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

cold lips, the great room grown a little misty and unreal about him, “you said that the Government would not grant you this boon though you crawled to them—and yet one of its first officials has stated that such a request would not be denied for a moment if you made it. Now you say that it goes against your conscience to make it. Which is it, my Lord Duke?”

      Argyll got up from his chair.

      “You are a very bold young man, Mr. Cameron of Ardroy! Are you trying to bring me to book?” The look which flickered over his pale, dignified features was nearer amusement than irritation. “I do not think that Mrs. Cameron would have taken that line. Believe me, it is not a wise one!”

      “I will take any line that . . . that pleases your Grace!” declared Ewen, desperate. Was he throwing away what Jean Cameron might have won? “Do you wish me, who, though I am not of Lochiel, have a strain of the blood and am a cadet of the clan, do you wish me to kneel to you? I will, here and now, if you will ask for Archibald Cameron’s life!”

      “There is no need for you to assume that uncomfortable position, Mr. Cameron,” replied the Duke drily. “Spiritually you are already upon your knees. And I am sorry if the floor is hard . . . since I cannot for a moment entertain your request. . . . It is a harsh saying, no doubt, but a very true one, when matters of this kind are in question (and it was an Englishman who uttered it)—‘Stone-dead hath no fellow’. I am grieved that I must endorse it in the case of Doctor Cameron, for I consider that the Government is more than justified in carrying out this long overdue sentence—a sentence better merited, indeed, to-day than it was even at the time of its infliction—and for the sake of Scotland’s welfare I cannot advise them to do otherwise.”

      Ewen put his hand up to his throat. Otherwise he did not move. Those were the accents of finality; to entreat further was only to batter oneself against a rock, to lower Archie himself in the eyes of the Campbell. Would Jean Cameron now have wept, implored, clung round the knees of MacCailein Mor? Surely not.

      “It is not,” went on Argyll, walking slowly to and fro with his hands behind his back, “it is not as though Doctor Cameron had shown the slightest sign of real repentance for his ill-doings, the slightest intention of future amendment. His answers before the Privy Council in April were inspired by the most obstinate intention of concealing every fact he knew under cover of having ‘forgotten’ it, and when last month, immediately after sentence had been passed upon him, he, in a conversation with Mr. Sharpe, the Solicitor to the Treasury, seemed to lament his unhappy position, and to say that if His Majesty extended his clemency to him he would strive to lead his fellow-clansmen into less treasonable paths, there was not one word of the only course which could conceivably merit such clemency—the making of disclosures.”

      Through the silence the slow swing of the pendulum of the great gilt clock behind Ewen seemed to emphasise how fast the sands were slipping in the glass of Archibald Cameron’s life. Ardroy clenched one hand round the wrist of the other; his eyes were fixed, not on the Duke, who had come to a standstill, but on the shaft of yellowish light which penetrated the aperture between the curtains. So that was the one chance, a mocking rift of hope like that blade of thin sunlight, a spar in the tumbling sea which one must let drive by, and drown without clutching. . . .

      “ ‘Disclosures’,” he said at last; and there was nothing in his voice to show what he thought of the word or the thing. “You mean, my Lord Duke, that if Doctor Cameron were to become a second Murray of Broughton, that if he would tell all he knows——”

      The Duke held up his hand quickly. “Pray, Mr. Cameron, do not associate me with any suggestion so affronting to a Highlander! I merely mention that Mr. Sharpe, as I remember, seemed much disappointed—for the Government are well aware that there is some new scheme afoot. You must draw what conclusion you can from that. For myself, I think the bargain would scarce be worth the Government’s while. . . . Yet, out of a perhaps misplaced humanity, I will go so far as to point out that that door, which was once open, may, for aught I know, be open still.”

      Open still—open still; the crystal pendulum swung on—but that was not what it was saying.

      “Your Grace is very good . . .” Ewen heard his own voice, and wondered at its cold steadiness, since his heart felt neither cold nor steady. “But that is not a door at which a Cameron of Lochiel could ever knock. I will detain you no longer, MacCailein Mor.”

      * * * * *

      He supposed that Argyll must have summoned a footman, for soon after that he passed once more through the pillars of the portico. And once outside, in the brief summer shower, laden with that scent of lilacs, which was now making sweet the June dust, all the leaping flame of repressed feeling sank to extinction, and in its place there was nothing but ice about his heart. He had failed; the last hope of all was gone. On Thursday——

      And now he must write to Jean Cameron and tell her.

      CHAPTER XXIII

       CONSTANT AS STEEL

       Table of Contents

      And after that came the death in life of those intervening two days, which seemed a whole lifetime on the rack, and yet a river hurrying with implacable haste to the sea.

      There was no hope for Archibald Cameron now, except the faint possibility of that eleventh hour reprieve to which a few still pinned their faith. At one moment Ewen would feel that the intensity of his desire alone must call this into being; the next, that he had always known the sentence would take its course. Lord Stowe, grave and disappointed, advised him not to trust to a miracle. It was remarkable that Aveling, young and generous-hearted though he was, gave the same advice, and would not take the easier path of trying to buoy up his friend’s spirits with an anticipation which he did not share. But Lady Stowe, with whom Ewen had an interview, not of his seeking, on the Tuesday, proclaimed her conviction that the execution would not take place, and hinted at the influence which she herself had brought to bear on certain members of the Government. Hector Grant was in a frenzy, dashing hither and thither, sure that something could still be done, and talking wildly of a rescue at Tyburn itself, of kidnapping Lord Newcastle or Henry Pelham and holding them to ransom, and other schemes equally impossible.

      But by noon on Wednesday Ewen had abandoned all dreams, sober and extravagant alike. His faint hope of seeing Archie once more was dead too, even the Earl of Stowe’s influence could not procure him another interview. And in the afternoon he shut himself up in his lodging, and would see no one, not even Hector. He could talk about to-morrow’s tragedy no longer, and, like a wounded animal which seeks solitude, only asked to be left alone. How desperately hard it was to meet a friend’s fate with composure and resignation—how much less hard to face one’s own! He knew, for he himself had once been almost as near the scaffold as Archibald Cameron was now.

      He had sat for he knew not how long that afternoon immured in the close little parlour, with the window fast shut since the moment when he had overheard two men in the street below arranging to go to Tyburn on the morrow, and one of them, who was a trifle drunk, offering the other some only too vivid reminiscences of the execution of the Scottish Jacobites in 1746. Ewen had sprung up, and, calling upon his Maker, had slammed down the window with such violence that he had nearly shattered it. Then, after walking to and fro for a while like a man demented, he had flung himself down on the settle, and was still sitting there, his head in his hands, when a timid tap at the door announced Mrs. Wilson.

      “I’d not disturb you, sir,” she whispered sympathetically, “but that there’s a messenger below from the Tower in a hackney-coach, and he brings this.” She held out a letter.

      Ewen lifted his head from his hands.

      “From the Tower?” he repeated, looking at her stupidly. Surely she did not mean that?

      But, opening the letter, he saw the heading; saw, too, that it came from the Deputy-Lieutenant.

      “Dear Sir,” it ran—

      “Doctor