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

. . .”

      “Yes, yes, always,” he answered in anguish. “Always!” But there would be no ‘always’. “Oh, if only you had not been in that madman’s path!”

      But that, at least, was not fortuitous. Yet to Keith the assassin had only been some man of Morar in league with the embarkation.

      He reopened his eyes. “Your hand . . .” Ewen gave it to him, and saw a little smile in the moonlight. “Have you been . . . burying any more cannon? . . . I always liked you,” said his enemy clearly; and a moment after, with his hand in Ewen’s, was gone to that place ‘where an enemy never entered and from whence a friend never went away’.

      Ewen laid him back on the patched sand, and, getting to his feet, stood looking down at the man to whom the heron had brought him—foe, enigma, saviour, victim of a terrible mistake. And friend—yes; but it was too late for friendship now. It had already been too late at their last meeting—which had not been the last after all—when he himself, as he thought, was standing on the threshold of death. But it was Keith Windham who had gone through that door, not he. . . . Had he known that he was dying? . . . Every word of the few he had spoken had been about him . . .

      Then through the haze of shock and grief penetrated the sound of a distant shot, and he remembered that there were other lives than his at stake.

      “Go—go and hide yourselves!” he commanded. But the two Camerons shook their heads. “Not until you are in the boat, Mac ’ic Ailein!”

      “I will come, then,” said Ewen. He would rather have stayed, now; but he knelt again and kissed Keith’s forehead. And that it should not be found on him, an equivocal possession, perhaps, he drew out his own letter to Alison and slipped it, all sodden, into his pocket. Then he suffered the gillies to hurry him down to the boat, for already it was clear that the soldiers were crossing the river, and some twenty yards away a couple of ill-aimed bullets raised spirts of sand.

      By the boat was waiting Lachlan, Lachlan who, directly he was recovered from the result of his first attempt by Loch Tarff, had once more set about the fulfilment of his vow, who had hung about Inverness through July and found no opportunity, lost track of his quarry when he went to Fort Augustus, picked it up again in Moidart, and had hardly let him out of his sight since. It was he who had removed the horse.

      “Ewen, my brother, forgive me—forgive me!”

      Ewen turned on him a terrible face. “Never! You have killed my friend!”

      “Never? Then as well have my life, too!” cried Lachlan. The reddened dirk which a year ago he had been moved to fling into the loch spun glinting through the moonlight and splashed into the sea, and its owner, turning, ran headlong towards the road and the oncoming patrol.

      * * * * *

      Soon the noise of shots and shouting could be heard no longer, only the creak of the oars in the rough rowlocks as young Angus and the fisherman pulled hard over the moonlit sea towards the French privateer. But Ewen sat in the sternsheets of the little boat with his face buried in his hands, and cared not that he went to safety.

      The day would come when, pondering over his memories of those broken sentences, recalling the pistol lying on the sand, he would arrive at a glimpse of the truth, and guess that Lachlan’s blade had saved Keith Windham from a decision too cruel, and that perhaps he had been glad to be so saved. But he would never realise—how should he?—that the tide which for a year had been carrying the Englishman, half ignorant, sometimes resisting, among unlooked-for reefs and breakers, away from the safe, the stagnant Dead Sea of his choice, had borne him to no unfitting anchorage in this swift death, devoid of thoughts of self. For Ewen saw Keith only as a loser through meeting him—a loser every way—whereas in truth he had been a gainer.

      A hail came over the water; they were approaching the privateer. He tried to rouse himself from his stupor of grief and regret, and from the self-reproach which stabbed scarcely less deep because it was causeless. And as he did so the kind moonlight showed him his friend’s ring upon his finger.

      EPILOGUE

       HARBOUR OF GRACE

       Table of Contents

      The fresh wind scouring the mouth of the Seine kept the fishing boats from Honfleur lying well over, and at the foot of the cliffs of Ste. Adresse the waves were shivering themselves in a joyful welter of foam. Long pennants of cloud streamed and vanished in the blue; all the shipping rocked at anchor, and Alison Cameron, crossing the market-place of Havre-de-Grâce with a basket on her arm, had to clutch at her black cloak lest it should be whirled off her shoulders.

      She had reached the French port in time to see her father alive; in time, indeed, to give him nearly six weeks of the most devoted care. But in May he died peacefully, ignorant of the catastrophe which had torn for ever the webs that he had helped to weave. Since he was ill it had not been very difficult to keep from him the news of the downfall of Jacobite hopes and the fugitive state of the Prince, and to invent reasons for the absence of any news of Ewen Cameron. Of Hector’s capture he had known before leaving Scotland. It was the thought of Ewen, to whose care he knew Alison now definitely committed, which had made his last hours easy. “Your man will never let you want for aught, my lass,” he had said, near the end; and Alison had had the strength to keep from him the anxiety which racked her.

      And so one morning she found herself left alone in the lodging where her father had lain ill, a little house belonging to a youthful married couple, kind and sympathetic enough, and glad that the Scottish lady should stay on there, waiting for the husband who, Madame Grévérend was privately sure, would never come now, having without doubt been slain in the deserts of l’Ecosse. And when, later on, a gossip would ask her why the young Scottish lady did not voyage back to those deserts to find her husband, or to procure news of him, or at least to have the solace of weeping on his tomb, Madame Grévérend would explain that the poor creature was so persuaded that her husband would in the end come to Havre-de-Grâce seeking her that she feared to miss him if she went away.

      “But she will wait for ever, one fears,” Madame Grévérend would finish; “and she left without even a good-for-nothing like this to plague her!” And here she would snatch up her fat, curly-headed Philippe and kiss him. “Yes, she has lost everything, poor lady, and she only five months married.”

      But one has never lost everything. Alison still had that possession which Madame Grévérend could not understand, the certitude which had come to her in the cabin of the brig at Inverness. Sooner or later Ewen would come for her.

      Yet it was hard, sometimes, to cling to that belief when the weeks went by and there was not the slightest crumb of authentic news of him. All she had was negative; for there was in Havre-de-Grâce another Scots refugee, a Mr. Buchanan who had served in the Duke of Perth’s regiment, and he had convinced her, on evidence that seemed conclusive to a mind which only longed to believe it, that Ardroy had not been among the slain or massacred in the battle. Where, then, was he?

      Her marketing finished, Alison took her way homewards through the bright windy weather, and came, down the little Rue des Vergers, to the small, sanded courtyard with the pear-tree where she dwelt above M. and Mme Grévérend. In that sunlit space there was at the moment only the grey cat curled in a corner, a pair of pigeons promenading, and Philippe, seated rosily upon his mother’s doorstep, deliberately pouring sand on to his curls, as if in penitence for some misdeed, by means of an old teacup.

      “My bairnie, don’t do that!” called Alison, half laughing, half horrified. “Fi donc, quelle saleté!”

      Philippe gave her a most roguish glance, scooped up and emptied upon his locks a sort of final bumper cupful, and then rose uncertainly to his fat legs and came to her, lifting a beaming, smeared face for a kiss. Alison wiped his countenance and gave him one.

      “Are you all alone, Philippe?”

      The child intimated that he was, and then entered unasked