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

I have started the rebuilding of the burnt crofts, and——”

      “Trust a man to think that he is the only being who can oversee anything practical! I wonder,” observed Miss Cameron, “how much of rebuilding and repairs I have not ordered and supervised when you were nothing but a small wild boy, Ewen, falling into the loch and losing yourself on the braes above it!”

      He hobbled over to her. “I know, I know. No laird ever had a better factor than you, Aunt Margaret!”

      Miss Cameron’s knitting slid to the floor. “Had! Aye, I’m getting an old wife now, ’tis plain, that you dare not leave the reins to me for a year or so, while you take your head out of the lion’s mouth for a while.”

      “No, no, you know that’s not my thought,” said Ewen, distressed. “I’d leave Ardroy to you as blithely as I did a year ago—I will so leave it . . . presently.”

      “Aye, that you will do presently—but not by your own will. You’ll go off from this door as you left Fort Augustus a week ago, tied on a horse again, and your father’s house really in flames behind you—and all because you will not listen to advice!”

      “You make me out more obstinate than I am,” said Ewen gently. “Your advice is excellent, Aunt Marget, but you do not know . . . all the circumstances.”

      “That can easily be remedied,” said Miss Cameron with meaning. But to that suggestion Ewen made no reply.

      Miss Cameron turned round in her chair, and then got up and faced him. “Ewen, my dear, what is wrong? What is it that is keeping you from getting out of the country? Surely it is not . . . that there is something amiss between you and Alison?”

      Ewen did not meet her eyes. But he shook his head. “Alison and I——” he began, but never finished. How put into words what Alison was to him? Moreover, that which was keeping him back did stand between him and her—at least in his own soul. “Some day, perhaps, I will tell you, Aunt Marget,” he said quietly. “But I’d be glad if you would not discuss my departure just now.—You have dropped your knitting.”

      He picked it up for her, and Margaret Cameron stood quite still, looking up uneasily at the height of him, at his brow all wrinkled with some pain of whose nature she was quite ignorant, at the sudden lines round his young mouth. She ended her survey with a sigh.

      “And to think that—since we cannot get a letter to her—the lassie may be breaking her heart over there, believing that you are dead!”

      Ewen took a step away, with a movement as though to ward off a blow. Then he translated the movement into a design to snuff the candles on the table behind him. After a moment his voice came, unsteady and hurt: “Aunt Margaret, you are very cruel.” And his hand must have been unsteady, too, for he snuffed the flame right out.

      “ ’Tis for your own good,” replied Miss Cameron, winking hard at the engraving of King James the Third as a young man over the mantelshelf in front of her. Ewen relighted from another the candle he had slain, saying nothing, and with the air of one who does not quite know what he is doing. “At least, I’m sure ’tis not for mine,” went on Miss Cameron, and now, little given to tears as she was, she surreptitiously applied a corner of a handkerchief to one eye. “You cannot think that I want you to go away again . . . and leave the house the . . . the mere shell of emptiness it is when you are not here!”

      Ewen looked round and saw the scrap of cambric. In an instant, despite the pain it cost him, he had knelt down by her side and was taking her hands into his, and saying how sorry he was to grieve her, and assuring her that there was nothing, nothing whatever wrong between him and Alison.

      Yet even then he made no promises about departure.

      * * * * *

      Nor had he made any a week later, when, one hot afternoon, he lay, reflecting deeply, on the bed in his own room, with his hands behind his head. Although his wounded leg was already much stronger, it rebelled with effect against unremitting use all day, and to Ewen’s intense disgust he found it imperative to spend a portion of the afternoon thus. He regarded this necessity as not only burdensome but disgraceful.

      The wind soughed faintly through the pines of the little avenue, and then passed on to ruffle the ivy outside his open window. A little brown, some of them, after their fiery ordeal, the topmost of those tough leaves were still there, and made just the same rustling noise as of old. And there Ewen lay, apparently at peace; back in his own room, among his modest possessions, his life and liberty snatched from the enemy, his home unharmed after all, and over the seas his young wife waiting for him in safety, the call of the sword no longer keeping him back from her, since the sword was shattered.

      But he was by no means at peace; there was unceasing war in his breast. The way to Alison was barred by a spectre which he could not lay. It was in vain to tell himself that, by God’s mercy, his most unwilling lapse at Fort Augustus had done no harm, that no one of his own party knew of it, that it was not even a complete revelation. To his acutely sensitive Highland pride the mere fact of the betrayal of his Chief’s trust was agony. Alison could not heal that wound, which, now that Ewen was back again in his old surroundings, almost in his old life, seemed to have broken out bleeding afresh. There was only one man who could draw the poison from it, and Ewen knew neither where he was nor how he could come at him.

      And meanwhile his dreams were full of Alison; and a night or two ago he had even seemed to hear her voice in one, asking in so pitiful and faint an accent why he delayed to come to her, now that honour no longer forbade it. She was so lonely . . .

      Ewen sighed deeply, and withdrew his hands from beneath his head. The double scar on his right palm caught his eye for an instant. He wondered, not by any means for the first time, whether Windham had heard of his escape; if he had, he would know that he had indeed given him his life—yes, even by his refusal to witness against him, since that was the direct cause of the prisoner’s being taken over the Spean, where he had met and seized his great opportunity. To judge by the Englishman’s palpable distress at their farewell interview, Windham would be exceedingly glad of the news of his escape. Some day, perhaps, he might contrive to get a letter conveyed to his hands. He would like to tell him in person. But he was never to see him again, so it seemed, for the five meetings were over. Again he counted them: here, at Edinburgh, on Beinn Laoigh, at Fort Augustus. And suddenly his pulse quickened with pleasure—that made four, only four! . . . No, of course, there had been two at Fort Augustus. . . . Yet what (save his own recapture) stood now in the way of their meeting again some day?

      But the ivy leaves went on rubbing their hands together, and through the window at the other side of the room came the clucking of Miss Cameron’s remaining hens, drowsy sounds both, and Ewen, pondering this question, began to fall asleep. Yet, just before he lost consciousness, there shot through his mind, apparently from nowhere, a last flicker of Angus’s prediction of a year ago . . . something about twisted threads . . . a thread of one colour and a thread of another. It had meant nothing at the time and he had totally forgotten it since. Now, between the two worlds of sleep and waking, it not only came back to him, but, with the curious pictorial clarity sometimes vouchsafed in that state, he seemed to see what it meant. Then picture and meaning faded, and he slept.

      He slept quietly for a while, and then dreamt that a man had come into the room and was standing looking down at him. Yet somehow he knew that it was not a dream, that there was really someone there. He tried to rouse himself, but could not; and then the man laid a hand on his wrist. And at that, still half in a dream, he began to struggle and to speak.

      “Let go my arm, you damned torturer! . . . No, not if you cut me in pieces! . . . Ah, my God, but there’s another way . . . another way!”

      The hand had left his wrist quickly, and now it was laid on his shoulder, and a voice—Lochiel’s voice—said, “Ewen, wake up. No one is hurting you.”

      He woke instantly, crying, “Donald! Donald!” half sure, all the time, that it was but a dream. Then he caught his breath and lay staring upwards. It was not indeed Lochiel, but it was his brother who stood there, looking down at him with a good deal of attention.