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

by chance yours, Mr. Grant?”

      And he displayed, hanging across his palm, Hector’s very lean and rather shabby green silk purse.

      The colour mounted hotly into the young Highlander’s face. Do what he would he could not restrain a half-movement of his hand to take his property. But almost swifter than that involuntary movement—instantly checked—was the proud and angry impulse which guided his tongue.

      “No, sir, I am not aware of having lost my purse,” he said very haughtily, and translated the tell-tale movement of his hand into one towards his pocket. He affected to search in that emptiness. “No, I have mine, I thank you. It must be some other gentleman’s.”

      And, having thus made the great refusal, Hector, furiously angry but outwardly dignified, marched up the steps and out of the ‘White Cock’ as penniless as he had come in.

      The door had scarcely closed behind him before Mr. Fetherstonhaugh joined the group round the purse-holder, his jolly red face puzzled. “I could have sworn that purse was Mr. Grant’s—at any rate I saw him pull forth just such another when he was here an hour ago.”

      “But ’tis impossible it should be his,” said someone else. “Who ever heard of a Scot refusing money—still less his own money!”

      The depleted purse passed from hand to hand until one of the company, examining its interior more closely, extracted a worn twist of paper, opened it, and burst into a laugh. “May I turn Whig if the impossible has not happened! The purse is his, sure enough; here’s his name on an old bill from some French tradesman in Lille!”

      “And the lad pretended that he had his purse in his pocket all the time!” exclaimed Squire Fetherstonhaugh. “He must be crazy!”

      “No, he must have overheard our comments, I’m afraid,” said a voice, not without compunction.

      “Aye, that will be it,” said the elder man. “You should be less free with your tongues, young gentlemen! I have a notion where Mr. Grant lodges, and, if you’ll make over the purse to me, damme if I don’t send it to him to-morrow.”

      “Take out the bill, then, sir,” advised one of the original jesters, “and he will be devilish puzzled to guess why it reached him.”

      On the whole it was well that Hector did not know how fruitless was his pretence, as he walked away towards Fleet Street again with an added antipathy to London in his heart. What else could he have done, he asked himself, in the face of such insolent comment? And, after all, it was not a great sum which he had so magnificently waved from him, and the young French lady who had made the purse for him three years ago had almost passed from his memory. That somebody besides himself, the woman with whom he had found a lodging, would also be the poorer for his fine gesture, did not occur to him that night.

      (2)

      Ten o’clock next morning saw Lieutenant Grant outside Beaufort Buildings, and knocking, as directed, at the second house on the right-hand side. The woman who opened told him to go to the upper floor, as the Scotch gentleman lodged there. Up, therefore, Hector went, and, knocking again, brought out a young, shabbily dressed manservant.

      “Can I see Mr. MacPhair of Glenshian?”

      “Himself is fery busy,” replied the man, frowning a little. He was obviously a Highlander too.

      “Already?” asked Hector. “I came early hoping to find him free of company.”

      “Himself is not having company; he is writing letters.”

      Hector drew himself up. “Tell Mr. Macphair,” he said in Gaelic, “that his acquaintance Lieutenant Hector Grant of the régiment d’Albanie is here, and earnestly desires to see him.”

      At the sound of that tongue the frown left the gillie’s face, he replied in the same medium that he would ask his master, and, after seeking and apparently receiving permission from within, opened wide the door of the apartment.

      Hector, as he entered, received something of a shock. To judge from his surroundings, Finlay MacPhair, son and heir of a powerful chief, was by no means well-to-do, and he, or his servant, was untidy in his habits. A small four-post bed with dingy crimson hangings in one corner, together with an ash-strewn hearth upon whose hobs sat a battered kettle and a saucepan, showed that his bedchamber, living apartment and kitchen were all one. In the middle of the room stood a large table littered with a medley of objects—papers, cravats, a couple of wigs, a plate, a cane, a pair of shoes. The owner himself, in a shabby flowered dressing-gown, sat at the clearer end of this laden table mending a quill, a red-haired young man of a haughty and not over agreeable cast of countenance. A half-empty cup of coffee stood beside him. He rose as Hector came in, but with an air a great deal more arrogant than courteous.

      “At your service, sir; what can I do for you?”

      “It’s not from him I’ll ever borrow money!” resolved Hector instantly. But Finlay MacPhair’s face had already changed. “Why, ’tis Mr. Grant of Lord Ogilvie’s regiment! That stupid fellow of mine misnamed you. Sit down, I pray you, and take a morning with me. Away with that cold filth, Seumas!” he added petulantly, indicating the coffee cup with aversion.

      They took a dram together, and Hector was able to study his host; a young man in the latter half of the twenties like himself, well-built and upstanding. The open dressing-gown showed the same mixture of poverty and pretension as the room, for Mr. Grant had now observed that over the unswept hearth with its cooking pots hung a small full-length oil portrait of a man whom he took to be old John MacPhair, the Chief himself, in his younger days, much betartaned and beweaponed, with his hand on an immensely long scroll which would no doubt on closer view be found to detail his descent from the famed Red Finlay of the Battles. In the same way the Chief’s son wore a very fine embroidered waistcoat over a shirt which had certainly been in the hands of an indifferent laundress.

      “Well, Mr. Grant,” said he, when the ‘morning’ had been tossed off, “and on what errand do you find yourself here? I shall be very glad to be of assistance to you if it is within my power.”

      He put the question graciously, yet with all the air of a chief receiving a not very important tacksman.

      “I have had a misfortune, Mr. MacPhair, which, if you’ll permit me, I will acquaint you with,” said Hector, disliking the prospect of the recital even more than he had anticipated. And he made it excessively brief. Last September a spy had treacherously knocked him on the head in the Highlands, and abstracted the pocket-book containing all his papers. Since then he had been confined in Fort William. (Of the subsequent theft of his money in London he was careful not to breathe a word.)

      “Lost all your papers in the Highlands, and been shut up in Fort William!” said Finlay MacPhair, his sandy eyebrows high. “I might say you’ve not the luck, Mr. Grant! And why, pray, do you tell me all this?”

      Hector, indeed, was almost wondering the same thing. He swallowed hard.

      “Because I don’t know how the devil I’m to get out of England without papers of some kind. Yet I must rejoin my regiment at once. And it occurred to me——”

      “I can’t procure you papers, sir!” broke in young MacPhair, short and sharp.

      “No, naturally not,” agreed Hector, surprised at the sudden acrimony of the tone. “But I thought that maybe you knew someone who——”

      He stopped, still more astonished at the gaze which his contemporary in the dressing-gown had fixed upon him.

      “You thought that I—I—knew someone who could procure you papers!” repeated Finlay the Red, getting up and leaning over the corner of the untidy table. “What, pray, do you mean by that, Mr. Grant? Why the devil should you think such a thing? I’d have you remember, if you please, that Lincoln’s Inn Fields are within convenient distance of this place . . . and I suppose you are familiar with the use of the small-sword!”

      Hector,