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

be again as it was at Gladsmuir and——”

      Then the door shut behind Lochiel, coming slowly out. He did not see the young man waiting for him, and on his tired, unguarded face Ewen could read the most profound discouragement.

      As he crossed the landing Ewen took a couple of strides after him, laying hold of his plaid, and the Chief stopped.

      “Is it true, Donald?”

      “I suppose so,” answered Lochiel quietly. “At any rate we must take up our positions at once.”

      “Over the water of Nairn, then, I hope?”

      “No. The Prince is immovable on that point. We are to take our stand on our old positions of yesterday on the moor.”

      “When you and Lord George disapprove!—It’s the doing, no doubt, of the same men who were for it yesterday, those who have nothing to lose, the French and Irish officers!”

      Lochiel glanced over his shoulder. “Don’t speak so loud, Ewen. But you are right—may God forgive them!”

      “May God—reward them!” said Ewen savagely. “We are to march our companies back to the moor then?”

      “Yes. And we and Atholl are to be on the right wing to-day.”

      Ewen was surprised, the MacDonalds always claiming and being conceded this privilege. But he did not seek the reason for the change, and followed his Chief in silence down the stairs. The confusion in the hall had increased, and yet some officers were still lying on the floor without stirring, so spent were they.

      “Find me Dungallon and Torcastle,” said Lochiel. “By the way, have you had anything to eat, Ewen, since noon yesterday?”

      “Have you, which is more to the point?” asked Ewen.

      Lochiel smiled and shook his head. “But fortunately a little bread and whisky was discovered for the Prince.”

      Ewen found Ludovic Cameron of Torcastle, the Chief’s uncle, and Cameron of Dungallon, major of the regiment, and himself went out in a shower of sleet to rouse his men, having in several cases to pull them up from the ground. He had got them into some kind of stupefied order when he saw Lochiel and Dungallon come by. A body of MacDonalds was collecting near, and as the two Camerons passed—Ewen scarcely realised it then, but he remembered it afterwards—there were muttered words and a black look or two.

      But he himself was thinking bitterly, “I wonder are we all fey? We had the advantage of a good natural barrier, the Spey, and we let Cumberland cross it like walking over a burn. Now we might put the Nairn water between him and us—and we will not!” An insistent question suddenly leapt up in his heart; he looked round, and by good fortune Lochiel came by again, alone. Ewen intercepted and stopped him.

      “For God’s sake, one moment!” He drew his Chief a little apart towards the high wall which separated the house from the parks. “If the day should go against us, Lochiel, if we have all to take to the heather——”

      “Yes?” said his cousin gravely, not repudiating the possibility.

      “Where will you make for? Give us a rendezvous—give me one, at all events!”

      “Why, my dear boy, I shall make for Achnacarry.”

      “But that is just where you would be sought for by the Elector’s troops!”

      “Yet I must be where the clan can find me,” said the Chief. “Loch Arkaig is the best rallying point. ’Tis not easy neither to come at it suddenly in force because there is always the Lochy to ford. And if I were strictly sought for in person, there are plenty of skulking places round Achnacarry, as you know.”

      “But none beyond the wit of man to discover, Donald—and most of them known to too many.”

      “Of the clan, perhaps, yes. But you do not imagine, surely, that any of them would be betrayed by a Cameron! Moreover, Archie came on a new one the other day when we were there; he showed it to me. Truly I do not think the wit of man could find that unaided, and no one knows of it but he and I. So set your mind at rest, dear lad.” He took a step or two away. “I’ll tell you too, Ewen.”

      The young man’s face, which had become a little wistful, lit up. “Oh, Donald . . .”

      “Listen,” said Lochiel, dropping his voice, and coming closer to the wall. “Half-way up the southern slope of Beinn Bhreac, about a hundred paces to the right of the little waterfall. . . .”

      And Ewen, listening eagerly, heard of an overhanging birch-tree whose old roots grasped like hinges an apparently immovable block of stone, which could be moved if one knew just where to push it, and of a cave, long disused, which Dr. Cameron had found behind it—a place whose existence could never be suspected. And there, if hard pressed . . .

      “Yes, surely there you would be safe!” said Ewen with satisfaction. “That is a thousand times better than any of the old places. I thank you for telling me; I shall not forget.”

      “Whom should I tell if not you, my dear Ewen,” said his Chief, laying his hand for a moment on his shoulder. “You have always been to me——” More he did not say, for Dungallon was at his elbow, urgently summoning him. But perhaps, also, he could not.

      * * * * *

      Ewen pulled his bonnet lower on his brows, and, bending his head against the sleety blast, set his face with the rest towards the fatal stretch of moorland, the last earthly landscape that many a man there would ever see. But over that possibility he was not troubling himself; he was wondering whether it were possible to be much hungrier, and what his foster-brothers would do when they returned and found him gone into battle without them. And like a litany he repeated to himself, to be sure that he remembered them aright, the directions Mac Dhomhnuill Duibh had given him: “Half-way up the southern slope of Beinn Bhreac, about a hundred paces to the right of the waterfall . . .”

      Just as they were all taking up their positions a gleam of sun shot through the heavy, hurrying clouds, and fell bright upon the moving tartans, Stewart and Cameron, Fraser, Mackintosh, Maclean and MacDonald, lighting too the distant hills of Ross across the firth, whence Cromarty came not, and the high ground over the Nairn water on the other hand, where Cluny Macpherson was harrying towards them with his clan, to arrive too late. Then the gleam went out, and the wind howled anew in the faces of those who should spend themselves to death unavailingly, and those who should hold back for a grudge; it fluttered plaid and tugged at eagle’s feather and whipped about him the cloak of the young man for whom the flower of the North stood here to be slain; and faint upon it, too, came now and then the kettledrums of Cumberland’s advance.

      CHAPTER III

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      Once more Keith Windham—but he was Major Windham now, and on General Hawley’s staff—was riding towards Lochaber. This time, however, he was thankful to find himself so occupied, for it was a boon to get away from what Inverness had become since the Duke of Cumberland’s victory a couple of weeks ago—a little town crammed with suffering and despair, and with men who not only gloated over the suffering but who did their best to intensify it by neglect. One could not pass the horrible overcrowded little prison under the bridge without hearing pitiful voices always crying out for water. And as for last Sunday’s causeless procession of those poor wretches, in their shirts or less, the wounded too, carried by their comrades, simply to be jeered at—well, Major Windham, feigning twinges from his wound of Fontenoy, had withdrawn, sick with disgust, from the neighbourhood of the uproariously laughing Hawley.

      And not only was he enjoying a respite, if only of a few days, from what was so repugnant to him, but he had been chosen by the Duke himself to carry a despatch to the Earl of Albemarle at Perth. It seemed that the Duke remembered a certain little incident at Fontenoy. General Hawley, relinquishing his aide-de-camp for the mission, had slapped him on