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

      Archie came quickly over to him, his face full of concern. “Very ill—and yet you left home for my sake! Have you a doctor there, Ewen?”

      Ardroy shook his head. “I was on my way to fetch one yesterday when I came upon Hector . . . so I could not go on. . . . I dare say Keithie is better by now. Children so easily get fever that it may mean nothing,” he added, with a rather heartrending air of reciting as a charm a creed in which he did not really believe. “That’s true, is it not?” And as Doctor Cameron nodded, but gravely, Ewen tried to smile, and said, getting to his feet, “Well, I’ll be starting back. Thank God that I was in time. And, Archie, you swear that you will be prudent? It would break my heart if you were captured.”

      He held out his hand. His kinsman did not take it. Instead, he put both of his on the broad shoulders.

      “I need not ask you if you are willing to run a risk for your child’s sake. If you will have me under your roof, Ewen, I will come back with you and do my best for little Keith. But if I were taken at Ardroy it would be no light matter for you, so you must weigh the question carefully.”

      Ewen started away from him. “No, no!—for it’s you that would be running the risk, Archie. No, I cannot accept such a sacrifice—you must go back farther west. Ardroy might be searched.”

      “Why should it be? You must be in fairly good repute with the authorities by now. And I would not stay long, to endanger you. Ewen, Ewen, let me come to the bairn! I have not quite sunk the physician yet in the Jacobite agent.”

      “It would be wrong of me,” said Ewen, wavering. “I ought not. No, I will not have you.” Yet his eyes showed how much he longed to accept.

      “You cannot prevent my coming after you, my dear boy, even if you do not take me with you; and it would certainly be more prudent if you introduced me quietly by a back door than if I presented myself at the front. . . . Which is it to be? . . . Come now, let’s eat a few mouthfuls of drammoch; we’ll go all the faster for it.”

      (2)

      That evening there seemed to be bestowed on Loch na h-Iolaire a new and ethereal loveliness, when the hunter’s moon had changed the orange of her rising to argent. Yet the two men who stood on its banks were not looking at the silvered beauty of the water but at each other.

      “Yes, quite sure,” said the elder, who had just made his way there from the house. “The wean was, I think, on the mend before I came; a trifle of treatment did the rest. He’ll need a little care now for the next few days, that is all. A beautiful bairn, Ewen. . . . You can come back and see him now; he’s sleeping finely.”

      “It’s hard to believe,” said Ewen in a low voice. “But you have saved him, Archie; he was very ill when you got here this morning, I’m convinced. And now he is really going to recover?”

      “Yes, please God,” answered Archibald Cameron. “I could not find you at first to tell you; then I guessed, somehow, that you would be by the lochan.”

      “I have been here all afternoon, since you turned me out of the room; yet I don’t know why I came—above all to this very spot—for I have been hating Loch na h-Iolaire, for the first time in my life. It so nearly slew him.”

      “Yet Loch na h-Iolaire is very beautiful this evening,” said his cousin, and he gave a little sigh, the sigh of the exile. “Those were happy days, Ewen, when I used to come here, and Lochiel too; we’ve both fished in this water, and I remember Donald’s catching a pike so large that you were, I believe, secretly alarmed at it. You were a small boy then, and I but two and twenty. . . .” He moved nearer to the brink. “And what’s that, pray, down there—hidden treasure?”

      Ewen came and looked—the moon also. Through the crystal clear water something gleamed and wavered. It was the Culloden broadsword hilt, cause of all these last days’ happenings.

      “That thing, which was once a Stewart claymore, is really why you are here, Archie.”

      * * * * *

      But the more obvious cause lay asleep in the house of Ardroy clutching one of his mother’s fingers, his curls dank and tumbled, his peach-bloom cheeks wan, dark circles under his long, unstirring lashes—but sleeping the sleep of recovery. Even his father, tiptoeing in ten minutes later, could not doubt that.

      Without any false shame he knelt down by the little bed and bowed his head in his hands upon the edge. Alison, a trifle pale from the position which she was so rigidly keeping—since not for anything would she have withdrawn that prisoned finger, though it would have been quite easy—looked across at her husband kneeling there with a lovely light in her eyes. And the man to whom, as they both felt, they owed this miracle (though he disclaimed the debt) who had a brood of his own oversea, wore the air, as he gazed at the scene, of thinking that his own life would have been well risked to bring it about.

      (3)

      Since by nine o’clock that evening Dr. Kincaid had not put in an appearance, it could be taken for granted that he was not coming at all. This made it seem doubtful whether he had seen Hector by the roadside, and though such an encounter was highly desirable for Hector’s own sake, yet, if the doctor had missed him, it probably meant that the farmer at Inverlair had sent at once and got the injured man into shelter, as he had promised Ewen to do.

      Alison was naturally distressed and increasingly anxious about her brother, now that her acute anxiety over Keithie had subsided, and her husband undertook to send a messenger early next morning to get news of the stricken adventurer. But to-night nothing could be done to this end. So, while his wife remained by the child’s side, Ardroy and his cousin sat together in his sanctum, and Ewen tried more fully to convey his gratitude. But once again Doctor Cameron would none of the thanks which he averred he had not deserved. Besides, it was rather good, he observed, to be at the old trade again.

      Ewen looked thoughtfully at his kinsman as the latter leant back in his chair. Archibald Cameron had been greatly beloved in Lochaber where, after his medical studies in Edinburgh and Paris, he had settled down to doctor his brother Lochiel’s people—poor and ignorant patients enough, most of them. Small wonder, however, if he regretted that lost life, quiet, strenuous and happy; whether he did or no it was the second time in a few hours, thought Ewen, that he had referred to it. Ewen could not help thinking also what strange and dangerous activities had been the Doctor’s, man of peace though he was, since that July day in ’45 when his brother the Chief had sent him to Borrodale to dissuade the Prince from going on with his enterprise. He had become the Prince’s aide-de-camp, had taken part in that early and unsuccessful attack on Ruthven barracks during the march to Edinburgh, had been wounded at Falkirk, and shared Lochiel’s perils after Culloden, adding to them his own numerous and perilous journeys as go-between for him with the lost and hunted Prince; it was he who had conveyed the belated French gold from the sea-coast to Loch Arkaig and buried it there. Then had come (as for Ewen too) exile, and anxiety about employment; after Lochiel’s death fresh cares, on behalf of his brother’s young family as well as his own, and more than one hazardous return to the shores where his life was forfeit. If Archibald Cameron had been a soldier born and bred instead of a physician he could not have run more risks. . . .

      “Why do you continue this dangerous work, Archie?” asked Ewen suddenly. “There are others who could do it who have not your family ties. Do you so relish it?”

      Doctor Cameron turned his head, with its haunting likeness to Lochiel’s. He looked as serene as usual. “Why do I go on with it? Because the Prince bade me, and I can refuse him nothing.”

      “But have you seen him recently?” asked Ewen in some excitement.

      “This very month, at Menin in Flanders. He sent for me and MacPhair of Lochdornie and gave me this commission.”

      “Menin! Is that where he lives now?”

      Archibald Cameron shook his head. “It was but a rendezvous. He does not live