the Muir of Pert.
Madam Flemington had never reopened the subject of James Logie with Archie. In her wisdom she had left well alone. Installed in her little lodging in Hyndford’s Close, with her womanMysie, she had made up her mind to remain where she was. There was much to keep her in Edinburgh, and she could not bring herself to leave the centre of information and to bury herself again in the old white house among the ash-trees, whilst every post and every horseman brought word of some new turn in the country’s fortunes.
News of the Highland army’s retreat to Scotland, of the Battle of Falkirk, of the despatch of the Duke of Cumberland to the North, followed one another as the year went by, and still she stayed on. With her emergence from the seclusion of the country came her emergence from the seclusion she had made for herself; and on the Duke’s thirty hours’ occupation of Holyrood, she threw off all pretence of neutrality, and repaired with other Whig ladies to the palace to pay her respects to the stout, ill-mannered young General whose unbeguiling person followed so awkwardly upon the attractive figure of his predecessor.
Now that Archie was restored to her, Christian found herself with plenty of occupation. The contempt she had hitherto professed for Edinburgh society seemed to have melted away, and every card-party, every assembly and rout, knew her chair at its door, her arresting presence in its midst. Madam Flemington’s name was on a good many tongues that winter. Many feared her, some maligned her, but no one overlooked her. The fact that she was the widow of an exiled Jacobite lent her an additional interest; and asthe polite world set itself to invent a motley choice of reasons for her adherence to the House of Hanover—which it discovered before her reception by the Duke at Holyrood made it public—it ended by stumbling on the old story of a bygone liaison with Prince Charles’s father. The idea was so much to its taste that it was generally accepted; and Christian, unknown to herself, became the cast-off and alienated mistress of that Prince whom her party had begun to call ‘The Old Pretender.’ It was scarcely a legend that would have conciliated her had it come to her ears, but, as rumour is seldom on speaking terms with its victims, she was ignorant of the interested whispers which followed her through the wynds and up the staircases of the Old Town.
But the reflected halo of royalty, while it casts deep shadows, reaches far. The character of royal light of love stood her in good stead, even among those to whom her supposed former lover was an abhorred spectre of Popery and political danger. The path that her own personality would surely open for her in any community was illumined and made smooth by the baleful interest that hangs about all kingly irregularities, and there was that in her bearing which made people think more of the royal and less of the irregular part of the business. Also, among the Whigs, she was a brand plucked from the burning, one who had turned from the wrong party to embrace the right. Edinburgh, Whig atheart, in spite of its backslidings, admired Madam Flemington.
And not only Edinburgh, but that curious fraction of it, David Balnillo.
The impression that Christian had made upon the judge had deepened as the weeks went by. By the time he discovered her true principles, and realized that she was no dupe of Archie’s, but his partisan, he had advanced so far in his acquaintance with her, had become so much her servant, that he could not bring himself to draw back. She had dazzled his wits and played on his vanity, and that vanity was not only warmed and cosseted by her manner to him, not only was he delighted with herself and her notice, but he had begun to find in his position of favoured cavalier to one of the most prominent figures in society a distinction that it would go hard with him to miss.
He had begun their conversation at Lady Anne Maxwell’s party by the mention of Archie Flemington, but his name had not come up between them again, and when his enlightenment about her was complete, and the talk which he heard in every house that he frequented revealed her in her real colours, he had no further wish to discuss the man into whose trap he had fallen.
David Balnillo’s discoveries were extremely unpalatable to him. If Christian had cherished his vanity, she had made it smart, too. No man, least of all one like the self-appreciative judge,can find without resentment that he has been, even indirectly, the dupe of a person to whom he has attached himself; but when that person is a woman, determined not to let him escape from her influence, the case is not always desperate. For three unblessed days it was wellnigh desperate with Balnillo, and he avoided her completely, but at the end of that time a summons from her was brought to him that his inclination for her company and the chance sight of Lord Grange holding open the door of her chair forbade him to disobey. She had worded her command as though she were conferring a favour; nevertheless, after an hour’s hesitation, David had taken his hat and repaired to Hyndford’s Close, dragging his dignity after him like a dog on a leash.
If she guessed the reason of his absence from her side she made no remark, receiving him as if she had just parted from him, with that omission of greeting which implies so much. She had sent for him, she said, because her man of business had given her a legal paper that she would not sign without his advice. She looked him in the face as fearlessly as ever, and her glance sparkled with its wonted fire. For some tormented minutes he could not decide whether or no to charge her with knowledge of the fraud that had been carried on under his roof, but he had not the courage to do so. Also, he was acute enough to see that she might well reply to his reproaches by reminding him that he had only himself to thank for theiracquaintance. She had not made the advances; his own zeal had brought about their situation. He felt like a fool, but he saw that in speaking he might look like one, which some consider worse.
He left her, assuring himself that all was fair in love and politics; that he could not, in common good breeding, withhold his help from her in her legal difficulty; that, should wind of Archie’s dealings with him get abroad in the town, he would be saving appearances in avoiding a rupture with the lady whose shadow he had been since he arrived in Edinburgh, and that it was his duty as a well-wisher of Prince Charles to keep open any channel that might yield information about Flemington’s movements. Whatsoever may have been the quality of his reasons, their quantity was remarkable. He did not like the little voice that whispered to him that he would not have dared to offer them to James.
There was no further risk of a meeting with Archie, for within a few days of the latter’s appearance in Hyndford’s Close he had been sent to the Border with instructions to watch Jedburgh and the neighbourhood of Liddesdale, through which the Prince’s army had passed on its march to England. Madam Flemington knew that the coast was clear, and David had no suspicion that it had been otherwise. Very few people in Edinburgh were aware of Flemington’s visit to it; it was an event of which even the caddies were ignorant.
And so Balnillo lingered on, putting off his return to Angus from week to week. His mouse-coloured velvet began to show signs of wear and was replaced by a suit of dark purple; his funds were dwindling a little, for he was not a rich man, and a new set of verses about him was going the round of the town. Then, with January, came the battle of Falkirk and the siege of Stirling Castle, and the end of the month brought Cumberland and the mustering of loyal Whigs to wait upon him at Holyrood Palace.
David departed quietly. He had come to Edinburgh to avoid playing a marked part in Angus, and he now returned to Angus to avoid playing a marked part in Edinburgh. He was behaving like the last remaining king in a game of draughts when he skips from square to square in the safe corner of the board; but he did not know that Government had kept its eye on all his doings during the time of his stay. Perhaps it was on account of her usefulness in this and in other delicate matters that Madam Flemington augured well for her grandson, for when the Whig army crossed the Forth, Archie went with it as intelligence officer to the Duke of Cumberland.