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

could be imagined. . . . It was not what I should have expected from you. Afterwards I saw what a simpleton I was to think you could have done all that for me without some very good reason . . . for by that time next day I had learnt what that reason was.”

      “Is it fair, is it just,” pleaded Keith, “to believe what a brute, and my enemy, said of me behind my back rather than to judge me by my own actions, Ardroy?”

      “You were . . . too humane,” said the voice dully. “And you did ask me about Lochiel . . .”

      “And must I have had an ill motive behind my humanity, as you call it? You cannot say I pressed you for information about your Chief!”

      “But you found out that I had it!”

      It was so difficult to answer this that Keith did not attempt it. “What motive, then,” he urged, “brought me hastening back here, into disgrace, into complete ruin, perhaps? Is there nothing in your own heart to tell you? When you hear that I have been broke for neglecting my duty and offending my superior officer on your behalf, Ardroy, will you still think that I betrayed you to Major Guthrie?”

      Ewen raised his ravaged face. “Will you swear to me on your word of honour that you never told him that I knew Lochiel’s hiding-place?”

      “I do most solemnly swear it, on my honour as a gentleman. I never saw Guthrie again till the day before yesterday.”

      “And will you swear, too, that you had not already suggested to him that I knew it, and would tell?” asked Ewen, narrowing his eyes.

      “No, I never suggested that,” answered Keith, with a steady mien but a sinking heart. Nothing but the naked truth would avail now . . . and yet its nakedness might prove too ugly. “I am going to tell you exactly what I did suggest.”

      “You will not swear it—I thought as much!”

      “No, I will not swear until I have made clear to you what I am swearing to.—Yes, you must listen, Ardroy; ’tis as much for your own sake as for mine!” He dragged forward a stool for himself. “Go back to that scene on the mountain—if you can remember it. Do you think it was easy for me to find weapons to save you with? When I rushed in and caught you as you sank down by the wall, when I stood between you and the firing-party, with that scoundrel cursing me and ordering me out of the way and telling the men to set you up there again, I had to snatch at anything, anything to stop your execution. I told Guthrie who you were—too important to shoot out of hand like that. Afterwards he asserted that I had implied that you, as Lochiel’s kinsman, would give information about him. As God sees us, such an impossible notion never entered my head, and I said that you would never do it. It was as we were riding away; so he replied, that devil, ‘Then it is not worth my while to fetch him into camp to-morrow; he can rot there in the hut for all I care!’ And I saw that you would rot there unless I could persuade him to send for you. Being at my wits’ end I made a most disastrous suggestion, and said, loathing myself the while for saying it, that it might perhaps be worth his while to fetch you into camp on the chance of your . . . of your dropping some hint by inadvertence. And he——”

      Ewen had given a sharp exclamation. “You said that—you did say that! It was true, then, what he told me! God! And how much more?”

      “No more,” said Keith, wincing. “No more, on my soul. And I only said that to hoodwink him into sending for you. You cannot think that I——”

      “You advise him to take me for that reason!” interrupted Ewen, dropping out every word, while his eyes, which had softened, began to turn to ice again. “And, when you came back that night, you never told me what you had done. Is not that . . . somewhat difficult to explain?”

      “No,” said Keith with a sigh, “it is easy. I was ashamed to tell you—that is the explanation . . . and yet I only made the suggestion because your life, so it seemed to me, was in the balance. When at last I had brought myself to the point of confession you had fallen into the sleep in which I left you. If I had guessed—— But of what use is regret now! And, Ardroy, you cannot imagine that I really thought that you would . . . or that anyone would try by force to . . .” He suddenly covered his eyes with his hand.

      And presently he heard the Highlander say, in a strange, dry, reflective tone, “Yes, it ill becomes me to accuse another man of treachery.” And then, even more quietly, “You say you did not believe it when they told you that I had made a disclosure . . . voluntarily. I ought to thank you for that.”

      The tired voice seemed for the moment empty of emotion; and yet it wrung Keith’s heart as its frenzied reproaches had not. He uncovered his eyes. “Nor do I believe it now,” he said vehemently. “If it is true that they have got your secret from you, then I know that they must have . . . half killed you first.”

      “No,” said Ardroy in the same dull tone, “they have not laid a finger on me here. . . . Yet I have told them what Major Guthrie nearly flogged me to get from me.”

      If Keith had seen a visitant from the dead he could not have stared more wildly. “That’s impossible!” he stammered. “I don’t believe it—you don’t know what you are saying!”

      Ewen’s lip twisted a little. “Why, by your own admission you said that I might drop a hint inadvertently!” The shaft went visibly deep. “Forgive me!” he exclaimed hastily. “It is true—I think I do not know what I am saying!”

      “Oh, let it pass,” said Keith, recovering himself. “Only, in God’s name, tell me what happened!”

      Ewen shut his eyes. “It is quite simple, after all. It seems that I still at times talk in my sleep, as I used when a boy. I was warned of it, not so very . . . not so very long ago.” He paused; Keith gave a stifled ejaculation, and had time to taste the immensity of his own relief. This then, was the explanation of what had been to him so inexplicable—or else so abhorrent. Under his breath he murmured, “Thank God!”

      But Ewen, his eyes open now, and fixed on the other side of the room, was going on.

      “When I was first brought here I was too ill and feverish to realise what they wanted of me. Afterwards, when I knew well enough (since they openly asked me for it so often, and it was what Major Guthrie had wanted too) and when I felt that the secret might slip from me in sleep, because it was so perpetually in my mind, I resolved never to allow myself to go to sleep except when I was alone. But I so seldom was alone. At first I thought, very foolishly, that this was from care for me; then I discovered the real reason, for I think they must have been hoping for this result from the first. Perhaps I talked when I was in Guthrie’s hands; I do not know. But, for all my endeavours,” he gave a dreary smile, “it seems that one must sleep some time or other. And the fifth night—two nights ago—I could hold out no longer, and being left by myself I went to sleep . . . and slept a long time, soundly. I had thought that I was safe, that I should wake if anyone came in.” Ewen stopped. “I ought to have cut my tongue out before I did it. . . . And I would have died for him—died for him!” His head went down on his knee again.

      “Good God!” murmured Keith to himself. The methods that he feared might not have been used, but those which had been were pretty vile. And though their victim had neither given the information voluntarily—not, at least, in the true meaning of the word—nor had had it dragged out of him by violence, his distress was not less terrible. Yet surely——

      “Ardroy,” he said quickly, and touched him on the shoulder, “are you not leaping too hastily to conclusions? No doubt you may have said something about your secret, since it was so much on your mind, but that in your sleep you can have given any precise information about it I cannot believe. Granted that you were told that you had—perhaps in hopes that you would really betray yourself—why did you believe it, and give yourself all this torment?”

      Ewen raised his head, and out of his sunken, dark-rimmed eyes gave Keith a look which wavered away from him as if undecided, and then came back to his face and stayed there. Despair sat in those blue windows, but behind despair could be caught now a glimpse of a more natural craving for sympathy which had not been there before.