The Dark Mile. D. K. Broster

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      CHAPTER I

       WHAT THE MOON SAW

       Table of Contents

      June 15th, 1755.

      “If the moon looks through the roof she will see us all in bed!” a little boy had gleefully announced this evening, sitting up suddenly in that retreat. “—Can the moon look through the roof?”

      Nobody knows for certain, though it is commonly held that she cannot. Yet, even if she has that power, and high as she was riding on this clear June night above the old house of Invernacree in Appin, she would not have seen all its inmates in bed. The child who had spoken of her, yes, and his elder brother, both very soundly and rosily slumbering; these she would indeed have seen; and in their respective apartments their great-uncle, old Alexander Stewart of Invernacree, to whom these, his dead sister’s grandchildren, were paying a visit; and his two daughters, Grizel and Jacqueline, between whom there lay twenty-five years’ difference in age, seeing that Invernacree had married twice; and Morag Cameron, the children’s nurse, who had come with them from their own home of Ardroy, in Lochaber, while their mother lay in of the daughter whose presence would be such a surprise to Donald and little Keithie when they returned. All the servants likewise would the moon have seen laid out on their truckle beds or pallets—all save a young maid who was awake with the toothache, and wishing she had access to the skill of the wise woman at home.

      But in one of the larger bedrooms there were two persons—two men—who had not even begun to undress, though it was fully an hour since they had come upstairs. The younger was sitting on the edge of the old four-poster bed, with an arm round one of the columns at the foot; it might be presumed that he usually occupied this bed himself, and so he did; for he was Ian Stewart, the son of the house. He was of the dark type of Highlander, lithe and dark-haired, with deep blue eyes under black lashes, lean and sensitive in feature and looking about five and twenty. The other, of larger build altogether, unusually finely made in fact, fair complexioned and some ten years his senior, was his first cousin and very good friend, Ewen Cameron of Ardroy, the father of the two little boys in the green bedchamber, come to fetch them both home again. He was now leaning over the back of a high chair, gazing at his kinsman with eyes more markedly blue than his, because they were not so dark.

      “Yes, my father is set upon my marrying soon,” said the young man on the bed with a sigh. “One can well understand it, Ewen; he is old, and desires to see a grandson before he dies. But if Alan had lived——”

      “No, there would not then have been the same necessity,” agreed Ardroy. Alan Stewart, the elder brother, had been killed, unmarried, at Culloden, nine years before. “Yet, Ian, you have taken no vow against wedlock, have you? Or is there someone . . . ?”

      Ian Stewart ran his finger round and round a detail of the acanthus carving on the bedpost. “There is no one,” he confessed. “Indeed I wish there were. My father would not then have to look about for a suitable match—for which the choice is none so wide neither, since I naturally cannot marry a lady from a Whig family.”

      “And has Uncle Alexander found anyone?”

      “Two,” said Ian with a little grimace. “Miss MacLaren, and Maclean of Garroch’s second daughter—the eldest is promised. I have no objection to either of them . . . save that I do not desire to marry either. I want someone of my own choice. Now do not, Ewen, tell me that arranged matches generally turn out very well, as I can see that you are upon the point of doing, for you have no right to possess an opinion on that subject, you who had the luck to marry the woman you chose for yourself and waited for!”

      Ewen Cameron smiled and, coming round, threw himself into the chair on which he had been leaning. “I was not going to say anything of the sort. I wish I could help you, Ian; and I am sure that Alison would if she could. She’d not be a true woman if she did not hanker after the chance.”

      “If only I had the means to travel a little!” said his cousin regretfully. “Still and on, to go from place to place looking for a wife as one might search for a brood mare would not content me neither. A spaewife once told me that I should love a woman who would be other than she seemed—not a very pleasant prophecy, was it?—But enough of my affairs. Tell me, Ewen, how are matters between you and the new Chief of Glenshian since he succeeded his father last autumn, and is now become almost your neighbour?”

      Very likely Ewen Cameron of Ardroy could prevent his sentiments СКАЧАТЬ