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

were on the door. He was not in irons.

      They clasped hands in silence as the door swung to and clashed home. Only then did Ewen see that they were not alone, for some distance away a wooden-faced warder sat stiffly on a chair against the wall.

      “Cannot that man leave us for a little?” murmured Ewen.

      “No,” said his cousin. “I must have a shadow now until—until there’s no more need of watching me. This good fellow must even sleep here to-night. But we can speak French or Erse; he’ll not understand either.”

      Ewen was bitterly disappointed. If there were a witness present they had not the faintest chance of changing clothes. He said as much in his native tongue.

      “My dear Ewen,” replied Archibald Cameron smiling, “Nature, when she gave you that frame, never intended you for such a rôle—and in any case it is quite impracticable. Come, sit down and let us talk. You see there is another chair.”

      It seemed of a tragic incongruity to sit quietly talking at a table, but Ewen obeyed. Talk he could not, at first. But Archie began to speak with perfect calm of his last arrangements, such as they were; he had given his wife, he said, what he had been able to set down from time to time of his wishes and sentiments, by means of a bit of blunt pencil which he had contrived to get hold of after all.

      “Four or five scraps of paper they are,” he concluded. “I could not come by more, but I have signed my name to everyone of them, that they may be known for authentic.”

      Only once did he betray emotion; it was in speaking of his young children in exile, and their future, so desperately uncertain when he was gone.

      “I have no money to leave them,” he said sadly. “Had that gold from Loch Arkaig really stayed in my hands they would not be penniless now, poor bairns! But I have been very much pleased,” he went on, “with a letter which my wife showed me from my eldest boy—you remember John, Ewen; he always had a great admiration for you. I have for some time observed in him a sense of loyalty and honour much beyond what might have been expected from a boy of his years, and in this letter of which I speak he expresses not only his conviction of my inviolable fidelity to the Cause, but a desire that I should rather sacrifice my life than save it upon dishonourable terms. I have great hopes of his future, even though the principles of uprightness and loyalty be not over-popular nowadays.”

      Ewen saw that great velvet curtain in the Duke of Argyll’s house, with the shaft of light slipping through. . . . Did Archie know of that appeal? He certainly did not know of the chance of life which Ewen himself had rejected on his behalf, for that Ewen had not communicated to Mrs. Cameron when he wrote.

      “Did the Privy Council,” he asked somewhat hesitatingly, “ever hold out a promise of mercy if you would make disclosures?”

      Archie nodded. “Yes. And I believe that hopes of my doing so must have been cherished for some time after my examination, since Mr. Sharpe, the Solicitor to the Treasury, certainly had them as late as the seventeenth of May, when I was sentenced. Tell me, Ewen,” he added, looking at him hard, “—for Jean has confessed to me the step which she worked upon you to take—had his Grace of Argyll the same hopes?”

      “You know of that?” exclaimed Ewen, half-apprehensive, half-relieved. “You know—and you forgive me for going to him?”

      “My dear lad, there’s no question of forgiveness. I ought to thank you from the bottom of my heart for undertaking what I know must have been a very repugnant task. Moreover, as I am neither a saint nor a hermit, but an ordinary man like the next, I’ll not deny that a span of forty-six years sometimes seems a little short to me. If MacCailein Mor could by honourable means have prolonged it, I should not have relished accepting the boon from his hands, but I should not have refused it.”

      Ewen turned very pale. “Archie . . . you make me feel like your executioner. You might have had your life, perhaps—but I—in effect I refused it for you! I . . . But it’s not too late.” He half-rose from his chair.

      Archie caught at his arm. “Ah, laochain, I guess why you refused it for me. Should I think that you know me less well than my poor John? I’d like to have had the refusing of it to MacCailein Mor myself, on the terms which I can divine that he offered.”

      “To do him justice, he offered nothing. At the end indeed he spoke of . . . of a possible door. You can guess what it was. He would have naught to do with it himself. Yet——” Ewen turned his head away. What an inhuman, sterile deity seemed, after all, that abstraction called honour! “Oh, Archie, if it were possible to accept! . . . It was not so hard then to turn one’s back on the chance; I did it without weighing the matter. I knew you would not consent. But it is much harder now.” And at last he looked at his cousin, with eyes which, half-ashamedly, implored, as if somehow, somehow . . .

      Archibald Cameron smiled and gave his head a little shake. “You will be glad by this time to-morrow. What welcome do you think Murray of Broughton’s former friends give him nowadays? And would you set the door of Ardroy wide for me, Ewen, were I to save my skin as he did? You know you would not!—But enough of this talk. There has been no choice in the matter. I could not bring myself to betray either my companions or my Prince’s plans.”

      “Yet you yourself have been betrayed!” came instinctively to Ewen’s lips.

      Archie’s face clouded a little. “I am glad to think that I do not know the informer, whether the thing was done of his own free will or at another’s instigation. It is easier to forgive, thus.”

      This time it was Ewen who was determined that Archie should read nothing upon his face, and he set it immovably. Of what use to burden his spirit, so soon to be gone, with the hatred and suspicion which lay so heavy on his own since the encounter with young Glenshian?

      Moreover—luckily perhaps—Archie here pulled out his watch. “Good Mr. Falconar, the Scots nonjuring clergyman who has been visiting me, and will attend me to Tyburn to-morrow, is to bring me the Sacrament at five o’clock. I would have wished to take it to-morrow morning before I set out, but then Jean could not have received it with me, nor you, if you wish to do so?”

      “Will it be here?”

      “Yes.” The Doctor pointed to where a little table, covered with a white cloth, stood against the wall, with two or three footstools ranged before it. “And Jean herself will be brought hither. But I have said farewell to her already. . . . Ewen, be patient with her—though, indeed, she has the bravest heart of any woman living.”

      “You do not need to urge that,” said Ardroy.

      “I know that I do not. It is you who are to take her away from the Tower, too, God bless you!”

      “Shall I . . . take her back to Lille?”

      “It is not necessary; that is arranged for.” Archie got up suddenly; Ewen had a glimpse of his face, and knew that he was thinking of the fatherless children to whom she would return.

      He sat there, rapidly and quite unconsciously fluttering over the leaves of the book lying on the table, and then said in a voice which he could scarcely command, “Archie, is there nothing else that I can do for you?”

      Doctor Cameron came and sat down again. “There is something. But perhaps it is too hard to ask.”

      “If it be anything which concerns me alone it is not too hard.”

      “Then . . . I would ask you to be there to-morrow.”

      Ewen recoiled. “I . . . I did not dream that you would ask that!”

      “You would rather stay away?”

      “Archie—what do you think I am made of?”

      Archibald Cameron looked at him rather wistfully. “I thought—but it was, I see, a selfish thought—that I should like to see one face of a friend there, at the last. I have heard that a Tyburn crowd, accustomed to thieves and murderers, is . . . not a pleasant one; and I have been warned that there will be very many people there.”