“I wonder will you meet Captain Windham anywhere in England?” said Alison.
“How that fellow runs in your head, my darling! I vow I shall soon be jealous of him. And I marching away and leaving him here in the Castle—for I suppose he is there still. Make him my compliments if you should meet him before setting out for Ardroy,” said Ewen, smiling. For to Ardroy were his betrothed and her father retiring in a day or two.
“Ewen,” said the girl seriously, taking him by the swordbelt that crossed his breast, “will you not tell me something? Was there ever a danger that, from the injury Captain Windham did you, you might never have had the full use of your hand again?”
“Why, what put that notion into your head?”
“A word you let fall once, and an expression on Dr. Cameron’s face one day when I mentioned the hurt to him.”
“For a day or two Archie did think it might be so,” conceded her lover rather unwillingly. “And I feared it myself for longer than that, and was in a fine fright about it, as you may imagine.—But, Alison,” he added quickly, as, exclaiming, “Oh, my poor darling!” she laid her head against him, “you are not to cast that up against Captain Windham. It was I that took hold of his blade, as I told you, and I am sure that he never meant——”
“No, no,” cried Alison, lifting her head, “you mistake me. No, I am glad of what you tell me, because that hurt he did you is perhaps the fulfilment of the ‘bitter grief’ which Angus said that he should cause you . . . only happily it is averted,” she added, taking his right hand and looking earnestly at the two red, puckered seams across palm and fingers. “For thatwouldhave caused you bitter grief, Ewen, my darling.” She covered the scars with her own soft little hands, held the captive hand to her breast, and went on, eagerly pursuing her exegesis. “Indeed, if for a time you believed that you would be disabled always—how dare you have kept that from me?—he has already caused you great grief . . . and so, that part is over, and now he will only do you a service!”
But Ewen, laughing and touched, caught her to him with his other arm.
“The best service Captain Windham can do is never to let me see his face again, or I may remember how angry I was with him when I found his letter and his guineas that night at Fassefern. Nor do I think he’ll want to see mine, for in his soul he was not best pleased, I’ll undertake, at being so lightly let off the other evening and shown down the very secret stair he could not find.—But now,mo chridhe, do not let us talk of the tiresome fellow any more. . . .”
And five minutes later, when Hector Grant in his French uniform appeared at the door, they had forgotten everything except that they were parting.
“Come, Ardroy, you’ll be left behind,” he called gaily. “Dry your tears, Alison, and let him go; we’ve eight good miles to cover.”
“I was not greeting, never think it,” said Alison as she was released. “But oh, I’m wishing sore I could come with you two!”
“Indeed, I wish you could,” said Hector. “For I doubt the English ladies cannot dance the reel.”
Alison looked from her brother to her lover and back again. She might not have been crying, but there was little gaiety in her. “There’ll be more than dancing over the Border, Hector!”
“There’ll be better than dancing, you mean, my lass,” said Hector Grant, and his left hand fell meaningly on his sword-hilt. “I suppose I may take a kiss of her, Ardroy?”
“Then all went to wreck.”—The Lyon in Mourning.
—The Lyon in Mourning.
There was a bitter wind sweeping across the Beauly Firth, and Inverness on the farther shore lay shivering under a leaden sky. The Kessock ferryman had to tug at his oars, although he carried but one passenger, a gaunt, broad-shouldered young man, fully armed, who sat looking across at the little town with rather harassed blue eyes.
Four months—four months and a week over—for to-day was the seventh of March—since, full of hope and determination, the Prince’s army had set out on the road to England. Of what avail those hopes? England had not risen for the Stuarts, had not stirred. And yet, just when it seemed that, if the invaders had put their fortunes to the touch and pushed on, they might have gained a kingdom, they found themselves turning their backs on their goal and trailing home again over the Border. Little more than forty days had been spent on the other side, and, save for the rear-guard action near Penrith, the sword had not left its sheath there. The invasion had been a failure.
Yet, in spite of weariness and heartburnings, the little army had at least recrossed Esk in safety—except those of it so mistakenly left to garrison Carlisle—and many were not sorry to be back on Scottish soil. But to have retreated once more after beating Hawley at Falkirk in January, even though the bad weather had hindered pursuit and prevented a more decisive victory, to have left Stirling, after failing to take it, in such haste and disorder that the withdrawal had been more like a rout, what name best befitted that strategy? For gradually all the Lowlands had been occupied in their rear, and there was a slow tide setting northwards after them which one day might be slow no longer.
The Prince, maddened at the decision to withdraw north, which was against his every instinct, had been told that the daily desertions were so great as to leave no choice, that the only course was to master the forts in the north, keep together a force until the spring, and then increase it to fighting strength. But had the desertions been so extensive? It was hard to judge, yet, from his own experience, Ardroy would not have said so. Still, there were other difficulties, other divisions; there was the preponderating influence of the Irish favourites, who always had the Prince’s ear because they always fell in with his opinions; there was the growing ill-feeling between him and his able but hot-tempered general-in-chief, so acute that Ewen had with his own ears heard Charles Edward charge Lord George Murray behind his back with treachery. Yet Lochiel had been for withdrawal, and whatever Lochiel did was right in Ewen’s eyes. He was wondering to-day whether the Chief were still of the same opinion; he had not seen him for over a fortnight.
The ferryman’s voice broke in on his passenger’s reflections. “’Tis all much changed in Inverness now, sir, and for the better.” Evidently, like most of the inhabitants, he was Jacobite at heart. “To think that only two weeks agone I ferried Lord Loudoun and the Lord President and the Chief of Macleod over in this very boat, and all their troops crossing helter-skelter too, to get away from the Prince. . . . You’ll be yourself, perhaps, from chasing after Lord Loudoun yonder?” he added tentatively.
“Yes,” answered Ewen, his eyes still fixed on Inverness, “I am from Lord Cromarty’s force.”
The reason why the Earl of Loudoun, commanding the district for the Government, had evacuated Inverness without a battle, was really due to the somewhat ludicrous failure of his attempt to seize the person of the Prince when, in mid-February, the latter was the guest of Lady Mackintosh at Moy Hall. Conceiving the idea of surprising him there, the Earl had set out secretly at night with a force of fifteen hundred men for that purpose. But timely warning having been sent from Inverness, the Prince slipped out of Moy Hall, and the whole of Lord Loudoun’s force was thrown into confusion, and a part of it into headlong flight, by the ruse of Donald Fraser, the Moy blacksmith, and four of Lady Mackintosh’s Highland servants, who, by firing off their pieces in the dark and calling to imaginary regiments to come up, re-enacted the comedy of High Bridge on an even more piquant scale. Not only was the Earl obliged to return ignominiously to Inverness, but the desertions from his Highland companies consequent upon this affair were so great that he thought it better to await Cumberland’s advance among the Whig clans of Ross and Cromarty, to which he and his force accordingly retired; and Prince Charles’s army had entered Inverness without a blow.
The water lapped the sides of the ferryboat impatiently. The sky looked full of snow, and nearly as dark as on the day of Falkirk, while the wind was even colder than Ewen remembered it as they had plodded over Shap Fell in the December retreat from England. In Cæsar’s time, as he used to read in his boyhood, armies went into winter quarters. But alltheirmarching and fighting had been done in the severest season of the year, in autumn and winter; and who knew what awaited them in the not less cruel rigours of a Highland spring? For Cumberland, he knew, had been at Aberdeen since the end of February.
Ewen frowned, and his thoughts went back to the somewhat comic warfare from which he had just been recalled. For when Lord Cromarty had been sent with a Jacobite force over the Moray Firth after Lord Loudoun, the latter, retreating farther north into Sutherland, established himself at Dornoch on the other side of the deep-winding firth of that name, which Cromarty, having no boats, could not cross. But directly Cromarty attempted to go round by the head of the firth Lord Loudoun sent his men across by ferry to Tain, on the Ross-shire side, once more; and when Lord Cromarty returned to Ross, Lord Loudoun recalled his followers to Dornoch. And thus a vexatious and absurd game of catch as catch can had been going on, and might go on for ever unless the Prince could send another detachment to hold Tain. No, Ewen was not sorry that Lochiel had recalled him.
He pulled his bonnet with the draggled eagle’s feathers and the soiled cockade farther down on his brows, and wrapped his plaid round him, for they were now in the icy middle of the firth. The ferryman babbled on, telling him for the most part things he knew already; how, for instance, when the Prince had had the castle here blown up after its surrender, an unfortunate French engineer had been blown up with it. It was useless to ask the man what he really wanted to know, how Miss Alison Grant did over there in Inverness, Alison on whom he had not set eyes since Hector and he had said farewell to her last All Hallows in Edinburgh. It was a question whether they three would ever meet again, for Hector had been one of the officers left behind as part of the ill-fated garrison of Carlisle, and since the thirtieth of December he had been a prisoner in English hands. How Alison was bearing this ill news Ewen could only guess; it was all the heavier for her too, because her father was in France, having been despatched thither on a mission by the Prince directly after Falkirk.
Ewen knew that Alison and his aunt had come to Inverness in the hopes of seeing him, immediately on the news of the town’s surrender to the Highland army on February 18, but as it was before their arrival that Ewen himself had been sent off with Lord Cromarty’s composite force, the meeting had not taken place. Miss Cameron, as a letter had since told him, had thought it best on that to return to Ardroy, but, feeling sure that sooner or later Ewen’s duties would bring him to Inverness, she had left Alison there in the care of Lady Ogilvy, whose husband, with his regiment, was on the other side of the Spey. And now Lochiel had recalled Ewen—but only to accompany him on another enterprise. Of his approaching return Ewen had told Alison in a letter which he had despatched yesterday by Lachlan, but he had not told her how brief his stay would be, nor had he broached the project which was in his own mind—the determination which had been growing there since the retreat northward.
But, as he thought of what that was, the harassed look went out of his eyes, and he became deafer than ever to the ferryman’s chatter.
At the guardhouse by the bridge over the Ness Ewen stopped to enquire where Lady Ogilvy was to be found, for he was not sure of her lodging, and as he was talking to the officer there he heard a youthful voice behind him asking exactly the same question in Gaelic.
Ewen turned quickly, for he knew that voice. There in the entry stood a half-shy, half-excited boy of fifteen, who had never been in a town before—young Angus, Neil MacMartin’s eldest son. His face lit up, and he darted forward. “Letters, Mac ’ic Ailein!” And out of an old sporran too big for him he produced two, none the better for their sojourn in that receptacle.
With a smile and a kind word his master took them. One was from Miss Cameron to himself, the other, addressed to Miss Alison Grant at Ardroy, in an unknown and foreign-seeming hand, had been redirected by his aunt to Inverness. He put them both in his pocket, gave the lad money to procure himself food and lodging and a new pair of brogues to go home in, told him where to find his father and not to return to Ardroy without seeing him again, and himself set off in haste for Lady Ogilvy’s lodging.
But AngusOg, footsore and hungry though he was, seeing his young chieftain quite unaccompanied, pattered at a little distance behind him with all the air of a bodyguard, his head full of wild plans for joining his father and uncle in this place of many houses instead of returning to Slochd nan Eun. If they were in Mac ’ic Ailein’s tail, why not he?
Young Lady Ogilvy lodged in one of the larger houses at the lower end of Kirk Street, and as Ewen passed the many-paned projecting window on the ground floor he caught sight of a blue ribbon confining dark curls. After that he was not much conscious of being admitted, or of anything until he found its wearer in his arms.
“Oh, my darling! . . . You were expecting me—Lachlan brought you my letter?”
Alison nodded, holding very fast to him, her eyes closed like one surrendered to ecstasy. Much as they had to say to one another, for a time neither said it; it was enough merely to be together again after the months of strain and waiting and endurance and disillusioned hopes. But when they had had their fill of looking at each other they began to talk.
“I knew that you would come back to Inverness,” said Alison happily. They were both sitting on the window seat now. And she added, with all her old gaiety, “If Lochiel would permit so forward an act, I would kiss him for having recalled you from Lord Cromarty’s force.”
“But he has not recalled me in order to stay in Inverness, darling—at least not for more than a couple of days. He and Keppoch are shortly going with reinforcements to the siege of Fort William, and I go too.”
All the peace and content was dashed out of Alison’s face. “Oh, Ewen . . . and I thought you would be staying here!” She bit her lip and the tears came into her eyes.
Her hand was in Ewen’s, and he sat a moment silent, looking down with some intentness at his ring upon it. “But we shall have two days together,m’eudail. And . . . do you not think that those two days are long enough . . . that the time has come . . . to change this ring of my mother’s for another?”
The colour ran over Alison’s face and her hand made a movement as if to withdraw itself. “Oh, my dear,” she said rather breathlessly, “not when my father is absent—not till he comes back! And not when . . . when one does not know what will befall next!”
“But, my heart,” said Ewen quietly, “that is just why I want to make you my wife. Do you not see that? Why, you should have been mine these six months. I have waited even longer than I had thought to wait, and God knows that was long enough.” And as Alison said nothing, but looked down, twisting her ring, he went on, suppressing a little sigh, “There are many reasons why we should be wed without further loss of time, and these two days that we have now seem designed for that. Our marriage could easily be arranged in the time; Mr. Hay, the Episcopal minister of Inverness is, I believe, in the town; Lochiel would take your father’s place. And I could carry you back to Ardroy, as its mistress, when we start for Fort William . . . Alison, dear love, say Yes!”
He was very gentle as he pleaded, for she seemed oddly reluctant, considering that they had been formally contracted since last July, and should indeed have been married in the autumn. She even mentioned Hector and his perilous situation, rather tentatively, as a reason for delay; but Ewen told her that her brother’s prospects were ten times better than those of most who wore the white cockade, for he held a French commission, and could not be treated otherwise than as a prisoner-of-war. And finally Alison said that she would ask Lady Ogilvy’s opinion.
Ewen tried not to be hurt. Since he had not the mistaken conviction of some young men that he knew all about women, even Alison’s feelings were sometimes a mystery to him. He longed to say, “Ihave not a French commission, Alison,” and leave her to draw a conclusion which might get the better of her hesitancy, but it would have been cruel. And as he looked at her in perplexity he remembered a commission of another kind, and put his hand into his pocket.
“When I saw you, Alison, everything else went out of my head. But here is a letter I should have given you ere this; forgive me. It was sent to you at Ardroy, and Aunt Marget despatched one of the MacMartin lads hither with it; and meeting me by the bridge just now he gave it to me for you. It is from France, I think.”
“I do not know the hand,” said Alison, studying the superscription, and finally breaking the seal. Ewen looked out of the window; but he did not see any of the passers-by.
Suddenly there was an exclamation from the girl beside him on the window seat. He turned; her face was drained of colour.
“My father . . . Ewen, Ewen, I must go at once—he is very ill . . . dying, they think. Oh, read!”
Horrified, Ewen read a hasty French letter, already more than two weeks old, which said that M. Grant, on the point of leaving France again, had been taken seriously ill at Havre-de-Grâce; the writer, apparently a recent French acquaintance of his, appealed to Mlle Grant to sail for France at once, if she wanted to see her father alive—not that the state of M. Grant at the moment was desperate, but because the doctor held out small hope of ultimate recovery.
Alison had sprung to her feet, and clasping and unclasping her hands was walking up and down the room.
“Ewen, Ewen, what if I am not in time! My dearest, dearest father, ill and quite alone over there—no Hector anywhere near him now! I must go at once. I heard Lady Ogilvy say that there was a French vessel in port here due to sail for France in a day or two; I could go in that. Perhaps the captain could be persuaded to sail earlier . . .”
In contrast to her restlessness, Ewen was standing quite still by the window.
“Ewen,” she began again, “help me! Will you make enquiries of the captain of the ship? I think she is for St. Maloes, but that would serve; I could post on into Normandy. Will you find out the captain now—this afternoon? . . . Ewen, what ails you?”
For her lover was gazing at her with an expression which was quite new to her.
“I am deeply sorry to hear this ill news of Mr. Grant,” he said in a low voice, and seemed to find a difficulty in speaking, “—more sorry than I have words for. But, Alison, what ofme?”
“You would not wish to keep me back, surely?”
“What do you think?” asked the young man rather grimly. “But I will not—no, it would not be right. I will let you go, but only as my wife. You’ll marry me to-morrow, Alison!”
There was no pleading about him now. He moved a step or two nearer, having to keep a tight hold on himself neither to frighten her nor to let slip a word against this other claim which, much as he respected it, was coming in once more to sweep her away from him, when he had waited so long. Whatever might be read on his face, his actions were perfectly gentle.
And Alison came to him, the tears running down her cheeks, and put her two hands in his. “Yes, Ewen, I am ready. Heart’s darling, I wish it, too; you must not think I am unwilling. . . . And you said that you would carry me off by force if I were,” she added, laughing a little hysterically, as he folded her once again in his arms.
So next day they were married in the little Episcopal meeting-house of Inverness. Only a very few people were present, but the Prince was among them: not the lighthearted adventurer of the escapade in Edinburgh in which the bridegroom had played so belauded a part, but a young man who looked what the last three months had made him, soured and distrustful. Yet he gave them a glimpse of his old charming smile after the ceremony, when he kissed the bride and wished them both happiness.
“I would I were venerable enough to give you my blessing, my friends,” he said, “since ’tis all I have to give; but I think I am somewhat the junior of your husband, Lady Ardroy; and in any case how could I bestow my benediction upon a bridegroom who has the bad taste to be so much taller than his future King!”
“But you know that I am at your feet, my Prince,” said Ewen, smiling, and he kissed once more the hand which he had kissed that night at Holyrood.
Last of all Lochiel, grave and gentle, who had given Alison away, kissed her too, and said, “Ewen is a very fortunate man, my dear; but I think you are to be congratulated also.”
For their brief wedded life a little house which Mr. Grant had hired the previous summer had been hastily prepared; it was bare almost to penury, a tent for a night or two, meet shelter for those who must part so soon. And Ewen had no gift ready for his bride—save one. When they came home he put on her middle finger the ring which the Prince had given him in Edinburgh.
Next day was theirs to play at housekeeping, and they were a great deal more gay over it than Jeanie Wishart, Alison’s woman, who went about her work perpetually murmuring, “Puir young things!” In the afternoon, since the March sun had come out to look at them, they wandered among the Islands and gazed down at Ness, hurrying past, broad and clear and shallow, to the firth. That evening they had thought to spend alone by their own fireside; yet nothing would serve Lady Ogilvy save to give a supper for the new-married pair, and Lady Ardroy, in a rose-coloured gown, was toasted by not a few who would never drink a pledge again; and all the Jacobite songs were sung . . . but not, somehow, that only too appropriate, ‘Oh, this is my departing time, for here nae longer maun I stay,’ with which gatherings were wont to conclude.
Yet Ewen and Alison sat by their fire after all, sat there until the last peat crumbled, and it began to grow cold; but Alison, as once before, was warm in the Cameron tartan, for Ewen had wrapped it round her knees over her pretty gown. He sat at her feet, looking very long and large, the firelight, while it lasted, playing on the shining golden brown of his hair, accentuating too the faint hollow in his cheek, the slight suggestion of a line between the brows which the last two months had set there.
“Ewen, I want to tell you something.” Alison hesitated and a tinge of colour stole over her face. “Do you know,m’eudail, that you talk in your sleep?”
He looked up at her surprised. “Do I? No, dearest, I did not know. Did I talk much—to disturb you?”
She shook her head. Ewen seemed to turn over this information for a moment. “I believe,” he said thoughtfully, “that as a boy I used to do it sometimes, so Aunt Margaret said, but I thought that I had outgrown it. What did I talk of—you, sweetheart, I’ll warrant?”
“No,” said Alison, smiling down upon him. “Not a word of your wife. You seemed to think that you were speaking to someone of whom she may well be jealous; and what is more, when I spoke to you, thinking for a moment that you were awake, you answered quite sensibly.”
“Jealous!” exclaimed Ewen, turning his clear, candid gaze full upon her. “My little white love, there’s no one in this world of whom you have occasion to be jealous, nor ever has been. Do not pretend to be ignorant of where my heart is kept!” He took her clasped hands, opened them gently, and kissed the palms. “The space is small,” he said, looking critically at it, “but, such as the heart is, all of it liesthere.”
Alison enveloped him in a warm, sweet smile, and slid the hands round his neck. “All? No; there’s a corner you have kept for someone else, and in it you have set up a little shrine, as the Papists do, for your saint—for Lochiel. But I am not jealous,” she added very softly. “I understand.”
Ewen gave her a look, put his own hands over those clasped round his neck, and dropped his head on to her knee in silence. After a while she put her cheek against the thick, warm waves of his hair. Joy and apprehension had so clasped hands about Alison Cameron this day that it was hard to know which was the stronger.
But in the night she knew. The icy fingers of foreboding seemed gripped about her heart. Not even Ewen’s quiet, unhurried breathing beside her, not even the touch of his hand, over which her fingers stole in search of comfort, could reassure her; his nearness but made the pain the sharper. Oh, to have him hers only to lose him so soon! But her father—alone, dying, over the seas! She reached out and lit a candle, that she might look once more at the husband she was leaving for her father’s sake, for God knew whether she should ever see him asleep beside her again. It was not the seas alone which were about to sunder them. . . .
Ewen was sleeping so soundly, too, so quietly; and he looked as young and untroubled as the boy she had known five years ago in Paris. There was no sign on his face, in its rather austere repose, of the trouble which had forced its way through his unconscious lips last night. Alison had not told him by the fire, that on their bridal night he had uttered protests, bewildered questionings, against that double retreat in which he had shared. ‘Must we go back, Lochiel—must we go back?’
She gazed at him a long time, until for tears she could see him no longer, and, blowing out the light, lay and sobbed under her breath. She thought she should die of her unhappiness; she almost wished that she might; yet she sobbed quietly lest she should wake Ewen to unhappiness also. But quite suddenly, though he had not stirred, she heard his voice in the darkness; and then she was in his arms, and he was comforting her in their own Highland tongue, with all its soft endearments and little words of love. And there at last she fell asleep.
But Ewen stayed awake until the grudging March daylight crept into the little room where he lay wide-eyed, with Alison’s dark curls on his heart, and within it a chilly sword that turned and turned. He would never hold her thus again; he was sure of it.
The morning was very cold, and when he took Alison to the French brig a little snow was falling; the gang-plank was slippery too with rime. He carried her bodily over it, and down to the cabin which she would share with Jean Wishart.
There under the low beams Alison’s courage broke at last. Clinging to him convulsively she said, in a voice that was not hers, that he must come with her; that she could not go without him—she could not! He must come too, and then he would be safe . . .
Ewen turned even paler than she. “My darling, my heart’s darling, you don’t mean that!”
Alison swayed; her eyes closed. Alarmed, he put her on a seat against the bulkhead, and, kneeling by her, began to chafe her hands. Soon they clenched in his, and she opened her eyes, dark pools of sorrow, and said firmly through colourless lips, “No, no, I did not mean it! I know that you cannot come. Will you . . . can you forget what I said, Ewen?”
“It is forgotten. It was not you who spoke,” he answered, trying to keep his own voice steady as he knelt there, holding her hands very tightly. There was a trampling sound on deck; how long had they for all the thousand, thousand things that remained to say? There was no time to say even one. He bent his head and pressed his lips passionately upon the hands he held. Anguish though it was to lose her, it was better that she should go. For since he had urged her to marry him that he might take her back to Ardroy he saw with different eyes. The future looked blacker than he had realised; away in Ross he had not known of the desperate want of money, even of food, the gradually thinning ranks. He knew of these now, and saw even Cumberland’s delay at Aberdeen in a sinister light, as if the Hanoverian commander knew that the fates were working on his side and that there was no need for haste. . . .
Above him Alison’s voice said suddenly, “Ewen . . . Ewen, why do you not say, ‘Stay then in Scotland with me—do not go to France yourself!’?”
He was startled; had she read his thoughts? “Why, my darling,” he answered as readily as he could, “because your father needs you so sorely.”
Her voice sank still lower. “There is another reason, too—do not deny it! You think that I am safer away!”
And Ewen did not answer.
“And you gave me this ring—the Prince’s ring—not only as a wedding gift, but because you feared that one day . . . soon . . . it might be taken from you!”
After a pause he said, “Partly, perhaps.”
“Then . . . I cannot leave you, even for my father,” said Alison, and sprang up. “I must stay in Scotland, beside you. I am your wife. Take me back to the quay, Ewen—tell Mrs. Wishart . . .”
But Ewen, on his feet too, caught her in his arms. “No, darling, no! Think of your father, whom you may never see again. And, love of my heart”—he tried to make his voice light—“you cannot come besieging Fort William with me! When we have beaten Cumberland, as we beat Cope and Hawley, I will come to France and fetch you home to Ardroy.”
“When we have beaten Cumberland.” Alison looked up into her husband’s eyes with a most insistent question in her own. But he did not answer the question, though he knew very well what it was, for he said gently, “How can one see into the future, darling? One can only . . . do one’s duty.”
Even as he uttered that rigorous word there came a knock at the cabin door, and a gruff French voice announced that they would be casting off in another minute or two, and that if Monsieur wished to land he must be quick.
So the sword slid down between them. Ewen’s grasp tightened.
“Alison, white love, rose of my heart, we are one for ever now! You will know, I think, what befalls me.”
Her face was hidden on his breast, so close that he could not even kiss it. “Darling, darling, let me go . . .” he whispered. But it was rather a question, he felt, whether he could ever unloose his own clasp and cast his heart from him. And men were running about shouting overhead; the hawser was coming inboard . . .
Suddenly Alison lifted her face, and it was almost transfigured. “Yes, I shall know . . . for I think you will come back to me, God keeping you.” She took her arms from his shoulders; he bent to her lips for the kiss that first turned his heart to water and then ran through it like wine, loosed his hold of her, and walked straight out of the cabin without another word or look. With the same unchecked movement he crossed the gang-plank from the deck, as if he could not trust himself to remain the moment or so longer that it would take the sailors to cast off the second hawser.
But on the quay he turned, wishing they would be quick, and make it impossible for him to leap on board again, though the plank was now withdrawn, and be carried off with Alison. And at last, after an eternity which was all too short, the end of the rope splashed into the water. More sails went up; the distance began to widen. Alison was going from him.
He stood there motionless, long after the brig had left the shore, watching her move to the waters of the firth. The sparse snowflakes whirled relentlessly against him, but they melted as soon as they came to rest, as brief in their stay as his two days’ happiness.
From the quay Ewen went straight to Lochiel’s head-quarters and reported himself for duty. Two hours later his body was marching out of Inverness in the van of the Cameron reinforcements. Where his soul was he hardly knew.
To rid the Great Glen of both its obnoxious English forts was an enterprise which highly commended itself to those clans whom they chiefly incommoded, the Camerons and the Glengarry and Keppoch MacDonalds. There had been jubilation among these when, on March 5, Fort Augustus had surrendered after two days’ siege, and what artillery the besiegers possessed was free to be turned against Fort William.
But Fort William, between Inverlochy Castle and the little town of Maryburgh, was not so accommodating as its fellow. For one thing, it was in a better position to defend itself, since sloops of war could come up Loch Linnhe to revictual it, even though the Highlanders held the narrows at Corran. It had a garrison of five hundred men, both regulars and Argyll militia, plenty of guns, and, after the middle of March, that zealous officer Captain Carolina Scott to assist Major-General Campbell in the defence. Already, by the time that Ewen arrived with Lochiel and the reinforcements, there had been some severe skirmishes, and the Highlanders had fought an engagement with the soldiers from the fort and the sailors from theBaltimoreandSerpentsloops, in which the latter succeeded in landing and destroying the ferry-house and several small villages on the Ardgour side. On this the Camerons ensconced themselves at Corpach, where Loch Linnhe bends to its junction with Loch Eil, and there beat off an armed flotilla of boats with such success that theBaltimorewas ordered thither to open fire and cover a landing. But the Highlanders’ position was so good that the bombardment made no impression, and Captain How had to withdraw baffled.
Ewen was with these adventurers at Corpach, enjoying himself and finding in conflict an anodyne for his thoughts; it made the blood run pleasantly and enabled him to forget Alison for an hour or so. But the ordinary business of the siege was less stimulating, since he had nothing to do with the artillery under Stapleton and Grant and their Franco-Irish gunners, and the only chance of hand-to-hand fighting lay in repelling the constant raids of the garrison and trying to protect the unfortunate dwellers in the countryside who suffered by them. He seemed to himself to live in a series of disconnected scenes, sometimes here in Lochaber, where Ben Nevis, thickly capped with snow, looked down impartially on assailants and defenders alike, sometimes back in Inverness, going through every moment of those short two days with Alison. But no one who did not observe him constantly and closely could have guessed this. Lochiel, who knew him well and did observe him closely, gave him as much to do as possible.
But it was certainly not Lochiel who enjoined on him the feat which brought his share in the siege to an abrupt end.
It was a fine morning in the latter half of March, blown through with a gusty wind. Brigadier Stapleton, having got some mortars into position on one of the little eminences about half a mile from the fort, had started to shell it from that point, and the fort was replying. Since its fire was directed towards destroying the hostile batteries, there was no great danger from it to those not serving the guns, and the Highlanders had no doubt grown a little careless, which might account for the fact that near the crest of another hillock, about a quarter of a mile away from Stapleton’s mortars and the same distance as they from Fort William, Lochiel and Keppoch were standing unconcernedly in the midst of a little group of Camerons and MacDonalds. Below them, on the slope looking towards the fort, a half-ruined stone wall hinted at a bygone attempt at cultivation or enclosure. The two chiefs were interested in some rather suspicious activities on board theBaltimoresloop, visible at anchor in the loch beyond the counterscarp and bastions of the fort.
“I vow it seems like another raid preparing,” said Alexander MacDonald. “Do you look, Lochiel.”
He passed the Cameron his spyglass. Ewen, who was sitting comfortably in the heather at a few yards’ distance, nearer the battery, rested his elbows on his knees and shaded his eyes the better to see also, his brain at these words busy with a vision of a possibly gratified desire for what he considered real fighting.
Suddenly, as it were with half an eye, he became aware of something unusual in the fort, where, a mere eight hundred yards away, movements were perfectly visible. Surely the defenders had altered the position of one of their six-pounders . . . could they be intending . . . Lochiel standing there with the glass to his eye looking at the sloop was fully exposed to their view . . .
In a second Ewen was on his feet, shouting a warning, but as he sprang came the flash and the roar. “God!” he cried in agony, and with another bound was up on the crest of the hillock, his arms wide. Could one man’s body suffice?
There was a crash as the shot pitched into the ruined wall on the slope below, breaking and scattering the big rough stones in all directions. Ewen never saw what struck him, but at the moment of impact, which seemed to drive his soul from his body, he had just time to think, “It is forhim! Alison, forgive me . . .” Then he went into darkness.
When he came out of it again he found himself lying on the farther slope in the midst of a group of people, with his head on someone’s arm, and hands unfastening his coat. A voice said, “No, the head wound is only slight; ’tis here on the breast that the large stone must have struck him.”
Ewen tried to get his own voice. It was difficult, and the world heaved. “Is . . . Lochiel safe?”
Archibald Cameron, kneeling beside him, looked up for a second. “He is holding you at this moment, dear lad. No—lie still!” He went on with his examination.
But Ewen disobediently turned his swimming head a little, and saw that he was indeed in Lochiel’s hold, so Lochiel must be unharmed. Why then had he his other hand over his eyes? Puzzled but content, he shut his own again.
When next he thought much about his surroundings he was lying in the same place, wrapped in a plaid, with Lachlan squatting near, gazing at him with anguished eyes. Over the level top of Ben Nevis clouds, as white as the snow which crowned it, were hurrying against the blue. It came back to Ewen that he had heard Archie say that he was greatly bruised, but that no bones seemed broken, and no internal injury, he hoped, inflicted; so, after speaking a word or two of reassurance to his foster-brother, he relapsed into his state of happy content, with pain every time he drew a breath and a violent headache. But Lochiel was safe.
Presently he felt his hand taken, and there was Lochiel himself kneeling by him, and Lachlan on the other side removing himself respectfully to a distance.
“Ewen, Ewen,” said the well-beloved voice, with trouble in it, “you should not have done it!”
Ewen gave him a radiant smile. He felt neither penitence nor any need for it.
“I saw . . . what was going to happen,” he observed.
“I do not think that anything would have reached me. No one was struck but you, who deliberately threw yourself in the way of the fragments, and one of Keppoch’s gillies, slightly. If you had been killed on my behalf——” Lochiel left the sentence unfinished, and glanced down at the cuff of his coat; there was a stain on it.
Ewen’s eyes had followed his. “Do not say that you are hurt after all!” he exclaimed in a tone of horror.
“It is your own blood, Ewen. Your head was not much cut, Archie says. But oh, my child, if I had had your death too at my door, when there is so much that I must answer for!”
And the young man saw that his Chief was moved—more deeply moved than he had ever seen him; but, being still stupid from the blow on the head, he thought, “Why does he say that . . . whose death is at his door?” And he lay looking with a mixture of affection and perplexity at the kinsman who was still as much his pattern of all that was noble, wise and generous as when he himself had been a boy under his tutelage. Then the fort fired one of its twelve-pounders at the battery, and through the din Lochiel told him that a litter had been sent for to take him to Glen Nevis House, where he should see him again later.
Soon after, therefore, four of his men carried Ewen to that house of Alexander Cameron’s at the opening of the glen which Lochiel and Keppoch had made their head-quarters; and he heard the voice of the Nevis, telling of the heights from which it had descended; and a little later, when that had faded from his hearing, a less agreeable one, Lowland and educated, saying how disgraceful it was that a peaceful writer could not go a mile from Maryburgh to visit a client without being seized by cattle-thieves; that indeed the said thieves could do no less than send him back under escort and safe-conduct. And here the indignant speaker’s gaze must have fallen upon the litter with its burden, for his next remark was: “What have we here—another of ye killed? I’m rejoiced to see it!”
Ewen felt constrained to deny this imputation. “I am not in the least killed,” he rejoined with annoyance, opening his eyes to find himself almost at the door of Glen Nevis House, and to see, in the midst of a group of rather shamefaced Highlanders, Mr. Chalmers, the Whig notary of Maryburgh, whom he knew and who knew him. The lawyer gave an exclamation.
“Gude sakes, ’tis Mr. Ewen Cameron of Ardroy! I’m unco sorry to see you in this condition—and in such company, Ardroy!”
“Why, what other company do you suppose I should be in?” asked Ewen, and shut his eyes again and heard no more of Mr. Chalmers and his grievances. But that chance meeting was to mean a great deal to him afterwards.
What meant more to him at the moment, however, was that Dr. Cameron kept him in bed longer than he had anticipated, and he had not been on his legs again for more than a day or two when the siege of Fort William was suddenly abandoned. The defenders were too resolute, the besiegers unfortunate, and their artillery not sufficiently powerful; and in the night of April 3, after spiking their remaining cannon, the attacking force withdrew. And, since they were in their own land of Lochaber, and it was seed-time or past it, Lochiel and Keppoch gave permission to their men to go home for a few days. So Ewen and his little force returned to Ardroy, and he saw Loch na h-Iolaire again, and caused Neil to row him upon it, for it was too cold for a swim; in the middle of which voyage he was struck by a sudden suspicion, and, landing on the islet, examined it for traces of the heron. There were none; and the nest, up at the top of the tallest pine-tree, must long have been uninhabited, for the winds had blown it nearly all away.
Shortly afterwards Lachlan had a singularly unpleasant interview with his chieftain, in which, upbraided with the most direct disobedience, he replied that his concern for the being he loved best on earth was even stronger than his wish to obey him; after which, in a dramatic but perfectly sincere manner, he drew his dirk and said that rather than Mac ’ic Ailein should look at him with such anger he would plunge it into his own heart. In the end Ewen was constrained to forgive him, after pointing out how little his disobedience had availed. There were more herons than one in Lochaber.
And other officers than Captain Windham in King George’s army, he might have added. His twice-held prisoner had indeed passed from his thoughts these many weeks; the question of the slaughtered heron necessarily brought him back there for a moment, but without any permanence. Ewen did not anticipate another meeting with him, for were Angus’s prophecy going to be fulfilled to the letter, they would surely have encountered each other in the confusion of Falkirk fight, where the second battalion of the Royals had—until it fled—faced the Camerons across the ravine. No; that two meetings should come to pass out of the five predicted was quite a reasonable achievement for the oldtaibhsear.
And then one afternoon, when he was absorbed in thoughts of Alison, with all the final suddenness of the expected came a panting messenger from Achnacarry, with a scrawl in Lochiel’s writing: “Gather your men and march at once. Cumberland is moving. God send we reach Inverness in time!”
A bad dream is sometimes only a dream to the sleeper; he may know it to be such, and tell himself so. But this, though it held some of the elements of nightmare, was no dream; it was reality, this tramping of a tired and half-starved army through the night in a hopeless attempt to surprise the Duke of Cumberland’s camp—hopeless because it was plain that they would never get to Nairn before daylight now. Aide-de-camp after aide-de-camp, officer after officer, had come riding past to the head of the column of Highlanders and Atholl men to urge Lord George Murray to halt, for the rear could not keep up. And yet, thought Ewen rather scornfully, they had not just marched more than fifty miles over mountainous country in two days, as most of Clan Cameron had.
It was by this feat of endurance and speed that Lochiel and his men had reached Inverness the previous evening, to learn, to their dismay, that Cumberland had been allowed to cross the Spey unopposed. Despite fatigue they had made but a brief halt in the town and had proceeded to Culloden House, whither the Prince had gone earlier in the day. A warm welcome had been theirs, for he was becoming alarmed at their non-appearance, the more so that by no means all his scattered forces were yet returned from the various enterprises on which they had been despatched. Cromarty, the Macgregors and the Mackinnons were still north of the Moray Firth, no one knew where, and Keppoch had not yet appeared, nor the Frasers, nor Cluny Macpherson and his men. To-day, since early morning, the whole army had been drawn up on the chosen ground on Drumossie Moor, in the belief that Cumberland would advance that day and attempt to reach Inverness. But the hours went by and the enemy did not appear, and then the cravings of hunger began to be felt, for all the food which had passed any man’s lips that day was a single biscuit served out at noon. And at last it was clear that, the fifteenth of April being his birthday, Cumberland was remaining at Nairn to allow his troops fitly to celebrate it. The Prince’s hungry forces therefore withdrew from the moor again to the vicinity of Duncan Forbes’s mansion.
It was known that Lord George Murray had not liked the ground chosen for their stand, and Brigadier Stapleton and Colonel Ker of Graden, the ablest staff officer the Prince possessed, had crossed the water of Nairn that morning to seek for a better. They reported that the boggy, hilly ground there was much more suitable than the open moor for receiving the Hanoverian attack, since it was almost impossible for cavalry and artillery, and the foot might perhaps be tempted into some pass where they could be fallen upon and annihilated. On the other hand, it was urged that, if the Highlanders withdrew over the stream into the hills, Cumberland would almost certainly slip by them to Inverness, seize the baggage and stores and starve them out. The matter was still unsettled when, at an informal council of officers in the afternoon, someone (Ewen was not clear who) had proposed to surprise the Hanoverian camp by a night attack. Most of the soldiers there, it was thought, would be more or less drunk after the festivities of the birthday. Lord George Murray and the Prince were both found to be in favour of the idea; moreover, owing to the scandalous neglect of the commissariat shown by Hay of Restalrig, who had succeeded Murray of Broughton as secretary, there was not a crumb of food for the men next day. Objections to the plan there were indeed: the distance—a good ten miles—the danger of a spy’s carrying the news to the English camp, the absence of so many contingents. But the arrival of Keppoch with two hundred MacDonalds when the meeting was in progress clinched the matter, and the night attack was resolved upon.
The decision had purposely been kept from the men themselves, and it was with remorseful knowledge of the futility of their preparations that Ewen had watched his own little company choosing the driest spots on the heathery hillside for a night’s repose, making a fire and rolling themselves supperless in their plaids to seek in sleep a palliative for the gnawing hunger which possessed them. Perhaps it would have been better if the rank and file had been told what was afoot, for by the time planned for the start, seven o’clock, it was found that hundreds of them had stolen off in search of food. And to the mounted officers sent out in the utmost haste to beat them up and bring them back—no easy task—many had replied that the officers might shoot them if they pleased, but go back they would not until they had had meat. The Prince was urged to give up the plan, but he refused; and as those who had remained were assembled, the word had been given to march off.
It was an excellent night for a surprise, dark and misty; but it was also very favourable for tired and hungry men to drop unobserved out of the ranks, and many of them did so. Ewen was as tired and hungry as anyone else, but he shut his mouth and plodded on like an automaton at the head of his company. Lochiel was in front, and where Lochiel went he followed as a matter of course. And close on his heels came Neil and Lachlan, of the same mind regarding him.
Although Lord George had never consented actually to stop, he had been obliged to march slower and slower in consequence of the messages from the rear; but now at last there came a halt, and a prolonged one. The Duke of Perth rode past, and presently Hay of Restalrig. Discussion was evidently going forward in the van. And meanwhile the unwished-for light was growing in the east, not yet daybreak, but its harbinger. Faces began to be distinct, and haggard faces they were.
And here came back one of the Mackintosh guides, the same who, not long before, had brought the order to attack with the sword only. Before he spoke to him Ewen guessed what orders he brought now. They were to retrace their steps; the surprise was being abandoned. Too much time had been lost on the way, and to attack in daylight would be madness. All the nightmare effort had been for nothing—for worse than nothing . . .
Between five and six of that cold, grey morning Ewen found himself once more before the gates of Culloden House. Men were dropping where they stood; some, he knew, were lying worn out along the roadside. He was in no better case himself; in some ways, indeed, in a worse, for it was not three weeks since he had left his bed after his experience at Fort William. But in anger and desperation he despatched Neil and Lachlan, who still seemed capable of movement, to Inverness with orders to get food for their comrades if they had to steal it. It was all he could do, and when he got inside the house he sat down exhausted in the hall, and fell asleep with his head on a table. He was hardly conscious of the stir a little later, when the Prince arrived, tired, dispirited and sore from the complaints which he could not avoid hearing. But from scraps of talk about him (for the place was full of officers in the same plight as himself) Ewen’s weary brain did receive the welcome impression that they would at least have some hours to rest and recuperate—and later, please Heaven, to get some food—for Cumberland was evidently not going to attack to-day.
He was dreaming that he was at home, and sitting down to a good meal, when he felt someone shaking him, and, raising his head, saw one of his own cousins from Appin, Ian Stewart.
“What is it?” he asked stupidly.
“A straggler has just come in with news that some troops are advancing from Nairn. He did not know whether it was the main body or only skirmishers . . .”
Ewen dragged himself to his feet. All round the hall others were doing the same, but some would require more to rouse them than a mere rumour. It was broad daylight; a clock near marked nine o’clock. “It cannot be the main body—the attack!” he said incredulously. “There was no sign of general movement at Nairn; the camp fires were burning—we could see them four miles away. However, the truth can soon be discovered.”
The weary-faced Appin lad shrugged his shoulders. “It will not be very easy to make sure,” he said. “Fitz-James’s Horse is all dispersed after fugitives and food. I tell you, Ardroy, I do not much care which it is, if only I can get an hour’s sleep.”
“I must find Lochiel,” said Ewen. He had no idea where he was—a sufficient comment on his own state—but was told that he was upstairs with the Prince, who, on coming in, had thrown himself just as he was upon his bed. Half dizzy with sleep and hunger, Ewen went up the wide staircase, hearing everywhere voices discussing the report, and arguing and wondering what was to be done, and declaring that the speakers disbelieved the news—because they desired to disbelieve it.
When he reached the landing the door of the Prince’s bedchamber opened, and Lord George Murray and Ker of Graden came out together, the latter looking very grim, Lord George plainly in a rage. They went down the stairs to the encumbered hall, Lord George calling for his aides-de-camp. The door meanwhile had been left ajar; loud voices came through it, and Ewen had a glimpse of the Prince, sitting on the edge of his bed, still booted, with Sir Thomas Sheridan, his old tutor, beside him. He was speaking, not to him, but to someone invisible.
“I tell you,” his voice came sharply, edged with fatigue and obstinacy, “I tell you the English will be seized with panic when they come to close quarters. They cannot face my Highlanders in the charge; ’twill be again as it was at Gladsmuir and——”
Then the door shut behind Lochiel, coming slowly out. He did not see the young man waiting for him, and on his tired, unguarded face Ewen could read the most profound discouragement.
As he crossed the landing Ewen took a couple of strides after him, laying hold of his plaid, and the Chief stopped.
“Is it true, Donald?”
“I suppose so,” answered Lochiel quietly. “At any rate we must take up our positions at once.”
“Over the water of Nairn, then, I hope?”
“No. The Prince is immovable on that point. We are to take our stand on our old positions of yesterday on the moor.”
“When you and Lord George disapprove!—It’s the doing, no doubt, of the same men who were for it yesterday, those who have nothing to lose, the French and Irish officers!”
Lochiel glanced over his shoulder. “Don’t speak so loud, Ewen. But you are right—may God forgive them!”
“May God—reward them!” said Ewen savagely. “We are to march our companies back to the moor then?”
“Yes. And we and Atholl are to be on the right wing to-day.”
Ewen was surprised, the MacDonalds always claiming and being conceded this privilege. But he did not seek the reason for the change, and followed his Chief in silence down the stairs. The confusion in the hall had increased, and yet some officers were still lying on the floor without stirring, so spent were they.
“Find me Dungallon and Torcastle,” said Lochiel. “By the way, have you had anything to eat, Ewen, since noon yesterday?”
“Have you, which is more to the point?” asked Ewen.
Lochiel smiled and shook his head. “But fortunately a little bread and whisky was discovered for the Prince.”
Ewen found Ludovic Cameron of Torcastle, the Chief’s uncle, and Cameron of Dungallon, major of the regiment, and himself went out in a shower of sleet to rouse his men, having in several cases to pull them up from the ground. He had got them into some kind of stupefied order when he saw Lochiel and Dungallon come by. A body of MacDonalds was collecting near, and as the two Camerons passed—Ewen scarcely realised it then, but he remembered it afterwards—there were muttered words and a black look or two.
But he himself was thinking bitterly, “I wonder are we all fey? We had the advantage of a good natural barrier, the Spey, and we let Cumberland cross it like walking over a burn. Now we might put the Nairn water between him and us—and we will not!” An insistent question suddenly leapt up in his heart; he looked round, and by good fortune Lochiel came by again, alone. Ewen intercepted and stopped him.
“For God’s sake, one moment!” He drew his Chief a little apart towards the high wall which separated the house from the parks. “If the day should go against us, Lochiel, if we have all to take to the heather——”
“Yes?” said his cousin gravely, not repudiating the possibility.
“Where will you make for? Give us a rendezvous—give me one, at all events!”
“Why, my dear boy, I shall make for Achnacarry.”
“But that is just where you would be sought for by the Elector’s troops!”
“Yet I must be where the clan can find me,” said the Chief. “Loch Arkaig is the best rallying point. ’Tis not easy neither to come at it suddenly in force because there is always the Lochy to ford. And if I were strictly sought for in person, there are plenty of skulking places round Achnacarry, as you know.”
“But none beyond the wit of man to discover, Donald—and most of them known to too many.”
“Of the clan, perhaps, yes. But you do not imagine, surely, that any of them would be betrayed by a Cameron! Moreover, Archie came on a new one the other day when we were there; he showed it to me. Truly I do not think the wit of man could find that unaided, and no one knows of it but he and I. So set your mind at rest, dear lad.” He took a step or two away. “I’ll tell you too, Ewen.”
The young man’s face, which had become a little wistful, lit up. “Oh, Donald . . .”
“Listen,” said Lochiel, dropping his voice, and coming closer to the wall. “Half-way up the southern slope of Beinn Bhreac, about a hundred paces to the right of the little waterfall. . . .”
And Ewen, listening eagerly, heard of an overhanging birch tree whose old roots grasped like hinges an apparently immovable block of stone, which could be moved if one knew just where to push it, and of a cave, long disused, which Dr. Cameron had found behind it—a place whose existence could never be suspected. And there, if hard pressed . . .
“Yes, surely there you would be safe!” said Ewen with satisfaction. “That is a thousand times better than any of the old places. I thank you for telling me; I shall not forget.”
“Whom should I tell if not you, my dear Ewen,” said his Chief, laying his hand for a moment on his shoulder. “You have always been to me——” More he did not say, for Dungallon was at his elbow, urgently summoning him. But perhaps, also, he could not.
Ewen pulled his bonnet lower on his brows, and, bending his head against the sleety blast, set his face with the rest towards the fatal stretch of moorland, the last earthly landscape that many a man there would ever see. But over that possibility he was not troubling himself; he was wondering whether it were possible to be much hungrier, and what his foster-brothers would do when they returned and found him gone into battle without them. And like a litany he repeated to himself, to be sure that he remembered them aright, the directions Mac Dhomhnuill Duibh had given him: “Half-way up the southern slope of Beinn Bhreac, about a hundred paces to the right of the waterfall . . .”
Just as they were all taking up their positions a gleam of sun shot through the heavy, hurrying clouds, and fell bright upon the moving tartans, Stewart and Cameron, Fraser, Mackintosh, Maclean and MacDonald, lighting too the distant hills of Ross across the firth, whence Cromarty came not, and the high ground over the Nairn water on the other hand, where Cluny Macpherson was hurrying towards them with his clan, to arrive too late. Then the gleam went out, and the wind howled anew in the faces of those who should spend themselves to death unavailingly, and those who should hold back for a grudge; it fluttered plaid and tugged at eagle’s feather and whipped about him the cloak of the young man for whom the flower of the North stood here to be slain; and faint upon it, too, came now and then the kettledrums of Cumberland’s advance.
Once more Keith Windham—but he was Major Windham now, and on General Hawley’s staff—was riding towards Lochaber. This time, however, he was thankful to find himself so occupied, for it was a boon to get away from what Inverness had become since the Duke of Cumberland’s victory a couple of weeks ago—a little town crammed with suffering and despair, and with men who not only gloated over the suffering but who did their best to intensify it by neglect. One could not pass the horrible overcrowded little prison under the bridge without hearing pitiful voices always crying out for water. And as for last Sunday’s causeless procession of those poor wretches, in their shirts or less, the wounded too, carried by their comrades, simply to be jeered at—well, Major Windham, feigning twinges from his wound of Fontenoy, had withdrawn, sick with disgust, from the neighbourhood of the uproariously laughing Hawley.
And not only was he enjoying a respite, if only of a few days, from what was so repugnant to him, but he had been chosen by the Duke himself to carry a despatch to the Earl of Albemarle at Perth. It seemed that the Duke remembered a certain little incident at Fontenoy. General Hawley, relinquishing his aide-de-camp for the mission, had slapped him on the shoulder and wished him good luck. The errand seemed to promise transference to the Duke’s own staff; and, if that should occur, it meant real advancement at last, and, when Cumberland returned to Flanders, a return with him.
So Keith was in better spirits than he had been for the last week. Surely the end of this horrid Scottish business was approaching for him! Falkirk—a bitter memory—was more than avenged, for the late victory on the moor of Culloden could not have been completer—he only wished he could get out of his mind some of the details of its completion. But there was this to be said for ruthless methods of suppression, that they were the sooner finished with.
To tell truth, Major Windham’s immediate situation was also exercising his mind a good deal. Wade’s road from Fort Augustus to Dalwhinnie and Perth ran over the steep Corryarrick Pass into Badenoch, and he had been told that somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Pass he would find a military post under a certain Major Guthrie of Campbell’s regiment, in which bivouac he proposed to spend the night. (There had been a time last August when Sir John Cope with all his force dared not risk crossing the Corryarrick; it was different now.) Keith had first, of course, to get to Fort Augustus, and had set out from Inverness with that intention; but about half-way there, just before the road reared itself from the levels of Whitebridge to climb to its highest elevation, he had been inexplicably tempted by a track which followed a stream up a valley to the left, and, on an impulse which now seemed to him insane, had decided to pursue this rather than the main road. His Highland orderly, a Mackay from Lord Reay’s country, only too pleased, like all his race, to get off a high road, even though he was riding a shod horse, jumped at the suggestion, averring, in his not always ready English, that he knew the track to be a shorter way to the Corryarrick road. So they had ridden up that tempting corridor.
It was a most unwise proceeding. At first all had gone well, but by this time it was clear to Keith that he and his orderly, if not lost, were within measurable distance of becoming so. The original track had ceased, the stream had divided and they knew not which branch to follow; and either only seemed to take them higher and higher towards its source. Bare and menacing, the mountain-sides closed in more and more straitly upon the foolhardy travellers. The Highlander was of use as a pioneer, but Keith had expected him to be a guide, whereas it soon appeared that he had no qualifications for the post, never having been in these parts before, despite his confident assertion of an hour ago. Every now and then they were obliged to lead their horses, and they were continually making detours to avoid boggy ground. Keith trudged on silent with annoyance at his own folly, his orderly voluble in assurances that ‘herself’ need not be alarmed; there were worse places than this in Sutherland, yet Dougal the son of Dougal had never lost himself.
It was hard to believe that it was the first of May, so cold was it; not only were the surrounding mountains capped with snow, but it lay in all the creases of the northern slopes to quite a low level. There were even patches not far above the route which the travellers were painfully making out for themselves. And it was actually a pocket of snow in a sort of overhanging hollow some way off to their left, a little above them, which drew Keith’s eyes in that direction. Then he saw, to his surprise, that there was a figure with a plaid drawn over its head sitting in the hollow—a woman, apparently.
He called Mackay’s attention to it at once. “Ask her if she can tell us the best way to the Corryarrick road.”
The Highlander shouted out something in his own tongue, but there was no answer, and the woman huddled in her plaid, which completely hid her face, did not move. “She will pe asleep, whateffer,” observed Mackay. “A bhean!—woman, woman!”
But another thought had struck the Englishman. Tossing the reins of his horse to Mackay, he strode up to the hollow where the woman sat, and stooping, laid a hand on her shoulder. For any warmth that struck through the tartan he might as well have touched the rock against which she leant. He gave an exclamation, and, after a moment, drew the folds of the plaid a little apart.
If the young woman who sat crouched within it, stiff now, like the year-old child in her arms, knew the way anywhere, it was not to the Pass of Corryarrick. There was a little wreath of half-melted snow in a cranny near her head; it was no whiter than her face. The upper half of her body was almost naked, for she had stripped herself to wrap all she could round the little bundle which she was still clasping tightly to her breast. But it was only a bundle now, with one tiny, rigid waxen hand emerging to show what it had been.
Keith removed his three-cornered hat, and signed to Mackay to leave the horses and come.
“The poor woman is dead,” he said in a hushed voice, “—has been dead for some time. Can she have met with an accident?”
“I think she will haf peen starfed,” said his orderly, looking at the pinched face. “I haf heard that there are many women wandering in the hills of Lochaber and Badenoch, and there iss no food and it hass been fery cold.”
“But why should she have gone wandering like this, with her child, too?”
The Mackay turned surprised eyes upon him. “Because you English from Fort William will haf burnt her house and perhaps killed her man,” he replied bluntly. “Then she wass going trying to find shelter for herself and the wean. . . . And now there iss no one to streak her and to lay the platter of salt on her preast. It iss a pity.”
He, too, with the innate reverence of his race for the dead, was standing bareheaded.
“I wish we could bury them,” said Keith. But it was out of the question; they had neither the implements nor the time; indeed, but for the food that they carried, and their horses, the same end might almost be awaiting them in these solitudes. So Mackay replaced the plaid, and they went silently back to the horses and continued their journey.
‘You English’—we English—have done this; we whose boast it has always been that we do not war with women and children; we English whose vengeance (Keith had realised it ere this) is edged by the remembrance of past panic, of the disgrace of Prestonpans and Falkirk and invasion. He went on his way with a sensation of being branded.
Yes, he had been too true a prophet. The comedyhadturned to grim and bloody earnest. And, despite relief and natural exhilaration at victory—of which there was not much left in him now—despite the liberation of his native country from a menace which she affected to despise, but which in the end had terrified her, despite the vindication, at last, of the worth of trained troops, Keith Windham could say with all his heart, ‘Would God we were back in the days of farce!’ Yes, even in the days when last he was in Lochaber, for the very mortification of the rout at High Bridge last summer and of his subsequent captivity had been easier to bear than the feeling that he belonged now to a band of executioners—was indeed closely connected with the most brutal of them all. He had been gratified when Hawley, on his arrival at Edinburgh, had, on Preston’s recommendation, chosen him to fill a vacancy on his staff; but during the last two weeks he had come to loathe the position. Yet his ambitious regard for his own career forbade him to damage it by asking permission to resign his post; indeed, had he taken such a remarkable step, he would not now be on his way to Perth, having turned his back for a while on what had so sickened him.
Another half-hour passed, and the memories which had been sweeping like dark clouds over Keith’s mind began to give way to a real sensation of alarm, not so much for his personal safety as for the carrying out of his mission. Suppose they did not find their way before nightfall out of this accursed maze into which he had so blindly ventured? He consulted anew with Mackay, and they resolved to abandon the line which they had been taking, and try instead to find a way over a spur on their right, for the mountain which sent it forth was neither craggy nor strewn with scree, and the slope of the spur was such that it was even possible to make use of their horses. At the worst its summit would give them a view, and they might then be able to strike out a better route for themselves.
As Keith was putting his foot in the stirrup Dougal Mackay caught his arm and said excitedly, “I wass hearing a shout, sir!”
“I heard nothing,” responded Major Windham, listening. “Where did it come from?”