CHAPTER IVBUSINESSEVENTSseemed to Flemington to be moving fast.Lord Balnillo dined soon after five, and during the meal the young man tried to detach his mind from the contents of the letter lying in his pocket and to listen to his host’s talk, which ran on the portrait to be begun next morning.The judge had ordered his robes to be taken out and aired carefully, and a little room with a north aspect had been prepared for the first sitting. The details of Archie’s trade had excited the household below stairs, and the servant who waited appeared to look upon him with the curious mixture of awe and contempt accorded to charlatans and to those connected with the arts. Only James seemed to remain outside the circle of interest, like a wayfarer who pauses to watch the progress of some wayside bargain with which he has no concern. Yet, though Archie’s occupations did not move Logie, the young man felt intuitively that he was anything but a hostile presence.“With your permission I shall go early to bed to-night,” said Flemington to his host, as the threesat over their wine by the dining-room fire and the clock’s hands pointed to eight.“Fie!” said the judge; “you are a young man to be thinking of such things at this hour.”“My bones have not forgotten yesterday——” began Archie.“And what would you do if you had to ride the circuit, sir?” exclaimed Balnillo, looking sideways at him like a sly old crow. “Man, James, you and I have had other things to consider besides our bones! And here’s Mr. Flemington, who might be your son and my grandson, havering about his bed!”Archie laughed aloud.“Captain Logie would need to have married young for that!” he cried. “And I cannot picture your lordship as anybody’s grandfather.”“Come, Jamie, how old are you?” inquired his brother in a tone that had a light touch of gratification.“I lose count nowadays,” said James, sighing. “I must be near upon eight-and-thirty, I suppose. Life’s a long business, after all.”“Yours has scarcely been long enough to have begotten me, unless you had done so at twelve years old,” observed Archie.“When I had to ride the circuit,” began Balnillo, setting down his glass and joining his hands across his waistcoat, “I had many a time to stick fast in worse places than the Den yonder—ay, and to leave my horse where he was and get forward on my clerk’s nag. I’ve been forced tosit the bench in another man’s wig because my own had rolled in the water in my luggage, and was a plaster of dirt—maybe never fit to be seen again upon a Lord of Session’s head.”Logie smiled with his crooked mouth. He remembered, though he did not mention, the vernacular rhyme written on that occasion by some impudent member of the junior bar:“Auld David Balnillo gangs wantin’ his wig,And he’s seekin’ the loan of anither as big.A modest request, an’ there’s naething agin’ it,But he’d better hae soucht a new head to put in it!”“It was only last year,” continued his brother, “that I gave up the saddle and the bench together.”“That was more from choice than from necessity—at least, so I have heard,” said Archie.“You heard that, Mr. Flemington?”“My lord, do you think that we obscure country-folk know nothing? or that reputations don’t fly farther than Edinburgh? The truth is that we of the younger generation are not made of the same stuff. That is what my grandmother tells me so often—so often that, from force of habit, I don’t listen. But I have begun to believe it at last.”“She is a wise woman,” said Balnillo.“She has been a mighty attractive one,” observed Archie meditatively; “at least, so she was thought at St. Germain.”“At St. Germain?” exclaimed the judge.“My grandfather died in exile with his master, and my father too,” replied Flemington quietly.There was a silence, and then James Logie opened his mouth to speak, but Archie had risen.“Let me go, Lord Balnillo,” he said. “The truth is, my work needs a steady hand, and I mean to have it when I begin your portrait to-morrow.”When he had gone James took the empty seat by his brother.“His grandfather with the King, and he following this womanish trade!” he exclaimed.“I should like to have asked him more about his father,” said Balnillo; “but——”“He did not wish to speak; I could see that,” said James. “I like the fellow, David, in spite of his paint-pots. I would like him much if I had time to like anything.”“I have been asking myself: am I a fool to be keeping him here?” said the other. “Was I right to let a strange man into the house at such a time? I am relieved, James. He is on the right side.”“He keeps his ears open, brother.”“He seems to know all aboutme,” observed Balnillo. “He’s a fine lad, Jamie—a lad of fine taste; and his free tongue hasn’t interfered with his good sense. And I am relieved, as I said.”Logie smiled again. The affection he had for his brother was of that solid quality which accepts a character in the lump, and loves it for its best parts. David’s little vanities and vacillations, his meticulous love of small things, were plain enough to the soldier, and he knew well that the benchand the bar alike had found plenty to make merry over in Balnillo. He had all the loyal feeling which the Scot of his time bore to the head of his family, and, as his sentiments towards him sprang from the heart rather than from the brain, it is possible that he undervalued the sudden fits of shrewdness which would attack his brother as headache or ague might attack another man. The fact that David’s colleagues had never made this mistake was responsible for a career the success of which surprised many who knew the judge by hearsay alone. Drink, detail and indecision have probably ruined more characters than any three other influences in the world; but the two latter had not quite succeeded with Lord Balnillo, and the former had passed him over.“I wonder——” said James—“I wonder is it a good chance that has sent him here? Could we make anything of him, David?”“Whisht, James!” said the other, turning his face away quickly. “You go too fast. And, mind you, if a man has only one notion in his head, there are times when his skull is scarce thick enough to stand between his thoughts and the world.”“That is true. But I doubt Flemington’s mind is too much taken up with his pictures to think what is in other men’s heads.”“Maybe,” replied Balnillo; “but we’ll know that better a few days hence. I am not sorry he has gone to bed.”“I will give him an hour to get between hisblankets,” said Logie, drawing out his watch. “That should make him safe.”Meanwhile Flemington had reached his room and was pulling his great package of spare canvases from under his sombre four-poster. He undid the straps which secured them and drew from between two of them a long dark riding-coat, thrusting back the bundle into its place. He changed his clothes and threw those he had taken off on a chair. Then he took the little locked box he had saved so carefully from the catastrophe of the previous night, and, standing on the bed, he laid it on the top of the tester, which was near enough to the ceiling to prevent any object placed upon it from being seen. He gathered a couple of cushions from a couch, and, beating them up, arranged them between the bedclothes, patting them into a human-looking shape. Though he meant to lock his door and to keep the key in his pocket during the absence he contemplated, and though he had desired the servants not to disturb him until an hour before breakfast, he had the good habit of preparing for the worst.He slipped out with the coat over his arm, turned the key and walked softly but boldly down into the hall. He paused outside the dining-room, listening to the hum of the brothers’ voices, then disappeared down the back-stairs. If he found the door into the stable-yard secured he meant to call someone from the kitchen regions to open it and to announce that he was going out to look at his disabled horse. He would say thathe intended to return through the front door, by which Captain Logie had promised to admit him.Everything was quiet. The only sign of life was the shrill voice of a maid singing in the scullery as she washed the dishes, and the house was not shut up for the night. Through the yard he went and out unmolested, under the great arch which supported the stable clock, and then ran swiftly round to the front. He passed under the still lighted windows and plunged into a mass of trees and undergrowth which headed the eastern approach.Once among the friendly shadows, he put on the coat, buttoning it closely about his neck, and took a small grey wig from one of its deep pockets. When he had adjusted this under his hat he emerged, crossed the avenue, dropped over the sunk wall dividing it from the fields, and made down them till he reached the Montrose road. Through the still darkness the sound of the Balnillo stable clock floated after him, striking nine.There was not enough light to show him anything but his nearest surroundings. The wall which bounded the great Balnillo grass-parks was at his left hand, and by it he guided his steps, keeping a perpetual look out to avoid stumbling over the inequalities and loose stones, for there were no side-paths to the roads in those days. He knew that the town was only three miles off, and that the dark stretch which extended on his right was the Basin of Montrose. A cold snap played in the air, reminding him that autumn,which in Scotland keeps its mellowness late, was some way forward, and this sting in the breath of night was indicated by a trembling of the stars in the dark vault overhead.He hastened on, for time was precious. The paper which he had taken from Skirling Wattie’s hands had bid him prepare to follow Logie into the town when dark set in, but it had been able to tell him neither at what hour the soldier would start nor whether he would walk or ride.His chance in meeting the beggar so soon had put him in possession of James’s usual movements immediately, but it had given him little time to think out many details, and the gaps in his plans had been filled in by guesswork. He did not think James would ride, for there had been no sound of preparation in the stable. His intention was to reach the town first, to conceal himself by its entrance, and when James should pass, to follow him to his destination. He had a rough map of Montrose in his possession, and with its help he had been able to locate the house for which he suspected him to be bound—a house known by the party he served to be one of the meeting-places of the adherents of Charles Edward Stuart.Archie’s buoyancy of spirit was sufficient to keep at arm’s length a regret he could not quite banish; for he had the happy carelessness that carries a man easily on any errand which has possibilities of development, more from the cheerful love of chance than from responsible feeling.His light-hearted courage and tenacity were buried so deep under a luxuriance of effrontery, grace, and mother-wit, and the glamour of a manner difficult to resist, that hardly anyone but Madam Flemington, who had brought him up, suspected the toughness of their quality. He had the refinement of a woman, yet he had extorted the wonder of an east-coast Scotsman by his comprehensive profanity; the expression, at times, of a timid girl, yet he would plunge into a flood of difficulties, whose further shore he did not trouble to contemplate; but these contrasts in him spoke of no repression, no conscious effort. He merely rode every quality in his character with a loose rein, and while he attempted to puzzle nobody, he had the acuteness to know that his audience would puzzle itself by its own conception of him. The regret which he ignored was the regret that he was obliged to shadow a man who pleased him as much as did James Logie. He realized how much more satisfaction he would have got out of his present business had its object been Lord Balnillo. He liked James’s voice, his bearing, his crooked mouth, and something intangible about him which he neither understood nor tried to understand. The iron hand of Madam Flemington had brought him up so consistently to his occupation that he accepted it as a part of life. His painting he used as a means, not as an end, and the changes and chances of his main employment were congenial to a temperament at once boyish and capable.The Pleiades rode high above Taurus, and Orion’s hands were coming up over the eastern horizon as he reached the narrow street which was the beginning of Montrose. The place was dark and ill-lit, like every country town of those days; and here, by the North Port, as it was called, the irregularities of the low houses, with their outside stairs, offered a choice of odd corners in which he might wait unseen.He chose the narrowest part of the street, that he might see across it the more readily, and drew back into the cavity, roofed in by the ‘stairhead’ of a projecting flight of steps which ran sideways up a wall. Few people would leave the town at that hour, and those who were still abroad were likely to keep within its limits. A wretched lamp, stuck in a niche of an opposite building, made his position all the more desirable, for the flicker which it cast would be sufficient to throw up the figure of Logie should he pass beneath it. He watched a stealthy cat cross its shine with an air of suppressed melodrama that would have befitted a man-eating tiger, and the genial bellowing of a couple of drunken men came down the High Street as he settled his shoulders against the masonry at his back and resigned himself to a probable hour of tedium.Not a mile distant, James Logie was coming along the Montrose road. He had trodden it many times in the darkness during the past weeks, and his mind was roving far from his steps, fareven from the errand on which he was bent. He was thinking of Archie, whom he believed to be snug in bed at Balnillo.He had gone out last night and landed this fantastic piece of young humanity from the Den, as a man may land a salmon, and he had contemplated him ever since with a kind of fascination. Flemington was so much unlike any young man he had known that the difference half shocked him, and though he had told his brother that he liked the fellow, he had done so in spite of one side of himself. It was hard to believe that but a dozen years divided them, for he had imagined Archie much younger, and the appeal of his boyishness was a strong one to Logie, who had had so little time for boyishness himself. His life since he was fifteen had been merged in his profession, and the restoration of the Stuarts had been for many years the thing nearest to his heart. There had been one exception to this, and that had long gone out of his life, taking his youth with it. He was scarcely a sad man, but he had the habit of sadness, which is as hard a one to combat as any other, and the burst of youth and buoyancy that had come in suddenly with Archie had blown on James like a spring wind. Archie’s father and grandfather had died in exile, too, with Charles Edward’s parents. And his eyes reminded him of other eyes.The events that had taken place since the landing of the Prince in July had made themselves felt all up the east coast, and the country wasJacobite almost to a man. Charles Edward had raised his standard at Glenfinnan, had marched on Edinburgh in the early part of September, and had established himself in Holyrood on the surrender of the town. After his victory over Cope at Preston Pans, he had collected his forces on Portobello sands—thirteen regiments composed of the Highland clans, five regiments of Lowlanders, two troops of horse commanded by Lords Elcho and Balmerino, with two others under Lord Kilmarnock and Lord Pitsligo. The command of the latter consisted of Angus men armed with such weapons as they owned or could gather.The insurgent army had entered England in two portions: one of these led by Lord George Murray, and one by the Prince himself, who marched at the head of his men, sharing the fatigues of the road with them, and fascinating the imagination of the Scots by his hopeful good-humour and his keen desire to identify himself with his soldiers. The two bodies had concentrated on Carlisle, investing the city, and after a few days of defiance, the mayor displayed the white flag on the ramparts and surrendered the town keys. After this, the Prince and his father had been proclaimed at the market cross, in presence of the municipality.But in spite of this success the signs of the times were not consistently cheering to the Jacobite party. There had been many desertions during the march across the border, and no sooner had the Prince’s troops left Edinburgh than the cityhad gone back to the Whig dominion. At Perth and Dundee the wind seemed to be changing too, and only the country places stuck steadily to the Prince and went on recruiting for the Stuarts.Although he was aching to go south with the invaders, now that the English were advancing in force, Logie was kept in the neighbourhood of Montrose by the business he had undertaken. His own instincts and inclinations were ever those of a fighter, and he groaned in spirit over the fate which had made it his duty to remain in Angus, concerned with recruiting and the raising of money and arms. He had not yet openly joined the Stuarts, in spite of his ardent devotion to their cause, because it had been represented to him that he was, for the moment, a more valuable asset to his party whilst he worked secretly than he could be in the field. The question that perplexed the coast of Angus was the landing of those French supplies so sorely needed by the half-fed, half-clothed, half-paid troops, in the face of the English cruisers that haunted the coast; and it was these matters that kept Logie busy.James knew the harbour of Montrose as men know the places which are the scenes of the forbidden exploits of their youth. This younger son, who was so far removed in years from the rest of his family as to be almost like an only child, was running wild in the town among the fisher-folk, and taking surreptitious trips across the bar when the staid David was pursuing his respectable career at a very different kind of bar in Edinburgh.He was the man that Montrose needed in this emergency, and to-night he was on his way to the town; for he would come there a couple of times in the week, as secretly as he could, to meet one David Ferrier, a country gentleman who had joined the regiment of six hundred men raised by Lord Ogilvie, and had been made deputy-governor of Brechin for the Prince.Ferrier also was a man well calculated to serve the cause. He owned a small property and a farm not far from the village of Edzell, situated at the foot of a glen running up into the Grampians, and his perfect knowledge of the country and its inhabitants of all degrees gave him an insight into every turn of feeling that swept through it in those troubled days. The business of his farm had brought him continually into both Brechin and Montrose, and the shepherds, travelling incessantly with their flocks from hill to strath, formed one of his many chains of intelligence. He had joined Lord Ogilvie a couple of months earlier, and, though he was now stationed at Brechin with a hundred men of his corps, he would absent himself for a night at a time, staying quietly at Montrose in the house of a former dependent of his own, that he might keep an eye upon the movements of an English ship.The Government sloop-of-warVenturehad come into the harbour, carrying sixteen guns and about eighty men, and had anchored south of the town, in the strait made by the passage of the River Esk into the sea. Montrose, apparently, wasto suffer for the work she had done as a port for Stuart supplies, for theVenture, lying at a convenient distance just under the fishing village of Ferryden, had fired heavily on the town, though no Jacobite troops were there. The commander had unrigged the shipping and burned two trading barques whose owners were townsmen, and he had landed a force at the fort, which had captured the town guns and had carried them on board a vessel lying at the quay.Ferrier looked with complete trust to James Logie and his brother Balnillo. The old man, during his judicial career, had made some parade of keeping himself aloof from politics; and as his retirement had taken place previous to the landing of the Prince, he had sunk the public servant in the country gentleman before the world of politicians began to divide the sheep from the goats. For some time few troubled their heads about the peaceable and cautious old Lord of Session, whose inconspicuous talents were vegetating among the trees and grass-parks that the late Lady Balnillo had husbanded so carefully for him. As to his very much younger brother, who had been incessantly absent from his native land, his existence was practically forgotten. But because the Government’s Secret Intelligence Department on the east coast had remembered it at last with some suspicion, Flemington had been sent to Montrose with directions to send his reports to its agent in Perth. And Flemington had bettered his orders in landing himself at Balnillo.As Archie heard a steady tread approaching, he shrank farther back under the stair. He could only distinguish a middle-sized male figure which might belong to anyone, and he followed it with straining eyes to within a few feet of the lamp. Here it paused, and, skirting the light patch, stepped out into the middle of the way.He scarcely breathed. He was not sure yet, though the man had come nearer by half the street; but the height matched his expectation, and the avoidance of the solitary light proved the desire for secrecy in the person before him. As the man moved on he slipped from his shelter and followed him, keeping just enough distance between them to allow him to see the way he went.The two figures passed up the High Street, one behind the other, Flemington shrinking close to the walls and drawing a little nearer. Before they had gone a hundred yards, his unconscious guide turned suddenly into one of those narrow covered-in alleys, or closes, as they are called, which started at right angles from the main street.Archie dived in after him as unconcernedly as he would have dived into the mouth of hell, had his interests taken him that way. These closes, characteristic of Scottish towns to this day, were so long, and burrowed under so many sightless-looking windows and doors, to emerge in unexpected places, that he admired James’s knowledge of the short cuts of Montrose, though it seemed tohim no more than natural. The place for which he conceived him to be making was a house in the New Wynd nicknamed the ‘Happy Land,’ and kept by a well-known widow for purposes which made its insignificance an advantage. It was used, as he had heard, by the Jacobite community, because the frequent visitors who entered after dusk passed in without more comment from the townspeople than could be expressed in a lifted eyebrow or a sly nudge. It was a disconcerting moment, even to him, when the man in front of him stopped, and what he had taken for the distant glimmer of an open space revealed itself as a patch of whitewash with a door in it. The close was a cul-de-sac.Flemington stood motionless as the other knocked at the door. Flight was undesirable, for James might give chase, and capture would mean the end of a piece of work of which he was justly proud. He guessed himself to be the fleeter-footed of the two, but he knew nothing of the town’s byways, and other night-birds besides Logie might join in. But his bold wit did not desert him, for he gave a loud drunken shout, as like those he had heard at the North Port as he could make it, and lurched across the close. Its other inmate turned towards him, and as he did so Archie shouted again, and, stumbling against him, subsided upon the paved floor.The door beyond them opened a little, showing a portion of a scared face and a hand which held a light.“Guid sakes! what’ll be wrang?” inquired a tremulous female voice.The man was standing over Archie, pushing him with his foot. His answer may have reassured the questioner, but it had a different effect upon the heap on the ground.“Hoot, woman! don’t be a fool! It’s me—Ferrier!”
EVENTSseemed to Flemington to be moving fast.
Lord Balnillo dined soon after five, and during the meal the young man tried to detach his mind from the contents of the letter lying in his pocket and to listen to his host’s talk, which ran on the portrait to be begun next morning.
The judge had ordered his robes to be taken out and aired carefully, and a little room with a north aspect had been prepared for the first sitting. The details of Archie’s trade had excited the household below stairs, and the servant who waited appeared to look upon him with the curious mixture of awe and contempt accorded to charlatans and to those connected with the arts. Only James seemed to remain outside the circle of interest, like a wayfarer who pauses to watch the progress of some wayside bargain with which he has no concern. Yet, though Archie’s occupations did not move Logie, the young man felt intuitively that he was anything but a hostile presence.
“With your permission I shall go early to bed to-night,” said Flemington to his host, as the threesat over their wine by the dining-room fire and the clock’s hands pointed to eight.
“Fie!” said the judge; “you are a young man to be thinking of such things at this hour.”
“My bones have not forgotten yesterday——” began Archie.
“And what would you do if you had to ride the circuit, sir?” exclaimed Balnillo, looking sideways at him like a sly old crow. “Man, James, you and I have had other things to consider besides our bones! And here’s Mr. Flemington, who might be your son and my grandson, havering about his bed!”
Archie laughed aloud.
“Captain Logie would need to have married young for that!” he cried. “And I cannot picture your lordship as anybody’s grandfather.”
“Come, Jamie, how old are you?” inquired his brother in a tone that had a light touch of gratification.
“I lose count nowadays,” said James, sighing. “I must be near upon eight-and-thirty, I suppose. Life’s a long business, after all.”
“Yours has scarcely been long enough to have begotten me, unless you had done so at twelve years old,” observed Archie.
“When I had to ride the circuit,” began Balnillo, setting down his glass and joining his hands across his waistcoat, “I had many a time to stick fast in worse places than the Den yonder—ay, and to leave my horse where he was and get forward on my clerk’s nag. I’ve been forced tosit the bench in another man’s wig because my own had rolled in the water in my luggage, and was a plaster of dirt—maybe never fit to be seen again upon a Lord of Session’s head.”
Logie smiled with his crooked mouth. He remembered, though he did not mention, the vernacular rhyme written on that occasion by some impudent member of the junior bar:
“Auld David Balnillo gangs wantin’ his wig,And he’s seekin’ the loan of anither as big.A modest request, an’ there’s naething agin’ it,But he’d better hae soucht a new head to put in it!”
“Auld David Balnillo gangs wantin’ his wig,And he’s seekin’ the loan of anither as big.A modest request, an’ there’s naething agin’ it,But he’d better hae soucht a new head to put in it!”
“Auld David Balnillo gangs wantin’ his wig,
And he’s seekin’ the loan of anither as big.
A modest request, an’ there’s naething agin’ it,
But he’d better hae soucht a new head to put in it!”
“It was only last year,” continued his brother, “that I gave up the saddle and the bench together.”
“That was more from choice than from necessity—at least, so I have heard,” said Archie.
“You heard that, Mr. Flemington?”
“My lord, do you think that we obscure country-folk know nothing? or that reputations don’t fly farther than Edinburgh? The truth is that we of the younger generation are not made of the same stuff. That is what my grandmother tells me so often—so often that, from force of habit, I don’t listen. But I have begun to believe it at last.”
“She is a wise woman,” said Balnillo.
“She has been a mighty attractive one,” observed Archie meditatively; “at least, so she was thought at St. Germain.”
“At St. Germain?” exclaimed the judge.
“My grandfather died in exile with his master, and my father too,” replied Flemington quietly.
There was a silence, and then James Logie opened his mouth to speak, but Archie had risen.
“Let me go, Lord Balnillo,” he said. “The truth is, my work needs a steady hand, and I mean to have it when I begin your portrait to-morrow.”
When he had gone James took the empty seat by his brother.
“His grandfather with the King, and he following this womanish trade!” he exclaimed.
“I should like to have asked him more about his father,” said Balnillo; “but——”
“He did not wish to speak; I could see that,” said James. “I like the fellow, David, in spite of his paint-pots. I would like him much if I had time to like anything.”
“I have been asking myself: am I a fool to be keeping him here?” said the other. “Was I right to let a strange man into the house at such a time? I am relieved, James. He is on the right side.”
“He keeps his ears open, brother.”
“He seems to know all aboutme,” observed Balnillo. “He’s a fine lad, Jamie—a lad of fine taste; and his free tongue hasn’t interfered with his good sense. And I am relieved, as I said.”
Logie smiled again. The affection he had for his brother was of that solid quality which accepts a character in the lump, and loves it for its best parts. David’s little vanities and vacillations, his meticulous love of small things, were plain enough to the soldier, and he knew well that the benchand the bar alike had found plenty to make merry over in Balnillo. He had all the loyal feeling which the Scot of his time bore to the head of his family, and, as his sentiments towards him sprang from the heart rather than from the brain, it is possible that he undervalued the sudden fits of shrewdness which would attack his brother as headache or ague might attack another man. The fact that David’s colleagues had never made this mistake was responsible for a career the success of which surprised many who knew the judge by hearsay alone. Drink, detail and indecision have probably ruined more characters than any three other influences in the world; but the two latter had not quite succeeded with Lord Balnillo, and the former had passed him over.
“I wonder——” said James—“I wonder is it a good chance that has sent him here? Could we make anything of him, David?”
“Whisht, James!” said the other, turning his face away quickly. “You go too fast. And, mind you, if a man has only one notion in his head, there are times when his skull is scarce thick enough to stand between his thoughts and the world.”
“That is true. But I doubt Flemington’s mind is too much taken up with his pictures to think what is in other men’s heads.”
“Maybe,” replied Balnillo; “but we’ll know that better a few days hence. I am not sorry he has gone to bed.”
“I will give him an hour to get between hisblankets,” said Logie, drawing out his watch. “That should make him safe.”
Meanwhile Flemington had reached his room and was pulling his great package of spare canvases from under his sombre four-poster. He undid the straps which secured them and drew from between two of them a long dark riding-coat, thrusting back the bundle into its place. He changed his clothes and threw those he had taken off on a chair. Then he took the little locked box he had saved so carefully from the catastrophe of the previous night, and, standing on the bed, he laid it on the top of the tester, which was near enough to the ceiling to prevent any object placed upon it from being seen. He gathered a couple of cushions from a couch, and, beating them up, arranged them between the bedclothes, patting them into a human-looking shape. Though he meant to lock his door and to keep the key in his pocket during the absence he contemplated, and though he had desired the servants not to disturb him until an hour before breakfast, he had the good habit of preparing for the worst.
He slipped out with the coat over his arm, turned the key and walked softly but boldly down into the hall. He paused outside the dining-room, listening to the hum of the brothers’ voices, then disappeared down the back-stairs. If he found the door into the stable-yard secured he meant to call someone from the kitchen regions to open it and to announce that he was going out to look at his disabled horse. He would say thathe intended to return through the front door, by which Captain Logie had promised to admit him.
Everything was quiet. The only sign of life was the shrill voice of a maid singing in the scullery as she washed the dishes, and the house was not shut up for the night. Through the yard he went and out unmolested, under the great arch which supported the stable clock, and then ran swiftly round to the front. He passed under the still lighted windows and plunged into a mass of trees and undergrowth which headed the eastern approach.
Once among the friendly shadows, he put on the coat, buttoning it closely about his neck, and took a small grey wig from one of its deep pockets. When he had adjusted this under his hat he emerged, crossed the avenue, dropped over the sunk wall dividing it from the fields, and made down them till he reached the Montrose road. Through the still darkness the sound of the Balnillo stable clock floated after him, striking nine.
There was not enough light to show him anything but his nearest surroundings. The wall which bounded the great Balnillo grass-parks was at his left hand, and by it he guided his steps, keeping a perpetual look out to avoid stumbling over the inequalities and loose stones, for there were no side-paths to the roads in those days. He knew that the town was only three miles off, and that the dark stretch which extended on his right was the Basin of Montrose. A cold snap played in the air, reminding him that autumn,which in Scotland keeps its mellowness late, was some way forward, and this sting in the breath of night was indicated by a trembling of the stars in the dark vault overhead.
He hastened on, for time was precious. The paper which he had taken from Skirling Wattie’s hands had bid him prepare to follow Logie into the town when dark set in, but it had been able to tell him neither at what hour the soldier would start nor whether he would walk or ride.
His chance in meeting the beggar so soon had put him in possession of James’s usual movements immediately, but it had given him little time to think out many details, and the gaps in his plans had been filled in by guesswork. He did not think James would ride, for there had been no sound of preparation in the stable. His intention was to reach the town first, to conceal himself by its entrance, and when James should pass, to follow him to his destination. He had a rough map of Montrose in his possession, and with its help he had been able to locate the house for which he suspected him to be bound—a house known by the party he served to be one of the meeting-places of the adherents of Charles Edward Stuart.
Archie’s buoyancy of spirit was sufficient to keep at arm’s length a regret he could not quite banish; for he had the happy carelessness that carries a man easily on any errand which has possibilities of development, more from the cheerful love of chance than from responsible feeling.His light-hearted courage and tenacity were buried so deep under a luxuriance of effrontery, grace, and mother-wit, and the glamour of a manner difficult to resist, that hardly anyone but Madam Flemington, who had brought him up, suspected the toughness of their quality. He had the refinement of a woman, yet he had extorted the wonder of an east-coast Scotsman by his comprehensive profanity; the expression, at times, of a timid girl, yet he would plunge into a flood of difficulties, whose further shore he did not trouble to contemplate; but these contrasts in him spoke of no repression, no conscious effort. He merely rode every quality in his character with a loose rein, and while he attempted to puzzle nobody, he had the acuteness to know that his audience would puzzle itself by its own conception of him. The regret which he ignored was the regret that he was obliged to shadow a man who pleased him as much as did James Logie. He realized how much more satisfaction he would have got out of his present business had its object been Lord Balnillo. He liked James’s voice, his bearing, his crooked mouth, and something intangible about him which he neither understood nor tried to understand. The iron hand of Madam Flemington had brought him up so consistently to his occupation that he accepted it as a part of life. His painting he used as a means, not as an end, and the changes and chances of his main employment were congenial to a temperament at once boyish and capable.
The Pleiades rode high above Taurus, and Orion’s hands were coming up over the eastern horizon as he reached the narrow street which was the beginning of Montrose. The place was dark and ill-lit, like every country town of those days; and here, by the North Port, as it was called, the irregularities of the low houses, with their outside stairs, offered a choice of odd corners in which he might wait unseen.
He chose the narrowest part of the street, that he might see across it the more readily, and drew back into the cavity, roofed in by the ‘stairhead’ of a projecting flight of steps which ran sideways up a wall. Few people would leave the town at that hour, and those who were still abroad were likely to keep within its limits. A wretched lamp, stuck in a niche of an opposite building, made his position all the more desirable, for the flicker which it cast would be sufficient to throw up the figure of Logie should he pass beneath it. He watched a stealthy cat cross its shine with an air of suppressed melodrama that would have befitted a man-eating tiger, and the genial bellowing of a couple of drunken men came down the High Street as he settled his shoulders against the masonry at his back and resigned himself to a probable hour of tedium.
Not a mile distant, James Logie was coming along the Montrose road. He had trodden it many times in the darkness during the past weeks, and his mind was roving far from his steps, fareven from the errand on which he was bent. He was thinking of Archie, whom he believed to be snug in bed at Balnillo.
He had gone out last night and landed this fantastic piece of young humanity from the Den, as a man may land a salmon, and he had contemplated him ever since with a kind of fascination. Flemington was so much unlike any young man he had known that the difference half shocked him, and though he had told his brother that he liked the fellow, he had done so in spite of one side of himself. It was hard to believe that but a dozen years divided them, for he had imagined Archie much younger, and the appeal of his boyishness was a strong one to Logie, who had had so little time for boyishness himself. His life since he was fifteen had been merged in his profession, and the restoration of the Stuarts had been for many years the thing nearest to his heart. There had been one exception to this, and that had long gone out of his life, taking his youth with it. He was scarcely a sad man, but he had the habit of sadness, which is as hard a one to combat as any other, and the burst of youth and buoyancy that had come in suddenly with Archie had blown on James like a spring wind. Archie’s father and grandfather had died in exile, too, with Charles Edward’s parents. And his eyes reminded him of other eyes.
The events that had taken place since the landing of the Prince in July had made themselves felt all up the east coast, and the country wasJacobite almost to a man. Charles Edward had raised his standard at Glenfinnan, had marched on Edinburgh in the early part of September, and had established himself in Holyrood on the surrender of the town. After his victory over Cope at Preston Pans, he had collected his forces on Portobello sands—thirteen regiments composed of the Highland clans, five regiments of Lowlanders, two troops of horse commanded by Lords Elcho and Balmerino, with two others under Lord Kilmarnock and Lord Pitsligo. The command of the latter consisted of Angus men armed with such weapons as they owned or could gather.
The insurgent army had entered England in two portions: one of these led by Lord George Murray, and one by the Prince himself, who marched at the head of his men, sharing the fatigues of the road with them, and fascinating the imagination of the Scots by his hopeful good-humour and his keen desire to identify himself with his soldiers. The two bodies had concentrated on Carlisle, investing the city, and after a few days of defiance, the mayor displayed the white flag on the ramparts and surrendered the town keys. After this, the Prince and his father had been proclaimed at the market cross, in presence of the municipality.
But in spite of this success the signs of the times were not consistently cheering to the Jacobite party. There had been many desertions during the march across the border, and no sooner had the Prince’s troops left Edinburgh than the cityhad gone back to the Whig dominion. At Perth and Dundee the wind seemed to be changing too, and only the country places stuck steadily to the Prince and went on recruiting for the Stuarts.
Although he was aching to go south with the invaders, now that the English were advancing in force, Logie was kept in the neighbourhood of Montrose by the business he had undertaken. His own instincts and inclinations were ever those of a fighter, and he groaned in spirit over the fate which had made it his duty to remain in Angus, concerned with recruiting and the raising of money and arms. He had not yet openly joined the Stuarts, in spite of his ardent devotion to their cause, because it had been represented to him that he was, for the moment, a more valuable asset to his party whilst he worked secretly than he could be in the field. The question that perplexed the coast of Angus was the landing of those French supplies so sorely needed by the half-fed, half-clothed, half-paid troops, in the face of the English cruisers that haunted the coast; and it was these matters that kept Logie busy.
James knew the harbour of Montrose as men know the places which are the scenes of the forbidden exploits of their youth. This younger son, who was so far removed in years from the rest of his family as to be almost like an only child, was running wild in the town among the fisher-folk, and taking surreptitious trips across the bar when the staid David was pursuing his respectable career at a very different kind of bar in Edinburgh.He was the man that Montrose needed in this emergency, and to-night he was on his way to the town; for he would come there a couple of times in the week, as secretly as he could, to meet one David Ferrier, a country gentleman who had joined the regiment of six hundred men raised by Lord Ogilvie, and had been made deputy-governor of Brechin for the Prince.
Ferrier also was a man well calculated to serve the cause. He owned a small property and a farm not far from the village of Edzell, situated at the foot of a glen running up into the Grampians, and his perfect knowledge of the country and its inhabitants of all degrees gave him an insight into every turn of feeling that swept through it in those troubled days. The business of his farm had brought him continually into both Brechin and Montrose, and the shepherds, travelling incessantly with their flocks from hill to strath, formed one of his many chains of intelligence. He had joined Lord Ogilvie a couple of months earlier, and, though he was now stationed at Brechin with a hundred men of his corps, he would absent himself for a night at a time, staying quietly at Montrose in the house of a former dependent of his own, that he might keep an eye upon the movements of an English ship.
The Government sloop-of-warVenturehad come into the harbour, carrying sixteen guns and about eighty men, and had anchored south of the town, in the strait made by the passage of the River Esk into the sea. Montrose, apparently, wasto suffer for the work she had done as a port for Stuart supplies, for theVenture, lying at a convenient distance just under the fishing village of Ferryden, had fired heavily on the town, though no Jacobite troops were there. The commander had unrigged the shipping and burned two trading barques whose owners were townsmen, and he had landed a force at the fort, which had captured the town guns and had carried them on board a vessel lying at the quay.
Ferrier looked with complete trust to James Logie and his brother Balnillo. The old man, during his judicial career, had made some parade of keeping himself aloof from politics; and as his retirement had taken place previous to the landing of the Prince, he had sunk the public servant in the country gentleman before the world of politicians began to divide the sheep from the goats. For some time few troubled their heads about the peaceable and cautious old Lord of Session, whose inconspicuous talents were vegetating among the trees and grass-parks that the late Lady Balnillo had husbanded so carefully for him. As to his very much younger brother, who had been incessantly absent from his native land, his existence was practically forgotten. But because the Government’s Secret Intelligence Department on the east coast had remembered it at last with some suspicion, Flemington had been sent to Montrose with directions to send his reports to its agent in Perth. And Flemington had bettered his orders in landing himself at Balnillo.
As Archie heard a steady tread approaching, he shrank farther back under the stair. He could only distinguish a middle-sized male figure which might belong to anyone, and he followed it with straining eyes to within a few feet of the lamp. Here it paused, and, skirting the light patch, stepped out into the middle of the way.
He scarcely breathed. He was not sure yet, though the man had come nearer by half the street; but the height matched his expectation, and the avoidance of the solitary light proved the desire for secrecy in the person before him. As the man moved on he slipped from his shelter and followed him, keeping just enough distance between them to allow him to see the way he went.
The two figures passed up the High Street, one behind the other, Flemington shrinking close to the walls and drawing a little nearer. Before they had gone a hundred yards, his unconscious guide turned suddenly into one of those narrow covered-in alleys, or closes, as they are called, which started at right angles from the main street.
Archie dived in after him as unconcernedly as he would have dived into the mouth of hell, had his interests taken him that way. These closes, characteristic of Scottish towns to this day, were so long, and burrowed under so many sightless-looking windows and doors, to emerge in unexpected places, that he admired James’s knowledge of the short cuts of Montrose, though it seemed tohim no more than natural. The place for which he conceived him to be making was a house in the New Wynd nicknamed the ‘Happy Land,’ and kept by a well-known widow for purposes which made its insignificance an advantage. It was used, as he had heard, by the Jacobite community, because the frequent visitors who entered after dusk passed in without more comment from the townspeople than could be expressed in a lifted eyebrow or a sly nudge. It was a disconcerting moment, even to him, when the man in front of him stopped, and what he had taken for the distant glimmer of an open space revealed itself as a patch of whitewash with a door in it. The close was a cul-de-sac.
Flemington stood motionless as the other knocked at the door. Flight was undesirable, for James might give chase, and capture would mean the end of a piece of work of which he was justly proud. He guessed himself to be the fleeter-footed of the two, but he knew nothing of the town’s byways, and other night-birds besides Logie might join in. But his bold wit did not desert him, for he gave a loud drunken shout, as like those he had heard at the North Port as he could make it, and lurched across the close. Its other inmate turned towards him, and as he did so Archie shouted again, and, stumbling against him, subsided upon the paved floor.
The door beyond them opened a little, showing a portion of a scared face and a hand which held a light.
“Guid sakes! what’ll be wrang?” inquired a tremulous female voice.
The man was standing over Archie, pushing him with his foot. His answer may have reassured the questioner, but it had a different effect upon the heap on the ground.
“Hoot, woman! don’t be a fool! It’s me—Ferrier!”