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

said with a bitter intonation. “Or are those yells all we are to know of them?” It was indeed sufficiently surprising that the rescuers had not entered the house some minutes ago, particularly as the door was broken open.

      Ewen listened. “I think that they are possibly chasing . . . a retreating enemy. But in any case”—he held out Keith’s sword—“I cannot stomach taking advantage of your being left in the lurch by those rascals. Put on your sword again, and I’ll convey you safely out of the house.”

      A dull flush swept over the English soldier’s face. “You mean that I am to run the gauntlet of those caterans, when they return, under your protection? No; I have been humiliated enough this evening; it would be less galling to go as a prisoner. Keep my sword; ’tis the second of mine you have had, Mr. Cameron.”

      Yes, he was sore, and no wonder! Ewen decided that he would not even mention the objectionable guineas.

      “I cannot hold this sword much longer,” he said lightly, “having but the one hand at present.—No, the caterans shall not see you at all, Captain Windham, and you shall go alone. Only, for Heaven’s sake, be quick, for some of them must soon be here!”

      Bewildered, half reluctant, Keith closed his fingers on the hilt held out to him, and Ewen drew him to the escritoire on the right of the hearth. When he pushed it aside the panel behind slid slowly back.

      Keith Windham stood before the gap momentarily speechless. “That, then——” he began at last, thickly.

      “Yes, that is the way my friends went. But you can use the same road. It comes out, I understand, in the West Bow; there you will have to trust to chance, but it seems a dark night. Here, take my cloak,”—he went and picked it up—“ ’twill cover your uniform. And you must have a candle to light you down.”

      To these directions and the proffered candlestick and cloak the baffled hunter paid no heed. “Your friends!” he said between his teeth. “The Pretender’s son, you mean! He was here this evening, then, in this very room!”

      “Yes, but he was gone a little time before you entered,” answered Ewen soothingly. “I was only troubled lest the door should slide open and betray the path he took. But ’tis of no moment now.”

      “No, it’s of no moment now!” repeated Windham bitterly. Wrath, reluctant admiration, disappointment and concern for what he had so nearly done—and not in fair fight—to the man before him strove openly in his tone as he went on: “Is this your revenge for——”—he pointed to the swathed right hand—“and for my outwitting you last August? It’s a sharp one, for all that it’s generous. . . . Yes, you have fairly outmanœuvred me, Ardroy, with your secret stair and your clansmen so pat to the moment, like a stage play! But I warn you that this mumming will turn to grim earnest some day; there’ll be a bloody curtain to the comedy, and you will regret that ever you played a part in it!”

      “That depends, does it not, on how many more battles of Gladsmuir we have?” retorted Ewen, with a smile on his lips and a sparkle in his eyes. “But go—go!” for at last there had come a rush of feet up the stairs, and the rescue party (oblivious of the bolt) were hammering upon the door with cries. He thrust the candlestick and the cloak—the Prince’s cloak—into the Englishman’s hands, calling out something in Gaelic over his shoulder the while. “Go—they’ll have the door down in another minute!”

      He almost pushed Captain Windham into the aperture, pressed the spring, and wedged the returning panel with the table, only a second or two before the unfortunate door of Lady Easterhall’s drawing-room fell inwards with a crash, and Cameron kilts plunged over it.

      CHAPTER IV

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      Walking home with her father next day up the crowded Canongate after rain, Miss Alison Grant suddenly became aware of a tall Highland officer striding up the street some way ahead. From the occasional glimpses of him, which were all that she was able to obtain in the moving throng, it seemed to be her betrothed; but, if so, he was carrying his right arm in a sling. This was disturbing. Moreover Ewen, if it were he—and at any rate the officer was a Cameron—was walking at such a pace that Alison and her parent would never overtake him, unless indeed he were on his way to visit them where they lodged in Hyndford’s Close, a little beyond the Netherbow.

      “Papa,” whispered Alison, “let us walk quicker; yonder’s Ewen, unless I am much mistaken, on his way to wait upon us, and he must not find us from home.”

      They quickened their pace, without much visible effect, when lo! their quarry was brought to a standstill by two gentlemen coming downwards who encountered and stopped him.

      “Now let us go more slowly, sir,” suggested Alison, dragging at her father’s arm. To which Mr. Grant, complying, said, “My dear, to be alternately a greyhound and a snail is hard upon a man of my years, nor do I understand why you should be stalking Ardroy in this fashion.”

      “Ewen is rather like a stag,” thought Alison; “he carries his head like one.—Papa,” she explained, “I want to know—I must know—why he wears his arm in a sling! Look, now that he has turned a little you can see it plainly. And, you remember, he disappeared so strangely last night.”

      And now, crawl as they would, they must pass the three gentlemen, who made way for them instantly, not to turn the lady with her hooped petticoats into the swirling gutter. As Ewen—for it was he—raised his bonnet with his left hand, Alison cast a swift and comprehensive glance over him, though she did not pause for the fraction of a second, but, acknowledging his salutation and those of his companions, went on her way with dignity.

      But she walked ever slower and slower, and when she came to the narrow entrance of their close she stopped. Yet even then she did not look back down the Canongate.

      “Papa, did you hear, those gentlemen were asking Ewen what had befallen him. I heard something about ‘disturbance’ and ‘Grassmarket’. You saw his hand was all bandaged about. He looked pale, I thought. What can he have been at last night—not fighting a duel, surely!”

      “Well, my dear, here he is, so he can tell us—that is, if he is disposed to do so,” observed Mr. Grant. “Good day, Ardroy; were you coming in-bye?”

      “I intended it, later on,” replied Ewen with more truth than tact, “but——”

      “But now you see that you behove to at this moment,” finished Alison with determination, looking very significantly at his arm; and Ewen, without another word, went obediently up the close with them, secretly admired from above by a well-known Whig lady who happened to be at her window, and who remarked to her maid that the Jacobite Miss lodging overhead had a braw lover, for all he was a wild Hielandman.

      And presently the wild Hielandman was standing in the middle of Mr. Grant’s parlour, and the Jacobite Miss was declaring that she could shake him, so little could she get out of him. “They say you can ask anything of a Cameron save butter,” she said indignantly, “but it’s clear that there are other things too you’ll never get from them!”

      Ewen smiled down at her, screwing up his eyes in the way she loved. He was a little pale, for the pain of his cut hand had kept him wakeful, but he was not ill-pleased with life this afternoon.

      “Yes, other people’s secrets, to wit,” he said teasingly; and then, feigning to catch himself up, “My sorrow, have I not the unlucky tongue to mention that word in a woman’s hearing! What I have told you, m’eudail, is the truth; I had an encounter last night with some of the Castle garrison, and my hand, as I say, was hurt—scratched, that is, as I warrant you have sometimes scratched yourself with a needle or a bodkin.”

      “The needle’s never been threaded whose scratch required as much bandaging as that!” retorted Alison, with her eyes on the muffled member in the sling. “And what was yon I heard as I passed about a disturbance in the Grassmarket?”