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

LIEUTENANT HECTOR GRANT OF THE RÉGIMENT D’ALBANIE

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      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 outside.

      The cool, spacious calm of the Highland night enveloped him in an instant; he saw Aldebaran brilliant in the south-east between two dark continents of cloud. Then footsteps came out of the shadows, and a slim, cloaked figure slipped quickly past him into the porch.

      “Est-il permis d’entrer, mon cher?” it asked, low and half laughing. “Down, Luath—it’s a friend, good dog!”

      “Who is it?” had been surprised out of Ewen in the same moment, as he turned.

      “Sure, you know that!” said the voice. “But shut your door, Ardroy!”

      The intruder was in the parlour now, in the lamplight, and as Ewen hastened after him he flung his hat upon the table, and advanced with both hands outstretched, a dark, slender, clear-featured young man of about five and twenty, wearing powder and a long green roquelaure.

      “Hector, by all the powers!” exclaimed his involuntary host. “What——”

      “What brings me here? I’ll tell you in a moment. How does Alison, and yourself, and the bairns? Faith, I’ll hardly be knowing those last again, I expect.”

      “Alison is very well,” replied Ewen to Alison’s only brother. “We are all well, thank God. And Alison will be vastly pleased to see you, as I am. But why this unannounced visit, my dear Hector—and why, if I may ask, this mysterious entrance by night? ’Tis mere chance that I am not abed like the rest of the house.”

      “I had my reasons,” said Hector Grant cheerfully. “Nay, I’m no deserter” (he was an officer in French service) “but I thought it wiser to slip in unnoticed if I could. I’ll tell you why anon, when I am less—you’ll pardon me for mentioning it?—less sharp-set.”

      “My sorrow!” exclaimed his host. “Forgive me—I’ll have food before you in a moment. Sit down, Eachainn, and I will tell Alison of your arrival.”

      Hector caught at him. “Don’t rouse her now. The morn will be time enough, and I’m wanting a few words with you first.” He threw off his roquelaure. “May I not come and forage with you, as we did—where was it . . . at Manchester, I think—in the ’45.”

      “Come on then,” said his brother-in-law, a hand on his shoulder, and they each lit a candle and went, rather like schoolboys, to rifle the larder. And presently Ardroy was sitting at the table watching his midnight visitor give a very good account of a venison pie. This slim, vivacious, distinctly attractive young man might almost have passed for a Frenchman, and indeed his long residence in France had given him not a few Gallic tricks of gesture and expression. For Hector Grant had lived abroad since he entered French service at the age of sixteen—and before that too; only during the fateful year of the Rising had he spent any length of time in Britain. It was, indeed, his French commission which had saved him from the scaffold, for he had been one of the ill-fated garrison of Carlisle.

      “Venison—ah, good to be back where one can have a shot at a deer again!” he presently observed with his mouth full. “I envy you, mon frère.”

      “You need not,” answered Ewen. “You forget that I cannot have a shot at one; I have no means of doing it—no firearms, no, not the smallest fowling-piece. We have to snare our deer or use dogs.”

      “C’est vrai; I had forgotten. But I cannot think how you submit to such a deprivation.”

      “Submit?” asked Ardroy rather bitterly. “There is no choice: every Highland gentleman of our party has to submit to it, unless he has ‘qualified’ to the English Government.”

      “And you still have not done that?”

      Ewen flushed. “My dear Hector, how should I take an oath of fidelity to the Elector of Hanover? Do you think I’m become a Whig?”

      “Faith, no—unless you’ve mightily changed since we marched into England together, seven years ago come Hallowmas. But, Eoghain, besides the arms which you have been forced to give up, there’ll surely be some which you have contrived to keep back, as has always been done in the past when these distasteful measures were imposed upon us?”

      Ewen’s face darkened. “The English were cleverer this time. After the Act of ’25 no one was made to call down a curse upon himself, his kin and all his undertakings, to invoke the death of a coward and burial without a prayer in a strange land if he broke his oath that he had not, and never would have in his possession, any sword or pistol or arm whatsoever, nor would use any part of the Highland garb.”

      Hector whistled. “Ma foi, you subscribed to that!”

      “I had to,” answered Ewen shortly.

      “I never realised that when I was here two years ago, but then my visit was so short. I did indeed know that the wearing of the tartan in any form was forbidden.”

      “That,” observed Ardroy, “bears harder in a way upon the poor folk than upon us gentry. I had other clothes, if not, I could buy some; but the crofters, what else had they but