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Ewen sat down, and, afraid lest his horror and surprise should make him too stern, drew the child towards him. “But, surely, Donald, you are sorry and ashamed now? Think what might have happened!”
The fair head drooped a little—but not, evidently, in penitence. “I am not sorry, Father, that I threw him in. He was wicked; he took my claymore hilt that was used at Culloden and threw it in. So it was right that he should be punished.”
“Great heavens!” exclaimed his parent, loosing his hold of him at this pronouncement, “don’t you think that your little brother is of more importance than a bit of an old broadsword?”
To which Donald made the devastating reply: “No, Father, for I don’t suppose that I can ever have the hilt again, because the loch is so deep there. But some day I may have another brother; Morag said so.”
Words were smitten from the laird of Ardroy, and for a moment he gazed speechless at this example of infantile logic. “Donald,” he said at last, “I begin to think you’re a wee thing fey. Go to bed now; I’ll speak to you again in the morning.”
“If you are going to punish me, Father,” said the boy, standing up very straight, and looking up at him with his clear, undaunted eyes, “I would liefer you did it now.”
“I am afraid that you cannot have everything you wish, my son,” replied Ardroy rather grimly. “Go to your bed now, and pray to God to show you how wicked you have been. I had rather you felt that than thought about getting your punishment over quickly. Indeed, if the sight of your little brother all but drowning through your act was not punishment. . . .” He stopped, for he remembered that Donald had at least screamed for help.
But the executor of vengeance stuck to his guns. “It was Keithie who deserved punishment,” he murmured, but not very steadily.
“The child’s bewitched!” said Ewen to himself, staring at him. Then he put a hand on his shoulder. “Come now,” he said in a softer tone, “get you to bed, and think of what you would be feeling like now if Keithie had been drowned, as he certainly would have been had I not happened to be on the island, for Luath could not have scrambled right out with him. . . . And you see what disobedience leads to, for if you had not taken Keithie to the loch he could not have thrown your hilt into it.”
This argument appeared to impress the logical mind of his son. “Yes, Father,” he said in a more subdued tone. “Yes, I am sorry that I was disobedient.”
And, though Ardroy at once divined a not very satisfactory reason for this admission, he wisely did not probe into it. “Go to bed now.”
“Am I to have any supper?”
“Supper’s of small account,” replied Ewen rather absently, gazing at the golden-haired criminal. “Yes . . . I mean No—no supper.”
On that point at least he was able to come to a decision. And Donald seemed satisfied with its justice. He left the room gravely, without saying good-night.
* * * * *
Later, bending with Alison over the little bed where Donald’s victim was already nearly asleep, Ewen repeated his opinion that their elder son was fey. “And what are we to do with him? He seems to think that he was completely justified in what he did! ’Tis . . . ’tis unnatural!”
And he looked so perturbed that his wife smothered her own no less acute feelings on the subject and said consolingly, “He must at least have done it in a blind rage, dear love.”
“I hope so, indeed. But he is so uncannily calm and judicial over it now. I don’t know what to do. Ought I to thrash him?”
“You could not,” murmured Lady Ardroy. Like many large,strong men, Ewen Cameron was extraordinarily gentle with creatures that were neither. “No, I will try whether I cannot make Donald see what a dreadful thing he did. Oh, Ewen, if you had not been there. . . .” Her lips trembled, and going down on her knees she laid her head against the little mound under the bedclothes.
Keithie half woke up and bestowed a sleepy smile upon her. In common with his impenitent brother he seemed to have recovered from his fright; it was the parents of both in whose cup the dregs of the adventure were left, very disturbing to the palate.
CHAPTER II
LIEUTENANT HECTOR GRANT OF THE RÉGIMENT D’ALBANIE
Alison retired early that evening, to keep an eye upon her youngest born after his immersion. But Ardroy did not go to bed at his usual hour; indeed, he remained far beyond it, and half-past eleven found him pacing up and down the big living-room, his hands behind his back. Now and again, as he turned in his perambulation, there was to be seen the merest trace of his memento of Culloden, the limp which, when he was really tired, was clearly to be recognised for one.
Deeply shocked at this fratricidal tendency in his eldest son, and puzzled how best to deal with it, the young man could not get his mind off the incident. When he looked at Luath, lying on the deerskin in front of the hearth, nose on paws and eyes following his every movement, he felt almost ashamed that the dog should have witnessed the crime which made Donald, at his early age, a potential Cain!
At last, in desperation, he went to his own sanctum, seized an account book and bore it back to the fireside. Anything to take his mind off this afternoon’s affair, were it only the ever-recurring difficulty of making income and expenditure tally. For Ewen had never received—had never wished to receive—a single louis of the French gold buried at Loch Arkaig, though it had been conveyed into Cameron territory by a Cameron, and though another Cameron, together with the proscribed chief of the Macphersons (still in hiding in Badenoch), was agent for its clandestine distribution among the Jacobite clans. Ardroy had told Doctor Archibald Cameron, Lochiel’s brother, and his own cousin and intimate, who had been the hero of its transportation and interment, that he did not need any subsidy; and John Cameron of Fassefern, the other brother, representative in the Highlands of the dead Chief’s family now in France, was only too relieved not to have another applicant clamouring for a dole from that fast dwindling hoard.
And Ardroy himself was glad of his abstention, for by this autumn of 1752 it was becoming clear that the money landed from the French ships just after the battle of Culloden, too late to be of any use in the campaign, had now succeeded in setting clan against clan and kinsman against kinsman, in raising jealousies and even—for there were ugly rumours abroad—in breeding informers. Yes, it was dragon’s teeth, after all, which Archibald Cameron had with such devotion sowed on Loch Arkaig side—seed which had sprung up, not in the guise of armed men to fight for the Stuarts, but in that of a crop of deadly poison. Even Ewen did not suspect how deadly.
In the midst of the young laird’s rather absent-minded calculations Luath suddenly raised his head and growled. Ardroy laid down his papers and listened, but he could hear nothing. The deerhound growled again, on a deep, threatening note, and rose, the hair along his neck stiffening. His eyes were fixed on the windows.
“Quiet!” said his master, and, rising also, went to one, drew aside the curtains, and looked out. He could see nothing, and yet he, too, felt that someone was there. With Luath, still growling, at his heels, he left the room, opened the door of the house, and going through the porch, stood СКАЧАТЬ