The Collected Works of D. K. Broster. D. K. Broster

not to the old fellow here? ’Tis true that if he had it he could not read the cipher, but that Captain Jackson might.”

      “I think the letter was never brought here, because, if it had been, even though neither of them could read a word of it, they would know that it had been taken from you on Tuesday, and would hardly have wasted their time in allowing you to pretend that you were at Ardroy until Saturday, nor have sent for Doctor Kincaid to testify that you were not the ‘Mr. Sinclair’ whom he saw there, worse luck, on Thursday.”

      “Unless they wished to give me more rope to hang myself in,” commented Hector, with a slight access of gloom. “But as to that,” he added after a moment, more cheerfully, “I’m more like to be shot as a deserter by the French than hanged as a conspirator by the English.”

      “You should have thought of that before coming here and giving yourself up!” exclaimed Ewen. “Are you serious, Hector?”

      “No,” confessed Lieutenant Grant with a grin. “Lord Ogilvie will see to it that he does not lose one of his best officers in that manner. I’ll report before my leave’s up, never fear. By the way, I was carrying my commission on me, as a safeguard, though I denied it; and the scoundrel who took my papers has that too, a bad meeting to him!”

      “I thought you were lying to those officers just now,” observed Ardroy. “But again, had your commission been brought here, I am sure that Captain Jackson could never have resisted the temptation of clapping it down in front of you when you denied that you had it.”

      “I wonder,” remarked Hector rather irrelevantly, “who has done the more lying of late, you or I? Nay, you, past a doubt, for you have had vastly more opportunity. And you don’t enjoy it, more’s the pity!”

      CHAPTER VIII

       ON CHRISTMAS NIGHT

       Table of Contents

      (1)

      No more scope for lying, however, was to be afforded to either of the captives, nor were they invited to walk out of Fort William, though for a week, ten days, a fortnight, this was their waking hope every morning. But as this perennial plant daily bloomed and faded, Ewen began to think that Colonel Leighton was not, perhaps, so happy an exchange as some had fancied for the astute but determined Crauford, that he was keeping them there because he knew that he was incompetent and wanted to disguise the fact by a show of severity. Of course it was quite possible that he was only obeying orders from Edinburgh, or, as time went on, from London, but that they could not find out. “At any rate,” declared Hector, “he is stupid; bête comme une oie, a man one cannot reason with. I saw that at once.”

      Stupid or clever, Colonel Leighton was the master of the situation. As the October days crawled by, shortening a little, so that one saw the glow from the sunset—when there was one—fall ever a little less far round on the wall, Lieutenant Grant’s temper grew shorter also. What right had Colonel Leighton to keep him imprisoned here, an officer of a foreign power against whom he had no producible evidence? He kept sending messages to that effect, and getting the invariable reply that since the Lieutenant-Governor had only his word that he possessed this status, Mr. Grant must produce his commission or something equivalent if he hoped to be believed. Long ago it had become plain that poor Hector’s chivalrous attempt at a bargain was worse than useless, for his surrendering himself had not released his brother-in-law; its only effect was to have introduced another inmate into the cage, and one who was as restless as any squirrel.

      November set in, cold and very windy, and with it came a sinister reminder that there are even worse fates than bondage. There lay in Fort William a prisoner, brought thither from Inveraray, tied on a horse, at the beginning of October, for whom the sands of captivity were running out. On the seventh of November, a day of tempest, an armed procession set out down the side of Loch Linnhe, and in the midst was James Stewart of Acharn. Next morning, in the same high wind, he was taken across Loch Leven and hanged at Ballachulish in Appin, the scene of the murder of Campbell of Glenure, meeting his unjust fate with composure and with the psalm destined ever after to be associated in that country with his name, the thirty-fifth. Presumably to impress them with the wisdom of submissive conduct, the two imprisoned Jacobites were given a full account of the proceedings, and Ewen, with his mother’s Stewart blood on fire, chalked up one more count in the score against the Campbells.

      November was to have seen that attempt on the liberty of George II. over which Ewen and his brother-in-law had come to loggerheads that night at Ardroy. But no news of any such attempt filtered through to the captives. Ewen was very glad, and Hector, presumably, sorry. It was a subject not mentioned between them, although the breach which it had made was healed.

      And so another five or six weeks trailed by. James Stewart’s chain-encircled body, still guarded by soldiers, rattled and froze on the hillock by Ballachulish ferry, and Lieutenant Hector Grant of the régiment d’Albanie by this time much more nearly resembled a panther than a squirrel. He could think or talk of nothing but escape, and every day his denunciations of Ewen for his passivity became more fervid. He told him among other things that he was like a cow which stays in a byre merely because the farmer has put it there. In vain Ewen pointed out the small advantages to be reaped by escape, at least in his own case, since he could not possibly return to Ardroy; he would be rearrested at once. As Hector knew, he had twice written to a lawyer in Edinburgh to take up his case. “Yes, but what answer have you had?” Hector would reply. “You are over trusting, Mac ’ic Ailein; that old Leighton of the devil never forwards your letters, ’tis clear. He probably uses them as curlpapers for his wig.” Yet when Ewen offered his assistance in carrying out the very unpromising plans for his own escape with which Hector constantly dallied, the young man would not hear of it, alleging that he had got Ardroy into sufficient trouble already.

      But at last Ewen’s own patience, not natural to him, but painfully acquired in the difficult years since his return from exile, was completely exhausted. For one thing, it fretted him more with every day that dawned that he knew nothing of Archie’s doings, nor had even learnt whence that aid was to come on which Doctor Cameron was building. So, one day about mid-December, when he and Hector had been discussing the various unsatisfactory plans for escape which the latter had concocted, he considerably startled that youth by saying, “Let us fix on Christmas Day, then, for the garrison will be more or less drunk, and we may have some small chance of walking out in the manner you propose.” (For the great obstacle to evasion in the orthodox way, by sawing through the bars of a window and letting themselves down, was the by now established impossibility of procuring a file or anything like it.)

      Hector leaped up from his chair. “Enfin! You mean it, Ewen—you are at last converted? Dieu soit loué! And you suggest Christmas Day. You do not think that Hogmanay would be better?”

      “No, for the garrison is English. It is on the evening of Christmas Day that we must look for the effect of their potations.”

      “Christmas Day be it, then! Now we can plan to better purpose!”

      (2)

      During these weary weeks Ewen had written as often as he was allowed to his wife, and had received replies from her, all correspondence of course passing through the hands of the authorities at Fort William, so that only personal and domestic news could be conveyed. But Alison had all along been determined to come and visit him, should his release be delayed, and wrote a few days after this that she believed she should succeed in getting permission to do so before Christmas.

      “Faith, if she do not come before, ’twill be of little use, or so I hope, coming after,” declared her brother. “Indeed, if one wished to throw dust in the eyes of that Leighton creature, it might have been well had she said that she was coming at the New Year.”

      “But I, at least, desire to be here when she comes,” objected Ewen. In his heart of hearts he