Almond, Wild Almond. D. K. Broster

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СКАЧАТЬ malheureux!” said the Vicomte de Lancize under his breath. But the Highlander resented pity for his Prince.

      “The more unfortunate, surely, are those who have undertaken a great enterprise which they have failed to carry out!” Glance, tone and words alike were challenging.

      Surprisingly, the young French officer did not pick up the glove. “I agree with you entirely, monsieur. We also are the losers by this decision. But . . . how can one argue with le bon Dieu when He is so inconsiderate? Even Versailles has no ambassador là-haut”—he waved a hand towards the ceiling—“who can influence the celestial Minister of Weather! But my personal regret is sincere, now that I have had the honour of seeing His Royal Highness, and I beg you to believe it. Moreover, who can read the future, or the minds of His Majesty’s advisers? We may yet meet in some hamlet of the county of Kent when you march south from Scotland to support a French landing! I shall look for you there. For the present, then, if you permit, I will take my leave—with a thousand thanks for your hospitality!”

      With him Ranald Maclean went to the street door, though he might not show this courtesy to his Prince. It was still raining hard, but the wind appeared to have dropped a little. “To our next meeting—over the sea!” said the young dragoon as he gave the end of his cloak a swing over his shoulder and jammed his hat firmly on his head. Then with a last salute he was gone.

      * * * * *

      When the Highlander returned to his empty little room he stared round that transitory habitation as if he could hardly believe that it had enshrined to-night the young idol of so many Scottish hearts, and that within it the final disastrous blow had been dealt him. For Ranald himself the evening had been an astonishing one. He alone of all the Jacobites in Dunkirk had been singled out to shelter the Prince in a black and bitter hour, he first had heard the final doom of the expedition pronounced. It was small wonder that he sat late by his dead fire, sat and heard the wind rise once more to shrieking point, as though to announce that it had not yet finished with the ships which presumed to cross the Channel on a Jacobite errand—as indeed it was to prove to-morrow that it had not.

      But after an hour or so the thoughts of this particular Jacobite reverted, in spite of himself, to his own affairs and to that warm vine country of the south where he had just been spending eight months on the modest estate among the vineyards which his dead mother’s brother, old David Fraser, a Jacobite exile of the Fifteen, had inherited from his French wife. Mr. Fraser, a childless man, believing his end not far off, had sent to Fasnapoll for Ranald last summer, desiring to make his acquaintance with a view to leaving him his property, and Ranald had been at Girolac all through the vintage, his uncle initiating him into the mysteries of the production of the claret which was so plentifully and so cheaply to be had in Scotland. And in those days of labour under a cloudless sky the young man had been tempted to accept this inheritance if, when the time came, the choice was in his power.

      For he was poor, and he dreaded always being a burden on his half-brother Norman, the laird (though they were excellent friends); he dreaded it the more since Norman’s wife was about to present him with a second child. The bitter lot of the consistent Jacobite was Ranald Maclean’s, for the army, the law and all Government posts were closed to him unless he could bring himself to take the oath to the house of Hanover. No profession was left but that of medicine, which had no attractions for a young man who, if his lot had been cast in less difficult times, would have chosen to be a soldier.

      But to carry on Girolac and its vineyards as this should be done would mean exile, or practical exile, from the Highlands. He would have at the least to spend a good portion of each year in France, and the annual change of residence, the long journey, would be very costly. He was not sure that his uncle did not intend to make it a condition of his legacy that his heir should reside entirely at Girolac, and that Ranald did not know if he could bear. However, the decision was not yet to make.

      The grey skies and the cold green water of his home were beginning to call him directly the autumn was over, but Mr. Fraser’s entreaties and a short but alarming illness which overtook the old man delayed the Highlander until well into January. At last, the great question still undecided, Ranald left Girolac in February, transacted Mr. Fraser’s business at Lille, and came to Dunkirk to find—this.

      And now, after all, when the weather permitted, he would carry out his original intention, find a passage to Leith or Dundee and, on his way to the West and the shores of Isle Askay, deliver the letter with which his uncle had charged him to that old comrade in arms of his, twice exiled, but now suffered in his declining years to reside on his Perthshire estate, the old poet chief Alexander Robertson of Struan. After that, and as soon as possible, Fasnapoll, the house on the bay, the gulls crying and dipping, and mist over Askival. There was no mist at Girolac.

      CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      (1)

      Much whiter than the wool she was spinning, the snow-flakes floated past the window, but Bride did not see them, for she was too intent upon her task. And as the wheel went round she crooned to herself a song in a sweet little voice which matched her stature, her almost childish air of innocence and her hair of pure, pale gold, itself spun upon some faery loom and for ever slipping out of place beneath her snood, so soft were the loose silken waves.

      In the bedchamber where she sat spinning this afternoon—bedchambers being put to so many uses in Scotland—the firelight seemed to please itself by drawing a sudden gleam from those bright locks of hers, and the dull green hangings of the bed, inwoven with a faded scroll pattern of mulberry, by making a not ineffective background for them. There were those in Bunrannoch who called Miss Bride Stewart, of Inchrannoch House, Bride an Oir, “Bride of the Gold.”

      Had the whirr of the treadle ceased you might have heard the river hurrying past at the back of the house, strong and wide, though shallow, with the late March fullness drawn from Loch Rannoch but a quarter of a mile away; and might have looked out upon it, too, from the little window rather oddly squeezed in near the fireplace. The room, the whole house might well be damp in winter from this close proximity to the Tummel, but such a thought had never troubled Bride’s uncle or aunt, nor would indeed be likely to occur to anyone living in the Perthshire Highlands in the middle of the eighteenth century. Inchrannoch House being conveniently near the ferry, its situation was most proper.

      And Bride had a very different view from her main window on the other side of the room, and one, too, which she loved better, for thence every morning and evening she could greet Sidh Chailleann—Schiehallion, the beautiful and shapely mountain dominating all Strath Tummel. From Kinloch Rannoch village, from all along the loch, from the distant Moor of Rannoch itself Schiehallion showed a perfect cone—the ideal peak; but dwellers along the Tummel further east saw it otherwise, for the long ridge behind came into view. Bride esteemed them much less fortunate.

      There was a knock at the door, and the head of an elderly woman was thrust in. “Mr. Malcolm Robertson’s below,” it announced.

      Bride continued to spin.

      “Do ye no’ hear me?” enquired the head.

      Bride nodded. “But I’m busy.”

      The tall angular body which was topped by this head now came in entirely. “Are ye no’ gangin’ doun, then? There’s a strange gentleman wi’ Mr. Robertson.”

      The wheel stopped. “O Phemie, why do you come fashing СКАЧАТЬ