The Gleam in the North. D. K. Broster

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СКАЧАТЬ his command; I had enough ado at first to get him to recognise me. The letter was, I gather, mostly in cipher, which is something; but cipher can be read. And since he was so insistent that a warning should be carried, and I turn——” He checked himself—“Since he was so insistent you will pay heed, Archie, will you not, and avoid crossing the Lochy yet awhile?”

      “Yes, indeed I will. I must not be captured if I can help it,” answered Doctor Cameron simply. “But, my dear Ewen”—he laid a hand on his kinsman’s arm, “do not look so anxious over it! You have succeeded in warning me, and in preventing, perhaps, a great wreckage of hopes. The Prince owes you a fine debt for this, and some day he will be able to repay you.”

      “I am already more than repaid,” said the young man, looking at him with sincere affection, “if I have stayed you from running into special peril . . . and I’m glad that ’twas for you, after all, that I came. But what of MacPhair of Lochdornie—should one take steps to warn him also?”

      “He’ll not be coming this way yet,” replied his cousin. “We are to meet in a week, back in Glen Dessary, and since he is to await me there, there is no danger.”

      “And what will you do meanwhile—where will you bestow yourself?”

      “Oh, I’ll skulk for a while here and in Glen Dessary, moving about. I am become quite an old hand at that game,” said Archibald Cameron cheerfully. “And now, ’ille, the sun’s coming up; let us break our fast. I have some meal with me, and you must be hungry.” Rising, he went over to the other corner of the shelter.

      Directly his back was turned Ewen leant his head against the rough wall behind him and closed his eyes, spent with the anxiety which had ridden with him to the point where the increasing lameness of his horse had forced him to abandon the beast and go on foot, and then had flitted by his side like a little wraith, taking on the darling shape of the child who was causing it. He heard Archie saying from the corner, “And how’s all with you, Ewen? Mrs. Alison and the children, are they well?”

      “Alison is well. The children . . .” He could get no further, for with the words it came to him that by this sunrise there was perhaps but one child at Ardroy.

      Archibald Cameron caught the break in his voice and turned quickly, the little bag of meal in his hand. “What’s wrong, Ewen—what is it?”

      Ewen looked out of the doorway. The sun was up; a hare ran across the grass. “Little Keith is . . . very ill. I must get back home as quickly as I can; I will not stay to eat.”

      Archie came quickly over to him, his face full of concern. “Very ill—and yet you left home for my sake! Have you a doctor there, Ewen?”

      Ardroy shook his head. “I was on my way to fetch one yesterday when I came upon Hector . . . so I could not go on. . . . I dare say Keithie is better by now. Children so easily get fever that it may mean nothing,” he added, with a rather heartrending air of reciting as a charm a creed in which he did not really believe. “That’s true, is it not?” And as Doctor Cameron nodded, but gravely, Ewen tried to smile, and said, getting to his feet, “Well, I’ll be starting back. Thank God that I was in time. And, Archie, you swear that you will be prudent? It would break my heart if you were captured.”

      He held out his hand. His kinsman did not take it. Instead, he put both of his on the broad shoulders.

      “I need not ask you if you are willing to run a risk for your child’s sake. If you will have me under your roof, Ewen, I will come back with you and do my best for little Keith. But if I were taken at Ardroy it would be no light matter for you, so you must weigh the question carefully.”

      Ewen started away from him. “No, no!—for it’s you that would be running the risk, Archie. No, I cannot accept such a sacrifice—you must go back farther west. Ardroy might be searched.”

      “Why should it be? You must be in fairly good repute with the authorities by now. And I would not stay long, to endanger you. Ewen, Ewen, let me come to the bairn! I have not quite sunk the physician yet in the Jacobite agent.”

      “It would be wrong of me,” said Ewen, wavering. “I ought not. No, I will not have you.” Yet his eyes showed how much he longed to accept.

      “You cannot prevent my coming after you, my dear boy, even if you do not take me with you; and it would certainly be more prudent if you introduced me quietly by a back door than if I presented myself at the front. . . . Which is it to be? . . . Come now, let’s eat a few mouthfuls of drammoch; we’ll go all the faster for it.”

      (2)

      That evening there seemed to be bestowed on Loch na h-Iolaire a new and ethereal loveliness, when the hunter’s moon had changed the orange of her rising to argent. Yet the two men who stood on its banks were not looking at the silvered beauty of the water but at each other.

      “Yes, quite sure,” said the elder, who had just made his way there from the house. “The wean was, I think, on the mend before I came; a trifle of treatment did the rest. He’ll need a little care now for the next few days, that is all. A beautiful bairn, Ewen. . . . You can come back and see him now; he’s sleeping finely.”

      “It’s hard to believe,” said Ewen in a low voice. “But you have saved him, Archie; he was very ill when you got here this morning, I’m convinced. And now he is really going to recover?”

      “Yes, please God,” answered Archibald Cameron. “I could not find you at first to tell you; then I guessed, somehow, that you would be by the lochan.”

      “I have been here all afternoon, since you turned me out of the room; yet I don’t know why I came—above all to this very spot—for I have been hating Loch na h-Iolaire, for the first time in my life. It so nearly slew him.”

      “Yet Loch na h-Iolaire is very beautiful this evening,” said his cousin, and he gave a little sigh, the sigh of the exile. “Those were happy days, Ewen, when I used to come here, and Lochiel too; we’ve both fished in this water, and I remember Donald’s catching a pike so large that you were, I believe, secretly alarmed at it. You were a small boy then, and I but two and twenty. . . .” He moved nearer to the brink. “And what’s that, pray, down there—hidden treasure?”

      Ewen came and looked—the moon also. Through the crystal clear water something gleamed and wavered. It was the Culloden broadsword hilt, cause of all these last days’ happenings.

      “That thing, which was once a Stewart claymore, is really why you are here, Archie.”

      * * * * *

      But the more obvious cause lay asleep in the house of Ardroy clutching one of his mother’s fingers, his curls dank and tumbled, his peach-bloom cheeks wan, dark circles under his long, unstirring lashes—but sleeping the sleep of recovery. Even his father, tiptoeing in ten minutes later, could not doubt that.

      Without any false shame he knelt down by the little bed and bowed his head in his hands upon the edge. Alison, a trifle pale from the position which she was so rigidly keeping—since not for anything would she have withdrawn that prisoned finger, though it would have been quite easy—looked across at her husband kneeling there with a lovely light in her eyes. And the man to whom, as they both felt, they owed this miracle (though he disclaimed the debt) who had a brood of his own oversea, wore the air, as he gazed at the scene, of thinking that his own life would have been well risked to bring it about.

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