The Greatest Historical Novels & Romances of D. K. Broster. D. K. Broster

Alexander was confined.”

      Indeed, looking through the window by which they sat, one saw that May can come even to a prison. The pear-trees on the wall below, which General Rainsford’s predecessor had planted not so many years before, had lost their fair blossom by now, but below them was a little border of wallflowers, and Tower Green, at a short distance, deserved its name. On the spot, too, where the child queen had laid down her paper diadem after her nine days’ reign a little boy and girl were playing with a kitten.

      “And your head, Ewen?” asked his cousin after a moment’s silence, “How long was it before you recovered from the effects of that blow? I was greatly afraid at the time that your skull was fractured.”

      “It was you, then, who bound up my head? I thought it must have been. Oh, Archie, and by that the soldiers must have known for certain who you were! You should not have done it!”

      “Tut—the redcoats knew that already! And I could not accomplish much in the way of surgery, my dear Ewen; I had not the necessaries. As you may guess, I have not had a patient since—you’ll be my last. So take off that wig, in which you seem to me so unfamiliar, and let me see the spot where the musket butt caught you.”

      “There’s naught to see, I am sure, and not much to feel,” said Ewen, complying. “My head is uncommon hard, as I proved once before. I was laid by for some weeks, that was all,” he went on, as the cool, skilful fingers felt about among his close-cropped hair. “Just when I naturally was a-fire to get to London after you. But now, when I am here, there seems nothing that one can do. And, Archie, ’tis I have brought you to this place!”

      Doctor Cameron had ended his examination and now faced him with, “My dear Ewen, I can, indeed, feel small trace of the blow. Yet it is clear that it must have severely shaken your wits, if you can utter such a piece of nonsense as that!”

      “ ’Tis not nonsense,” protested Ewen sadly. “Was it not I who discovered that thrice-unlucky hut and persuaded you to go into it?”

      “And I suppose it was you that surrounded the wood with soldiers from Inversnaid . . . you might have brought them from somewhere nearer, for ’twas a most pestilent long tramp back there that night! Nay, you’ll be telling me next that ’twas you sent the information to Edinburgh——”

      “God! when I can find the man who did——” began Ewen, in a blaze at once.

      “Ah, my dear Ewen,” said his kinsman soothingly, “leave him alone! To find him will not undo his work, whoever he is, and I have wasted many hours over the problem and am none the wiser. I had better have spent the time thinking of my own shortcomings. ‘Fret not thyself at the ungodly’—’tis sound advice, believe me. I can forgive him; he may have thought he was doing a service. It will cost me more of a struggle to forgive the man who slandered me over the Loch Arkaig gold . . . but I think I shall succeed even in that before the seventh of June.”

      “Who was that man?” demanded Ewen instantly, and all the more fiercely because he winced to hear that date on Archie’s lips.

      The Doctor shook his head with a smile. “Is it like I should tell you when you ask in that manner. ’Tis a man whom you have never met, I think, so let it pass.”

      “Is he known to me by name, however?”

      “How can I tell,” replied Doctor Cameron shrewdly, “unless I pronounce his name and see? But come, let’s talk of other folk better worth attention; there are so many I should be glad to have tidings of. How is Mrs. Alison, and the boys, especially my wee patient? And have you any news, since we parted, of your fellow-prisoner in Fort William?”

      “Poor Hector’s over here in London, and in great distress,” began Ewen without reflecting, “for there’s an ill rumour abroad, in Lille at least, accusing him——” And there he stopped, biting his lip. He ought not to have brought up that subject in Archie’s hearing, blundering fool that he was!

      “Accusing him of what, lad?”

      So Ewen had to tell him. He hurried over the tale as much as he could, and, seeing how shocked and grieved Archie appeared, laid stress on the fact that, if ever Hector were really brought to book, he himself was in a position to disprove his connection with the capture of the Jacobite.

      “But I would give much to know who set the story about,” he ended, “for there are only two persons whom he told of the loss of that letter, myself and the man who helped him to return to his regiment in January, young Finlay MacPhair of Glenshian, and it is almost incredible that he should have spread such a report.”

      But the end of that sentence left Ardroy’s lips very slowly, in fact the last words were scarcely uttered at all. He was staring at his companion. Over Archie’s face, at the mention of Finlay MacPhair, there had flitted something too indefinable to merit a name. But in another moment Ewen had reached out and caught him by the wrist.

      “Archie, look at me—no, look at me!” For Doctor Cameron had turned his head away almost simultaneously and was now gazing out of the window, and asking whether Ewen had seen the two bairns out there playing with the little cat?

      Ewen uttered an impatient sound and gripped the wrist harder. “Deny it if you dare!” he said threateningly. “I have named your slanderer too!”

      “Dear lad——”

      “Yes or no?” demanded Ewen, as he might have demanded it of his worst enemy.

      The Doctor was plainly rather chagrined as he faced him. “I am sorry that I have not better control of my features—Now, for God’s sake, Ewen—” for Ardroy, releasing his wrist, had got to his feet, “Ewen, I implore you not to take advantage of a secret which you have surprised out of me!”

      But Ardroy was in one of his slow white rages. “The man who was associated with you when you risked your life for that accursed money in ’49 was viper enough to traduce you over it! It was he, then, who poisoned his cousin Lochdornie’s mind against you! God’s curse on him till the Judgment Day! And I warrant his dirty lie did not stop short with Lochdornie—did it now, Archie?”

      Doctor Cameron, distressed, did not answer that. “Oh, my dear Ewen, if I could persuade you to leave this question alone. What does it matter now?”

      “Your good name matters to me as much as my own,” said Ewen, towering and relentless.

      “But ’tis all past history now, Ewen, and the slander will die with my death. . . . Ewen, Ewen, promise me that you’ll not go stirring up old scores with that young man! I cannot say I love him, but he is powerless to harm me any more now, and, as I say, I hope to forgive him without reservation. My dear lad, you will only cause me more distress than the lie itself, if I am to spend the short time which remains to me thinking of you quarrelling on my behalf with young Glenshian!”

      Ewen had begun to stride up and down the little room, fighting with his resentment. “Very good then,” he said after a moment, coming and sitting down again, “I will not give you that distress; it is a promise. Moreover—perhaps this will reassure you a little,” he added with a wrathful snatch of a laugh, “the man is not in London now, I believe.”

      “Then let’s cease to waste time over him,” said Doctor Cameron with evident relief. “And you have not told me yet, as you promised, how you procured this order to see me.”

      Trying to put away the thought of Glenshian, Ewen told him. “Had I not good fortune—though indeed, at first, when I found myself in Stowe House, I thought it was the worst kind of ill-luck which had befallen me. The Earl and his son were both at the King’s Bench that day, too, which prejudiced them, it is clear, in your favour.—By the way,” he added with some hesitation, “was it a surprise to you that you had no trial?”

      “No,” replied his cousin. “I always suspected that the Government would make use of the old sentence of attainder if ever they caught me.”

      “Yes, perhaps it was inevitable,” murmured Ewen, but he was thinking—though