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

      What age had left of the Duke’s eyebrows lifted. A line appeared on either side of his mouth. “And what does Mr. Ewen Cameron”—there was the faintest stress on the patronymic—“want of me?”

      And his gaze, not hostile, not piercing, but unmistakably the gaze of command, rested on Aveling’s tall companion.

      “Your Grace,” began Ewen; but it seemed to him that his voice was frozen in his throat. It was not awe which enchained it, for he was not in the least overawed, but realisation of this man’s power for life or death, and of his personality. He was MacCailein Mor, the Chief of the hated, swarming and triumphant race of Campbell . . . and he seemed to be feigning ignorance of why he, the Cameron, was there to wait upon him, so that he might have the reason, which he could well have guessed, put by the petitioner into words. The moment was as bitter as death to Ardroy, and he hoped that Lord Aveling would leave them alone together. But he finished his sentence.

      “Your Grace, I am come on behalf of Mrs. Cameron, and by her express desire, she now having made herself close prisoner with her husband, and being therefore unable to wait upon you herself.”

      “You come as the emissary of a lady, sir?” inquired the Duke smoothly. “Your errand must have my best attention then. But we stand all this while. Pray be seated, gentlemen.” He waved them towards chairs.

      “If your Grace will excuse me,” put in Lord Aveling, “I will withdraw. I came but to present Mr. Cameron in my father’s stead.”

      “Both of you deputies, in fact,” said Argyll, looking from one to the other, and again he smiled the little smile which did not reach his eyes. “I am sorry to lose your company, my lord, but I know that you young men (if you’ll forgive me for calling you one) have better things to occupy you than talking affairs with an old one. Mr. Cameron and I will then bid you farewell, with regret. Commend me, if you please, to his lordship, and convey to him my condolences on his indisposition.” He shook hands again with every appearance of cordiality, a footman appeared, and Aveling was gone.

      The Duke turned with equal courtesy to the visitor who remained.

      “And now Mr. Cameron—Cameron of Ardroy, is it not . . . Ardroy near Loch Arkaig, if I am not mistaken? Pray be seated, and let me know in what I can serve you on Mrs. Cameron’s behalf? The chance to do so is not a pleasure of frequent occurrence where one of your name is concerned.”

      “If your Grace will permit me, I had rather stand,” said Ewen somewhat hoarsely. “I am come, as I am sure you can guess, as a suppliant.”

      “Is that so?” remarked the Duke, looking long and steadily at him. His face betrayed nothing. “You will forgive me, perhaps, if I myself sit, for I am old and weary.” And he seated himself slowly in a high-backed chair. “You come, you say, as a suppliant, and I am to see in you the representative of Mrs. Cameron?”

      “If you please, my Lord Duke—of a woman who turns to you, in her mortal distress, as her last hope.”

      “I think,” said the Duke of Argyll in a soft voice, “that with a Highland gentleman such as yourself I prefer to be MacCailein Mor.”

      Ewen swallowed hard. It had come to him that he could only get through his mission if he forgot that fact.

      “Because for one thing,” went on Argyll, “if you are a kinsman of Doctor Cameron’s you are equally a kinsman of his brother, the late Lochiel, and of the boy who is Lochiel now.”

      “Yes, I am a kinsman of all three,” said Ewen in a low voice. Archibald Campbell was trying, was he, to fancy that in some sort he had the Chief of Clan Cameron before him, about to beg for mercy? “A kinsman by marriage. And do not think, MacCailein Mor,”—he gave him the title since he wished it, and had every right to it—“do not think that Doctor Cameron himself knows of his wife’s appeal to you!”

      “No? But let us be clear, Mr. Cameron, on what score she . . . you . . . which am I to say?—is appealing to me. You have not yet informed me.”

      Ewen’s lip gave a little curl as he drew himself up. The Campbell knew perfectly well the nature of that appeal. He himself did not look much like a suppliant, as he stood there facing the Duke, nor did he feel like one, but he did his best to keep his tone that of a petitioner. “Mrs. Cameron desires to throw herself at your Grace’s feet, as at those of the foremost man in Scotland, whose wish is paramount with the Government in all things Scottish, to beg, to implore you to use your great influence to have the sentence on her husband commuted.”

      “Commuted,” said Argyll after a moment. “Commuted to what?”

      “To imprisonment, to transportation—to anything save an undeserved death.”

      The Duke leant forward, his fine hands, half-hidden by their ruffles, grasping the lion-headed arms of his chair. “Undeserved, do you say, Mr. Cameron? A man comes from abroad, with every circumstance of secrecy, not once or twice only, but constantly, during a period of seven years, to work against the established government in the North, to foment disaffection by any means in his power, to promise foreign intervention in aid of it—all this in a country just settling down after a most disastrous upheaval, in which he, too, bore a prominent part . . . and you call his death undeserved!”

      “Having regard to Doctor Cameron’s private character,” replied Ardroy firmly, “I do. Your Grace must know—what on all sides is acknowledged to be the case—how blameless a reputation he bears and how humane, and how strenuously, before the troubles, he upheld all Lochiel’s efforts for the betterment of the clan. It was largely due to him, too, that Glasgow did not fare worse during the hostilities, and that Kirkintilloch was spared, and Mr. Campbell of Shawfield’s house and property protected. Doctor Cameron’s is not the case of an ordinary plotter, my lord.”

      “In what manner can any plotter be extraordinary, Mr. Cameron, save perchance in the amount of harm he does?” asked the Duke. “In that certainly Doctor Cameron has been singular. Since the year 1747 his comings and goings, or his supposed comings and goings, have kept Lochaber and the West in a continual ferment. In his private character he may be all that you urge and more, yet he has proved the veritable stormy petrel of the Highlands, and the sentence on him is so well deserved that if I were to crawl on all fours to the English Government they would not remit it.”

      “You underrate your power, MacCailein Mor,” said Ewen in a low voice. O God, did he mean that, or was he merely holding out for more fervid, more grovelling entreaties? “You underrate your power,” he repeated. “And you would show more than your power, your . . . generosity . . . by intervening on behalf of a man whose ancestors and yours——”

      “No doubt,” broke in Argyll before the sentence was completed. “But that would be somewhat of a selfish luxury. I have to consider my country, not my own reputation for magnanimity.”

      Ewen seized upon this passionately. “My lord, my lord, you would be considering your country! The best interests of this Government are surely not served by the carrying out of this extraordinarily harsh sentence, which your Grace must be aware is agitating all London! There is no doubt whatever—and in your heart you must know it—that an act of mercy on the part of the present dynasty would do far more towards establishing it in popular esteem than the depriving one Jacobite of life on a seven-year-old attainder could possibly do.”

      “When I spoke of my country, Mr. Cameron,” said the Duke with emphasis, “I meant my native land, Scotland, whose welfare and good settlement I had at heart before you were born. Now you desire that I should induce the English Government to commute Doctor Cameron’s sentence in order that he may have the opportunity of going back to injure her again.” And as Ewen tried to protest he went on more strongly: “No, Mr. Cameron, if I advise His Majesty’s ministers to commute the sentence to one of perpetual imprisonment, that is only to make of Doctor Cameron a constant centre of intrigue and trouble, ending after some years in his escape, as George Kelly escaped in the end (for there are plenty of crypto-Jacobites in London who will conspire though they will not fight).