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Title: A Lost Lady of Old Years. A Romance.
Author: Buchan, John (1875-1940)
Date of first publication: 1899
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London and New York: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1899
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 7 November 2012
Date last updated: 7 November 2012
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1007

This ebook was produced by:
David T. Jones, Mary Meehan, Al Haines
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






                   A LOST LADY OF OLD YEARS

                         _A Romance_

                        BY JOHN BUCHAN


    JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
    LONDON AND NEW YORK
    1899


    _By the Same Author_

    JOHN BURNET OF BARNS
    GREY WEATHER
    SIR QUIXOTE OF THE MOORS
    SCHOLAR GIPSIES


    _Copyright, 1899_
    BY JOHN LANE
    _All rights reserved_




TO

DUNCAN GRANT WARRAND


MY DEAR DUNCAN:

To you, the well-read historian, there is little need to say that every
event in this tale is not recorded for gospel. It is the story of the
bleak side of the Forty-five, of goodness without wisdom, of wisdom
first cousin to vice, of those who, like a certain Lord, had no virtue
but an undeniable greatness. You will ask my authority for Francis's
mission to Lovat,--or the singular conduct of Mr. John Murray. You will
inquire how the final execution came six months too soon, and you will
ransack Broughton's _Journal_ in vain to find my veracious narrative of
the doings of his beautiful wife. Such little matters are the
chronicler's licence. But some excuse is needed for the introduction of
your kinsman, the lord President, and the ragged picture of so choice a
character. My apology must be that my canvas is no place for honest men,
and the Laird of Culloden would have been discredited by his company.

But, such as it is, I dedicate to you this chronicle of moorland wars,
for the sake of an "auld Highland story" which neither of us would wish
to see forgotten.

J. B.




CONTENTS


    Chapter                                                        Page


    BOOK I

       I. THE BIRKENSHAWS OF THAT ILK AND THEIR FORTUNES              1

      II. HOW MR. FRANCIS BIRKENSHAW DEPARTED HIS NATIVE CITY        16

     III. FORTH AND TWEED                                            35

      IV. A JOURNEY IN LATE SUMMER                                   51

       V. THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY                                     67

      VI. ON THE EDINBURGH HIGHWAY                                   84

     VII. OF A LADY ON A GREY HORSE                                 102


    BOOK II

    VIII. THE JOURNEY TO THE NORTH                                  124

      IX. MY LORD OF LOVAT                                          142

       X. WASTE PLACES                                              171

      XI. THE PRINCE'S CABINET OF WAR                               190

     XII. AFTER CULLODEN                                            211

    XIII. CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH                                     226

     XIV. HOW MR. FRANCIS CAME TO THE LOW COUNTRY ONCE MORE         246


    BOOK III

       XV. THE HOUSE OF BROUGHTON                                   262

      XVI. A COUNCIL OF HONOUR                                      276

     XVII. THE JOURNEY TO THE SOUTH                                 289

    XVIII. OF AN INTERVIEW IN AN UNLIKELY PLACE                     305

      XIX. THE LAST OF THE SECRETARY                                323

       XX. THE DEATH OF THE LORD LOVAT                              337

      XXI. THE TEMPTATION OF MR. FRANCIS                            349

     XXII. A LONG LEAVE-TAKING                                      359

    XXIII. IN THE NATURE OF A POSTSCRIPT                            363




    "E'en so, swimmingly appears,
    Through one's after-supper musings,
    Some lost lady of old years
    With her beauteous vain endeavour
    And goodness unrepaid as ever."

    _Browning._




A Lost Lady of Old Years




BOOK I




CHAPTER I

THE BIRKENSHAWS OF THAT ILK AND THEIR FORTUNES


When Gideon Birkenshaw--of Birkenshaw Tower in the Forest and the lands
of Markit beneath the brow of remote Cheviot--was summoned by death to
his account, he left all to his eldest son and turned the other
penniless upon the world. Robert, the heir, stepped unthinking into the
dead man's shoes, and set himself to the family task of amassing gear.
He was a man already grim and aging at thirty, with the stoop of an
inquisitor and deep eyes to search out the intents of the heart. Of old
the house had been insignificant raiders, adding field to field and herd
to herd by a method which it seemed scarce fair to call plunder, so
staidly was it pursued. No minstrel sang their deeds, no tale of them
was told at nightfall in the village, but in all decency and hardness
they went like oxen to their resting-places. They cared naught for
politics, but every now and again the stock bred a religious enthusiast.
A Birkenshaw had served with the Lords of the Congregation, and another
had spoken his testimony in the face of the Grassmarket and a thousand
people, and swung off valiantly into eternity. The watchword of all was
decency and order, and as peace settled upon the land they had left off
their old huntings and harryings and fallen to money-making with the
heartiest good-will. And they prospered deservedly. While the old poor
Lamberts, Horsebrocks, and Burnets, whose names were in a hundred songs
and tales, who had fought with quixotic gallantry forever on the losing
side, and spent their substance as gaily as they had won it, sank into
poverty and decline, the crabbed root of the Birkenshaws budded and put
forth shoots. With anxious eyes and prayerful lips they held on their
wonted path, delighting in the minutes of bargaining and religious
observance, yet full of pride of house and brave with the stubborn
valour of the unimaginative.

It was indeed their pride of race, their inherited spirit, and their
greater wealth which alone marked them off from the burly farmers of the
countryside. To see them at kirk or market, their clothes were as
coarse, their talk as rude, and their companions the same as their
neighbours of the sheep-farms. But all knew and owned the distinction.
Somewhere in the heavy brow and chin of a Birkenshaw there lurked
passion and that ferocity which can always awe the born retainer. The
flashes were scarce, but they were long remembered. When a son of the
house broke the jaw of Chasehope for venturing to sell him a useless
collie bitch, the countryside agreed that the man but got his deserts
for seeking to overreach a Birkenshaw beyond the unwritten rules of
dealing. And darker stories were told--of men maimed and slain in
change-houses, even it was whispered at the door of the House of God,
for chancing in their folly upon the family madness.

They married women like themselves, hard, prudent, and close-lipped;
seeking often far and wide for such a wife and never varying from their
choice. Such marriages were seldom fruitful but never barren; one or two
sons or daughters were always left to hand on the name and the
inheritance. No man had yet been found of sufficient courage to mate
with a daughter of the house, and so it fell out that those gaunt women,
strong and tall as the men, stayed in the Birkenshaw Tower till their
brothers' marriage, and then flitted to the lonely dwelling of Markit,
where there always waited some brother or uncle in need of a
housekeeper. Such an order in life brought its reward. There were no
weaklings to spoil the family credit, and like a stripped unlovely pine
the stock survived, abiding solitary on its hill-top and revelling in
storms.

But in their lives they paid assiduous court to a certain kind of
virtue. In the old riding days the house had robbed and harried, as it
were, under protest; and now, being fallen on settled times, they
cultivated honesty with the greatest diligence. A Birkenshaw's word was
as good as his oath, and his oath as his bond, and woe befall the man
who doubted one or the other. The milk of human kindness was confined
with them to family channels and embittered with the grudging which
comes of obedience to the letter. By the canon of the Word of God they
were men of a singular uprightness, but it was a righteousness which
took the colour of the family traits. They set diligence, honour, and a
freedom from gross vices on the one hand, and passion, relentless
severity, and little love for their neighbours on the other, and,
finding the result to be a species of pride, labelled it an excellence.
Withal their penuriousness made their lives frugal and their toils gave
them health, so that, a race of strong men, they ran their imperious
course, feared in their faults and hated in their virtues.

The pastimes of their class were little thought of. It was long since
one of the name had been seen with the deer-hounds or playing a salmon
in the floods of Tweed. Long days of riding over their broad lands were
varied with noisy mornings in the clatter of a market-place or evenings
filled with the sleep of well-fed lassitude. But when they came among
their fellows it was with something of a presence,--the air of masters
who cared little for the quibblings of superiority but were ready if
occasion came to prove it by deed. Hence came the owercomes of "A
Birkenshaw's glower," and "'Gang out o' my gate,' quo' auld Birkenshaw,"
with which the conversation of the valley was garnished to repletion.

In such manner did life pass by in the grey stone dwelling which crowned
the Yarrow braes, with Yarrow crooning in the nooks below. It was but
yesterday I passed the place, which no lapse of years can change. The
vale of long green hills which falls eastward from the lochs is treeless
and desert for miles, with a wan stream sweeping 'neath barren
hill-shoulders and the grey-green bent lending melancholy to all. But of
a sudden it changes to a defile; the hills huddle together till the
waters can scarce find passage; and a forest of wildwood chokes the
gorge. Brown heather and green hazels crest every scarred rock and
fringe the foot of Birkenshaw Tower, which looks steeply down on its
woodland valley. Soft meadowgrass is shaded by a tangle of ashes, and in
every dell the burn's trickle slips through a wild flower-garden; while
in broad pools and shining stretches Yarrow goes singing her ageless
song for evermore.

Of the two sons born to Gideon Birkenshaw in the house on the hill, the
elder was even as his father, a man of few words and hard deeds,
ungenial, honest, and with all his qualities grounded on that rock of
devilment which lay deep in the temper of his house. His person was
such as his nature, and it was not hard to see in the spare and sinewy
figure of the son the immature presentment of the father. But the
younger, Francis, was like a changeling in the place. From his birth he
had none of the ways of the rest; his very form was like a caricature of
the family traits, and whatever was their strength was in him perverted
to weakness. He had the Birkenshaw high cheek bones, the fleshy chin and
the sunken eyes, but all were set carelessly together, as if by nature
in a moment of sport. He had his father's long limbs and broad back, but
in him the former were feeble and knoitering, the latter bent in an
aimless stoop. In character the parody was the more exaggerated.
Shrewdness became a debased cunning which did not halt at a fraud;
energy, mere restlessness; and persistence, stupidity. Also the mastery
over the bodily appetites which marked the kin was wholly absent in him,
and early in life he took to brandy-drinking and tavern-loafing. Every
fold has its black sheep and every house its weakling, but to the proud
family whence he sprung Francis was something more than a ne'er-do-weel.
He was a lasting disgrace, always at the doors, staring in their faces
at kirk and market. It is the curse of such a kin that a man who shows
somewhat weaker than the rest goes straight to the devil without a
chance of redemption, and the house of Birkenshaw with drawn lips and
averted eyes suffered the prodigal to go his way.

But in the trivial Mr. Francis there remained some shreds and rags of
quality unperceived by his kinsfolk. He alone in the whole history of
his race possessed some tincture of the humanities, picked up in a
ragged way but worthy of some note. He had something of a poetic soul
and saw wonders in hill and water which were not for the busy men of
affairs who rode their horses over the countryside solely that they
might reach an end. He was humane in little matters and no dumb creature
suffered ill-usage at his hands. Even in his vices he preserved some
tatters of kindliness and _bonhomie_ which endeared him to the folk with
whom he consorted. In a dim, confused way he strove to guide his
shambling life in the way of mercy, and in his stumbling made helpless
efforts to rise.

It was clear to all that such a state of matters could not long
continue, and the mind of the countryside waited for a crisis. It
arrived at length and in the expected way. The blacksmith of Birkenshaw
was one Reuben Gowanlock, a drunken ill-conditioned fellow, with a set
hatred of the family in the Tower and a marvellous power of quarrelling.
His daughter Marion, a handsome girl of twenty, fell much in the way of
Mr. Francis in his village sojournings, and an intimacy sprang up
between them which endured all through the spring and summer of a year.
No record exists of its nature, but it is certain that the couple took
long walks in the sunset vale, during which Francis would charm her ears
with his flowery rhapsodical talk and her vanity with his presence. In
the winter a child was born, and in the eyes of all, the laird's son
stood confessed as the father. The blacksmith cursed deep and swore
vengeance; poor Marion dared not show herself abroad; and things looked
black enough for both. But worse was still to follow, for the place was
startled one morn by the news that Francis had married the girl in all
honour and good faith. Here was food for gossip and speculation, and it
was the common verdict that the man had made such reparation in terror
of Reuben's menaces. Yet it is certain that nothing was less in
Francis's mind. Whatever grave lack he had, there was no stint in his
share of the family courage. His motive for the deed was an indistinct
sense of honour, a certain ill-defined compassionateness of heart, which
he scarcely realised and would not have sought to defend.

For the twain the end came sharp and cruel. There was long speech in the
place of the interview between Francis and his father, and stray
fragments of what passed were spread abroad. The wretched creature with
his farcical handsomeness and strength stood shivering before the
terrible old man, who represented the essence of a long line which knew
no mercy. Every inch of his face was browned and wrinkled with sun and
wind; his eye glanced steely as an October sun; and his figure was alive
with vigour and wrath. He had been absent on a visit to Markit when the
events occurred and all was over ere he returned. So in riding-boots and
greatcoat he sat at the table's end with a hunting crop before him. He
heard the village explanation of his son's folly and he was not slow to
believe it. His sentences came out with a dry rasp and with an ominous
accompaniment of lowering brows. "I will not speak of the crime against
God's law as written in His book, for that is a matter between you and
your saul." Indeed, it was said that others of the Birkenshaws had erred
in like manner, and in any case it was not a sin which involved any
surcease of pride. "But of one thing I will speak," he went on, "and
that is of your offence against the bluid of the man that begat ye and
the house that gives ye your name. Ye have mairrit a tinkler lass, you,
ye splaittering body, because ye were feared at her faither's mauvering.
By God, there was never yet ane o' your race wi' sic a taid's hert."

The wretched son made no attempt at a defence which he would have
scarcely told to himself. He shuffled with ineffectual feeling, a prey
to sentiment and inward tears.

"But 'my son' did I say?" the other went on. "Na, na, ye are nae son o'
mine. Gang to the midden ye've been pikin' on and let a cleanly honest
house be quit o' ye. Gang off, the pair o' ye, and breed up bairns to
rin for porters and serve in byres. By the Lord Almichty I disown ye,
and I wis nae mair than to see ye in the kennel ye've made for yoursel'.
Gang out o' my sicht, ye thing o' strae."

Francis went out of the room with an indistinct pain of heart, for he
was no more than sober from his morning cups. Yet the grating tones had
scarcely ceased, the door was scarcely closed, ere the old man laid his
head on his hands and suffered in dry-eyed misery the pangs of pride
wounded through affection.

Of the exact movements of Mr. Francis after that hour there remains no
adequate record. He could not bide in the house, nor did his remnants of
pride suffer him to remain in the village. With such small belongings as
were his he took himself and his wife to Edinburgh and set up dwelling
in a dingy room in the Monk's Vennel. How he lived no man could tell,
but it seems likely that when all his gear had gone for brandy this
scion of a reputable house did odd jobs for whoever was willing to hire
him, from copying a bill to carrying a bundle. One thing is certain,
that his course, whatever it was, soon drew to an end. His body was
never strong, and his impressionable and capricious temper of mind was
not far removed from craziness. Poverty and dram-drinking so wrought
upon him that soon he was little better than an enfeebled idiot, sitting
melancholy on tavern benches and feeding the fire of life on crude
spirits. Two more children--daughters--were born to him, and some five
years after his departure from home, Mr. Francis Birkenshaw had become a
mere wreck of his former wreckage, a parody of a parody. Six months
later a fever took him, and kindly Death stepped in with his snuffer and
turned the guttering candle into blackness.

Hitherto we have not spoken of Mistress Marion Birkenshaw who adorned
the dim house in the Monk's Vennel. Her beauty, at first considerable,
had grown with the years to heaviness, and nought remained but singular
black eyes. Her nature was not extraordinary, but rejoiced in the
niceties of gossip and the refinements of housekeeping. Her early
behaviour was the sudden blossoming of romance in an orderly mind, and
with the advancing months she returned to the placid level of the
common. Had she married decently and dwelled in her native village she
would have been a matron without reproach, a mistress of gossip and
old-wives' tales, glorying in little hospitalities and petty hatreds, an
incarnation of the respectable. As it was, she ruled the household with
a bustling hand, and found neighbours in a desert of strangers. The
clack of her tongue sounded all day about the doors, or was sunk in the
afternoon to a contented sing-song when Mistress Gilfillan dropped in to
sew with her and tell her woes. Even in so hard a place she attained to
some measure of happiness, and speedily ordered sprawling children and
feckless husband with a pride in the very toil which would have cheered
one's heart. Loud-tongued, noisy, coarse as sackcloth, a wallower in the
juicily sentimental, she yet had something of the spirit of a general,
and marshalled her ragged forces in decent array.

On the death of Mr. Francis her action took a characteristic path. For,
meeting Robert, now master of the broad lands of Birkenshaw, in the High
Street, one chill February morn, she forthwith detailed to him his
brother's debts, and with the abandon of her class glided from becoming
tears into the necessary question of maintenance. The Laird's feelings
at the moment would be hard to tell. The thought that one of his house
should have sunk so low that his widow had to beg her bread, stung him
like a lash. He lost for the moment his habitual reserve. With a mumbled
"Tak' it, wumman, tak' it; there'll be mair to follow," he thrust some
gold into her hand; and thenceforth came quarterly payments from
Birkenshaw with a bare word of communication. Marion took them gladly,
for she had no other choice, and on such means she reared her children
to grown age.

One incident in her character remains which is eloquent in its
strangeness. From the day of her departure she held no communication
with her folk at the smithy, manifesting no interest in their doings and
shunning even the mention of their names. Deep in her soul was a well of
sentiment. She had mated with a Birkenshaw and some peace-offering was
due to the fetich of the family pride. A sense of an honour paid to her
hung ever on her conscience; it made her look with respect on her own
children as something higher than herself; and it forced her to the
severance of natural ties. It is doubtful, indeed, whether they were
ever tightly knit, for the drunken father had little kindness for any.
But, such as they were, they were gladly renounced, and with something
not far from heroism this foolish woman took loneliness for her portion,
a solitude brightened with the halo of a great connection.




CHAPTER II

HOW MR. FRANCIS BIRKENSHAW DEPARTED HIS NATIVE CITY


The child Francis grew up to manhood with something of precipitancy, for
in that house life was not suited for a lengthy play-day. At five he had
been as ugly as sin in face, though well-grown and straight in body. His
father's hard features and ruddy skin were joined to Marion's sloe-black
eyes and hair, and such a conjunction is not fair in childhood. So
peculiarly sinister an appearance would have made him the butt of his
coevals, had he not possessed a hot temper and an uncommonly hard fist.
From his sixth year battles were of daily occurrence, and it was rarely
that the week-end found him with his face unmarked. But inch by inch,
wound by wound, he fought his way to fame, till the mere sight of his
black countenance was more than enough to hush the wrangling of the
others and incline their ears to his words.

But with those days we have little to do, and it is at the maturity of
eighteen that we would take up the tale of his life. His sisters, Jean
and Lisbeth, were now grown to high-coloured, loud-spoken girls, who
shared their mother's likings and their mother's comeliness. The
Birkenshaw payments made comfort possible, and the house was conducted
in a pleasant stir, with gossips sitting at all hours and the sharp
tones of the housewife guarding its cleanliness and order. The two
lasses were the blacksmith's true grandchildren, and in no way different
from a thousand such maids in the city. They loved to dress in their
best of a Sabbath and walk in decent procession to the Cross Kirk, where
the ministrations of Mr. Linklater were sugared with the attentions of
the young apprentices. They were notable cooks and wrought all day to
their mother's bidding with a cheery bustle. In a word, they were of
their mother's pattern,--honest, fresh-coloured, hearty, and friendly to
all.

Had it not been for their brother's presence, the household in the
Monk's Vennel might have been an abode of prosperous peace. But Francis
was a puzzle to most folk and a grief to his mother such as her foolish
loose-lived husband had never been. The years brought him height and
strength and a handsome face. It would have been hard to find in all the
town a nobler figure of a man, when anger did not distort the features.
From some unknown forebear he derived an air of uncommon masterfulness,
and a carriage which might have vied with that of the greatest buck of
the day, my Lord Craigforth himself. His temper was like his body,
fierce, and strong, and hot as a red fire, so that no man could anger
him with safety. In happier conditions he might have followed the paths
of virtue, for there seemed nothing ignoble in that brow and eye. But in
the kitchen of his home, among the clatter of neighbour tongues and
women's gossip, in the presence of his mother and sisters and the rotund
housewives who called them friends, he was wofully out of place.

In his childhood he had cared little for the thing, for the street was
his home at most hours; but as he grew to age the whole life oppressed
him with deep disgust. To him alone had fallen a share of the Birkenshaw
temper, and he revolted from this unctuous existence. For his kin he had
fits of tenderness, but at his age no feeling is so weak as domestic
love. The result was not hard to foresee. With such share as he had of
the family income he took to his own pleasures, and the house saw him
not save at meal-time and the late night.

Who shall tell of the glorious Edinburgh of that age in all its colour
and splendour and dirt? The years of last century were still young, the
second George was but new on the throne, and in the northern city life
flowed freely and hotly in a muddy, turbulent stream. The drums of war
were still in men's memories, and soldiers from the Castle still
thronged the street. In the narrow alleys which wound like snakes among
the high, dark houses there lurked filth and disease which have long
since gone from the land. Ragged Highland lairds and broken gillies,
fine periwigged gentlemen, ministers many with their sombre black, fair
ladies and country wives, honest shepherds in homespun from the South,
half the gentry of the land, as well as the staid merchant or the
wandering southerner, were jostled on the narrow causeway by French
agents and priests in hiding, or fell a prey at dark corners to the
lurking cut-purse. Roaring east winds disturbed the trials in the
Parliament House, where half a dozen learned judges administered the
law, ere hurrying back to dinner and their unfinished treatises on Taste
and the Sublime. And the same wind caught at the throats of half-starved
loyalists shivering in entries, and praying and plotting for that day
when the King should come back to his own. Every now and again the
streets were in an uproar over some straggling news of a fresh landing,
and the good citizens listened to the bugle on the Castle rock with a
feeling of confirmed security. It was the day of riot and bright colour,
of fine dresses and rags, of honest poverty and the blackguard shuffling
in the same kennel,--a day when no man knew his own mind or his
neighbours', and the King's peace was more brittle than the King
desired.

But above all it was the hey-day of taverns, great houses of festivity
where beside leaping fires a motley crew dined and grew drunk in all
good fellowship. The age must be thick with alarums and perils of war to
produce the fine flower of tavern-life. It is when a man's mind is hot
with wild news or the expectation of its reception that he leaves his
ingle and seeks the steaming hearth and the talk of neighbours. And who
can tell of the possibilities which lie in such an evening, of a door
flung open and a stranger coming full of unheard-of tales? The
inn-lounger is as surely a glutton for the romantic as the adventurer
upon the sea.

To such homes of the soul went Francis with more zeal than discretion.
There, and not in the female atmosphere of the Monk's Vennel, he found
the things in which his heart delighted. The talk of men in its freedom
and brutality was his delight, and in the motley concourse of folk he
had matter for a living interest. A strain of inherited vice made the
darker side of it soon cease to appall him, and in time he passed from
the place of a spectator to that of a partaker in many carousals, a
sworn friend to half the riff-raff in the city, the ally of loose women
and causeway sots.

Yet in this spring-tide of wild oats there was none of the sower's zest.
After all, he was very much of an amateur in vice, restrained from
excess by many bonds of memory, convention, and human kindliness. His
course was the recoil from the paths of fireside virtue, the outcome of
something uncommon and heroical in a nature run to seed. At moments a
sense of the folly of it all oppressed him, but the fatal rhetoric of a
boy's thoughts put the graver reflection to flight. He would regain his
self-respect by fancying himself a man of the world, living with a hand
close on the springs of life, one who in all folly was something beyond
his allies. And in consequence he sank but rarely into brutish
drunkenness,--a sin (for the confusion of all doctrines of heredity)
which had little hold upon him,--and even from such lapses recovered
himself with a certain alertness of spirit. Yet this was but the
immaturity of his character, a thing to pass away with years, and in a
little Francis might have looked to grow to a blackguard of some
quality.

To his mother his life was a source of uncomprehending grief. Her
efforts of kindness were now repelled and now met half-way with an
inconsistency which confounded all her notions. When her son staggered
home in the small hours, or when Mistress Leithen of the Candle Row
retailed strange stories of his evil-doing, the unhappy woman was, if
anything, less pained than mystified. Maternal affection, which for the
glorifying of poor humanity, is strongest in the coarsely sentimental,
bade her sorrow, when all the rest of her nature bade her only wonder.
So with a patience and a denseness too deep for words, she persisted in
her tenderness, bore his lordly humours, and revolted his soul with a
thousand nauseous vulgarities, since to the rake the only intolerable
coarseness is the respectably plebeian.

Now it chanced that Fate took it upon her to order events for the saving
of Francis' soul. About his eighteenth year he had entered a writer's
office in the city, for no other cause than to give himself some name
whereby to describe his life. An odd strain of worldly prudence kept him
from neglecting his duties to dismissal point, and in a sort of careful
idleness he copied deeds, visited ground for seisin, and collected rents
in and out of the town. He had no ill-will to the work, provided it did
not bear too hardly upon his time. But meanwhile in the burgh of Dysart,
which sits perched on the steep shore of Fife, there lived a Mr. Gregor
Shillinglaw, who as the one lawyer in the place had a good livelihood
and a busy life. He was growing old, and in the natural course bethought
him of a successor. His head clerk, John Henryson, was able and willing
for the place, but Mr. Shillinglaw belonged to a school of men who have
less respect for long services than for family ties. Once on a time a
Birkenshaw had married a distant cousin of his, and the two names had a
kinship in his memory. So it fell out that, being in Edinburgh at the
office of Trumbull and Gleed, who were Francis's masters, he saw the
lad, heard his name, and was affected with a sudden kindness.

He asked after his business merits. Good, admirable, said Mr. Trumbull,
with a smile. And his character? Oh, well, some folk are young and fresh
in blood, and the same rule does not hold for all, said the lawyer,
amazed at his own heresy, but bound in honour to say nothing to the
discredit of his house or servants. Mr. Shillinglaw heard and was
satisfied; the hint of gentlemanly vices only increased his friendliness
for the young man; so before the week was out Francis received an offer
to go to Dysart to a place which with care might bring him to an old age
of opulence and respect.

To Dysart Francis went with a mixture of feelings. He had never lived
elsewhere than in Edinburgh, and he was glad to make trial of a new
habitat on the very edge of the sea. More, he had many deeds to his name
in Edinburgh which would scarce bear the inevitable scrutiny which the
days must bring. His credit, too, was low, and his debts great; so with
a light heart and much hope he betook himself to the dark rooms in the
little wind-worn town, where a man's lips are always salt with the air
from the sea, and a roaring East sweeps in the narrow lanes.

The ancient town is now a very little place, unsightly with coal and
dingy with stagnant traffic. But in the days of Mr. Shillinglaw it was a
bustling port, where skippers from Amsterdam came with strong waters and
cheeses and Lord knows what, and carried away beer and tallow, hides and
sea-coal. It boasted of a town-house where the noisy burgesses met, and
elegant piazzas where foreign merchants walked and chaffered. In the
rock-hewn harbour lay at all times twoscore and more of schooners, and
the high red-tiled houses looked down upon an eternal stir of shipping
and unlading. It was a goodly place to live, for health came with the
clean sea-wind and wealth with every tide.

Of Francis's doings in this place there is scant account save for the
brilliant episode which marked his departure. It seems that at first he
wrought well under Mr. Shillinglaw's guidance, and the two would drink
their claret of a night in all amity. But untoward events soon
thickened in the younger's path, and, aided by his uncertain temper, he
began anew his downward course. From the time when he first saw Nell
Durward his doom was assured, and thereafter his master might grieve or
storm, but Francis remained untouched. Nell was the provost's daughter,
tall and comely, with bright cheeks and saucy black eyes which captured
his roving thoughts. Thenceforth he was her slave, running at her every
beck and nod, till her father, with some inkling of how matters stood,
resolved to put an end to his daughter's coquetry, and plainly told the
eager lover that Nell was already betrothed to a Baillie of the town,
one Gow by name, and would shortly be his wife.

Francis flung himself out of the house, and from that hour till after
the celebration of the wedding drank more deeply than he had ever done
before, and bade Mr. Shillinglaw and his business go to the devil whence
they had come. For three weeks he was the bye-word of the town; then,
when all was over, he returned to his right mind and relapsed into
decency with some apology for his absence.

But Fate had still further tricks to play on him. It chanced that a
yearly dinner was held in the Bunch of Grapes in memory of some former
benefactor of the town, and thereafter dancing went on till morning in
the roomy upper chamber, where faded silk hangings and a frowning
portrait proclaimed antiquity. Hither went Francis in a sober mood, and
after the meal drank his toddy with the fathers of the burgh as befitted
a grave notary. But after he had his fill of their company and had grown
hot with the fumes of spirits, he mounted the stair, and sitting by the
fiddlers surveyed the gay scene. Suddenly to the assembly there entered
Baillie Gow, with the aforetime Nell Durward blushing on his arm. The
devil of boastfulness, born of early and deep potation, drove the man in
the direction of his rival. He gaped before him, and then with many
abusive words delivered him a moral homily. The blood of Francis, hot at
the best, was roused to madness by the man's conduct and the thought of
his own unrewarded love. "Let go his arm, my dear," he said quietly to
the girl, and struck the portly baillie clean on the jaw so that he
dropped like a felled ox.

Now Mr. Gow was a great man in the town, and at the sight a party, with
the landlord, one Derrick, at their head, made to lay hands on his
assailant. But Francis was strong and young, and with a bench he cleared
a space around him and fought his way to the door. His head was in a
muddle, and his one thought was to reach the street. But at the
stair-top the landlord confronted him, and with a cudgel struck him
smartly on the face. The blow roused madness to action. With a sudden
crazy resolution, Francis drew his knife and stabbed the man in the
side, and then breaking through the crowd on the steps reached the open
and ran straight for the distant woods.

The remainder of the incident goes with still greater spirit. For three
days Francis lay hid among the brackens with the terror of murder on his
soul. But none came to seek him, and with the hours his confidence grew,
till he summoned his courage and sallied out at the darkening of the
fourth day. With infinite labour he avoided observation, and entered the
narrow wynds. Now came his chief toil. He must learn of the landlord's
fate to ease his mind and determine his plans. So in much trepidation he
betook himself to the only haven he could think of, the house of one
Berritch, a man of reputed wealth but no reputation, a former ally of
his own in tavern-drinking, and esteemed a trafficker in the contraband.

Thither he crept, and won immediate admittance. He heard with relief
that his enemy was all but recovered, that the wound had been a mere
scratch, and that his name was free at least from such a stain. But
otherwise, Mr. Berritch admonished him, things looked black indeed. Mr.
Shillinglaw had repudiated him, and the respectability of the place had
made their faces flint against him. It was currently believed that he
had returned to the purlieus of Edinburgh.

In such a state of affairs Francis was ripe for an offer, and Mr.
Berritch did not fail him. He himself would undertake to bring him to
France in one of his boats, and set him down where there was chance and
room for likely young lads unburdened with a conscience. He could not
remain in Dysart, and the city was but a halting-place on the road to
beggary. That night a lugger would sail from the Wemyss Rocks in which
he was welcome to a passage.

The conclusion of the episode was yet more varied; for when all had won
to the starting-place, word was brought that the Burnt island gaugers
had got tidings about Mr. Berritch and his occupation, which would lead
them that night to pay a visit to his dwelling. The unfortunate man
bowed to fate in a transport of cursing, and set his face to the boat
and the sea; but in the nick of time he had mind of valuable monies left
in the house, which he would little like to see in the hands of the law.
He was at his wits' end, when Francis, with the uneasy generosity of one
in debt, offered to go to fetch them. Accordingly he set out and made
his way through the dark and filthy east streets of Dysart, not without
some qualms of anxiety. But at the High Street corner he met a man in an
advanced stage of drunkenness, stumbling over ash-buckets and suffering
from the narrowness of the path. A glance convinced him that it was none
other than Baillie Gow, returning from some borough dinner, and flown
with wine and talk. A plan grew in Francis's mind which made him shake
with mirth. Slipping his arm through the Baillie's, he led him to Mr.
Berritch's house and set him in Mr. Berritch's chair, with Mr.
Berritch's wig on his head and a tumbler of rum at his elbow. Then he
secured the gold, and slipped outside the window to wait the result. His
patience was little tried, for soon there came the tramp of men down
the street, a knocking at the door, a forced entrance, and a swoop upon
their prisoner. He heard them read the paper of identification, and give
a one-voiced consent to every detail. Then with aching sides and
smarting eyes he watched them lift the innocent upon their shoulders;
and when their tread died away he betook himself to the cutter in huge
delight at his own boyish humour.

With this bravado begins the history of the doings of Mr. Francis
Birkenshaw, which he did in the years of our Lord seventeen hundred and
forty-five and seventeen hundred and forty-six in the reign of George
the Second, King of England. In such a fine fervour of conceit and
daring he launched out upon his course. The events of the past weeks
seemed like an ancient tale from which he was separated by years of
maturity. In a night he had outgrown any vain schemes for a reputable
life of good-citizenship. Now he was free to go whither he pleased, and
carve his fortune in the manner best suiting him without restraint of
prejudice. As the vessel rode on the waters and the wind sang in the
sheets, his heart was strengthened with pleasing self-praise, not
without a hint of mirth at the comedy of life.

But for all great designs money was needful, and Mr. Berritch himself
was the first to mention it. Now the secret of the Birkenshaw payments
had always been kept hid from him, and he thought that the family
substance came from some fortune of his father's. There must be some
portion remaining to him, he thought, and on this he set his hope. So it
was settled that the lugger should lie well into the Lothian coast
during the day, and in the evening he should be put ashore to seek his
own. Then once again they would set sail for their longer voyage.

The plan was carried out to the letter, and at eight the next night
Francis was knocking at the door of his mother's house. From within came
the noise of tongues and women's laughter, and the cheerful clatter of
dishes which marks the close of a meal. His mother opened to him, wiping
her mouth with her apron in a way she had, and smirking over her
shoulder. At the sight of him she started, and he entered unbidden. The
place bore all the marks of comfort, and in the firelight he saw two
women of the neighbourhood, old gossips of his sisters and mother. His
entrance hushed their talk, and sidelong looks and a half-giggle
succeeded. Somehow the sight roused his gorge unspeakably. He, with his
mind intent upon high adventure, with the smell of the salt and the
fierce talk of men still in his memory, loathed this glosing prosperity,
these well-fed women, and the whole pettiness of life. He took his
mother aside and demanded the money which was his share. She, good soul,
did not tell him the truth, but wrapping herself up in her rags of
pride, went to a drawer and gave him a meagre bag of gold. It was the
latest payment, and its loss meant straitened living for months. But he
knew nothing of this, thought it but his share, and grumbled at its
smallness. With the irony which riots in life, at that moment he was
pluming himself upon superiority to such narrow souls, when all the
while pride in one was making a sacrifice of which he knew nothing. His
remnants of filial love made him take a kindly farewell of his mother;
and then, with nose in the air and a weathercock of a brain, he shook
off the dust of the domestic, and went out to the open world.

With the doorway of his former home, he passed from vice frowned upon
and barely loved to vice gilded and set upon a pedestal. A sense of
high exhilaration grew upon him. He would follow his own desires, with
the aid of a strong hand and a courageous heart. In his then frame of
mind the only baseness seemed to lie in settling upon his lees in the
warm air of the reputable. A hard conscience and a ready hand were a
man's truest honour, and with this facile catchword he went whistling
into a new life.

But at the moment something from the past came to greet him. As he
passed a tavern door a girl with the face and attire of the outcast
hailed him boisterously and made to link her arm with his. He knew her
well for one of his aforetime comrades. Her face was pinched, and the
night wind was blowing through her thin frock. But from Francis she got
no kindness. His heart at the time was too steeled on his own path for
old regrets. With a curse he struck her harshly with his open hand, and
watched her stagger back to the causeway. The blow comforted his soul.
It was the seal upon his new course, the rubicon which at length he had
crossed; and when he came to Musselburgh sands and the lugger, it was
with an increased resolution in his fool's heart.




CHAPTER III

FORTH AND TWEED


The wind was already shaking in the sails when he clambered aboard, and
the windlass groaned with the lifting anchor. Mr. Berritch cried a
cheery greeting from the bow, as Francis, heavy with sleep, tumbled down
below to bed. The moon was up, the night airs were fine, and in a little
the lugger was heading by the south end of Inchkeith for the swell of
the North Ocean.

At dawn Francis was up and sniffing the salt air over the bulwarks. A
landsman born, he had little acquaintance with the going down to the sea
in ships, and the easy movement and the brisk purpose of the lugger
delighted his heart. He was still in the first heat of adventure; the
white planking, the cordage, and the tarry smell were all earnests of
something new; and with the vanishing smoke and spires he beheld the end
of a life crimped and hampered. He felt extraordinary vigour of body and
a certain haphazard quality of mind which added breadth to his freedom.
But at the last sight of the Pentlands' back, sentiment woke for one
brief moment ere she shook her wings and fled.

He turned from his meditation to find Mr. Berritch at his elbow with a
smile and a good-morning. Seen in the first light his face had an ugly
look about the eyes and ponderous jaw, a shadow in the lines of his
mouth. With him came another, whose face Francis had not seen before,--a
lean youth with bleak eyes, a hanging chin, and a smirk always on the
verge of his lips.

"Ye came well off frae your venture, Francie," said Mr. Berritch. "I
have to present to ye Mr. Peter Stark, a young gentleman out o'
Dumbarton, bound on the same errand to France as yoursel'. Starkie, this
is Mr. Birkenshaw I telled ye o'."

The two bowed awkwardly, and the elder man went off and left them.
Francis got little comfort from the sight of the gawky boy before him.
If this were a type of the gentleman-adventurer, then it would have
suited better with his tastes to have chosen another trade. As for Mr.
Stark, he assumed an air of wonderful shrewdness, which raw youth at
all times believes to be the mark of the man of affairs.

"What's garred ye take the road, Mr. Birkenshaw?" said he, with the
drawling accent of the West.

The other looked him up and down with rudeness and leisure, scanning
every detail of his rustic clothes, his ill-tied hair, and the piteous
aping of the fine gentleman in his carriage. This was no better than the
tavern sots in Edinburgh with whom he had brawled a year before.

"What if I do not care to make my business public on every shipboard,
sir?" he said with chill insolence. "Do you think I should go about
making proclamation of my past?"

The boy looked aggrieved and taken aback. "But between men of honour,"
he said sullenly.

Francis laughed the laugh of the man to whom all old burdens are now but
the merest names. "Honour!" he said, with a sense of diplomacy in the
assumption of a part, "honour is not a luxury for you or me, my friend.
We're running atween the jaws o' government warships, and whatever we
may have done it's unlikely that there'll be much talk o' fair trial
for suspects. Every man is his neighbour's enemy till he has put his
breast before him to the bullet. Then there may be friendship. But what
talk is this of honour, sir, atween two chance acquaintances?" And he
stood, darkly suspicious, in a fervour of self-admiration.

The other bent low in respect for this new revelation of spirit. He felt
a tingle of shame for his petty villainies in the presence of one whose
crimes might yet be called high-treason. By a mere chance Francis had
fallen upon the part best suited to take his comrade's fancy. Henceforth
he might act as he pleased and yet loom heroic to the reverent eyes of
Mr. Stark. The frank homage pleased him, and he felt a morsel of liking
for this uncouth westlander. So leaning over the rail, they spoke of
their joint fortunes.

With the freshets of the wider seas Francis rose in spirits. His mind,
in the Edinburgh and Dysart days, had always been panoramic, raking the
future with its spy-glass and finding solace in visions. He had never
entered a brawl or a debauch without some glimpse of himself in the act
of cutting a fine figure to cheer his fancy. For the mere approval of
gossip he had cared little, but much for the verdict of a certain select
imaginary coterie who kept house in his brain. Now his part was the
adventurer, and he sought to play it to his satisfaction.

"They say that France is weel-filled wi' Scots," said Mr. Stark. "I hae
near twae hunner guineas I took frae my faither, and I'm the lad to mak'
mair." And he stuck his hat more jauntily, and whistled the stave of a
song.

"Guineas for auld men," said Francis. "For me, I have little thought on
gear, if I but get free hand and fair play. Lasses and gear fall soon to
the high hand. For myself, I am for the King's court, the rightful
King's, as a gentleman should. Ye'll be a Whig since ye come from the
Westlands, Mr. Stark?"

"Whig did you say? Na, na! I was a Whig yince when Kate Mallison was
yin, and I gaed to the Kirk to watch her. But noo I'll sing _Jamie come
hame_ wi' any braw lad that's to my mind." And the boy grimaced and
swaggered with fine abandonment.

Something in the attitude struck the finical Francis with disgust. This
Dumbarton apprentice had not the figure or speech of a King's man. He
was on the point of giving him back some rude gibe, when a thought of
his new part smote upon him. He checked his tongue and held a diplomatic
peace. To the true master no tool was too feeble for use, so he set to
to flatter Mr. Stark.

It may be guessed that the task prospered, for soon the face of the one
beamed with conscious worth. Then the voice of Mr. Berritch broke
roughly in upon the colloquy.

"Heh, Starkie, come and gie's a lift wi' this wecht."

The boy looked queerly at his companion and ambled off to obey. He came
back with face flushed from stooping, only to find in Francis a mood of
stony disdain.

For a little he looked out to sea and bit his lips. Then he said in
accents of apology: "He askit little to tak' me ower, so I maun needs
help him in his bit jobs."

"I have nothing to do with your affairs," said his immovable comrade,
"but I would be sweered to fetch and carry for any man. And what talk is
this o' money? Does he charge hire like an Alloa ferryman?"

To the bargaining mind of the other such a tone seemed uncalled for. "Ye
wadna expect him to dae't for love? I couldna dae't mysel'."

"Then, by God, Mr. Stark, ye have most of the lessons of gentility to
learn."

At this moment of time the voice of Mr. Berritch was again audible. He
came aft the vessel with his brow shining from toil. Now, on the high
seas, he was a different man from the secret gentleman of Dysart. His
tones were boisterous and full of authority, his eye commanding, and his
figure trimmer. More, his jaw looked uglier, and his narrow, unkindly
eyes a full half more disconcerting.

"Starkie, my lad," he shouted, "ye maun come and gie's a hand. And you,
Mr. Birkenshaw, gang to the bows and help Tam Guthrie wi' the ropes. I'm
terrible short-handed this voyage, and I canna hae idlers."

The hectoring note roused contradiction in Francis's blood. He bore no
dear affection for Mr. Berritch, and he had no mind to serve him. He
scarcely even felt the debt of obligation, for had he not already risked
his liberty for the captain's gold?

"Ye would not have me work like a tarry sailor, Mr. Berritch?" said he.

"E'en so," said the bold ship's captain. "I would have ye work like a
tarry sailor when ye're on my lugger." And he looked the young man up
and down with insolent eye.

Francis became for the moment magnanimous. "If ye were to ask it as a
favour, I would be the first to oblige ye, but ..."

The other cut him short, frowning.

"Weel, weel, sir, if ye're mindit to play the fine gentleman ye can dae
it and be damned to ye. But ye'll pay me twenty guineas down for your
passage, when I micht hae been content wi' ten if ye had shown decent
civility."

Francis grew dusky with sudden wrath.

"I thought I had paid ye for my passage already," said he, hoarsely.
"Besides, I had a thought that there was a talk o' friendship in the
matter."

Mr. Berritch laughed long and loud. "Is't like," he said, "when ye winna
dae a bit obleegement when I ask ye? Na, na, my man, ye'll gie me the
twenty afore ye steer frae thae boards, and seein' that ye're payin' for
it a' ye can take your leisure like a gentleman."

It would be hard to tell the full irritation of his hearer's mind. To be
blocked and duped thus early in his career of adventure by a knavery
more complete than his own, was bitter as wormwood. A certain trust in
the generous and the friendly had remained to him even in his
renunciation of virtue, and now its loss seemed more vexatious than
consisted with his new view of the world. He was in a maze of
self-distrust and wounded sentiment, to which, as the minutes passed,
was joined the more wholesome passion of anger.

For one brief second he was tempted to a curious course. He had almost
paid the money demanded, posed as the wounded friend, and continued in
this lofty character. But the feeling passed, and his vexation sealed
his resolve to send Mr. Berritch and his crew to the devil rather than
yield.

"What's he taking from you?" he asked Starkie, who stood watching the
result with the interest of malice.

"He's daein' it for ten," was the answer.

"Then this is my word to you, Mr. Berritch," and Francis drew himself up
with bravado. "Ye offered to take me over for friendliness, and, though
we fall out over the matter of friendship, I hold ye to your bargain.
You land me in France hale and safe, or I'll ken the reason why," and he
tapped his sword-handle with rising pride.

"And this is my word to you, Mr. Birkenshaw," said the captain, his face
aflame with rage. He had flung down the rope-end, and stood with arms on
hips and blazing eyes. "I hae three men here wi' me, ilka ane a match
for you, and I mysel' could soon gar ye pit up your bit swirdie. But I'm
a man o' peace, and I likena violence. If ye dinna pay me your farin'
here and now, I land ye in Berwick afore night, whaur I ken o' some who
will hae meikle to say to ye aboot your misdeeds."

The man's whole carriage had changed from the bluff bravado he had once
affected to an air of cunning and respectable malice. Francis felt the
hopelessness of his case, and his thoughts grew hotter. He drew his
blade and was in the act of rushing upon his foe, when that worthy
whistled shrilly, and at the sign the three ship hands, truculent
fellows all, came running to his side. Francis glanced toward Starkie
and there read the folly of his action. If the Westlander had but joined
him he would have forthwith attacked the quarto with some good-will. But
his comrade clearly had no love for the sight of steel, for with a very
white face and shaking legs he was striving to act the mediator.

The captain regarded his opponent grimly and calmly. As the anger ebbed
from Francis' brain his reason returned and he regarded his folly with
some little shame. But sufficient remained to make him obdurate. "Take
me to Berwick if it please ye," he cried, "but ye'll never see the glint
o' my money."

"To Berwick ye'll gang," was the sour answer, "and I wis ye may like
it." And without more words he went about his business.

Francis went over to the gunwale and looked out to sea. The September
day was ending in a drizzle of mist and small rain. He could not see the
shore, save as a dim outline; but he guessed that they must be well down
the Berwick coast, seeing that they had rounded the Bass in the early
morning. The threat of Mr. Berritch had no special terrors for him, his
misdeeds were out of the region of actual crime, and in any case Berwick
was too far away for punishment. But, unless he liked to face a ship's
crew and captain with the bare sword, he would be carried ignominiously
into harbour, and find himself stranded purposeless once more in his own
land. And yet he would never pay the money, he reflected, as he became
cognisant of his own root of pride. He had sudden yearnings towards
virtue, produced by his sudden disgust at villainy in another. But above
all the bitterness rose highest that he should be thus frustrated in the
first glamour of his hopes.

The gallant Mr. Stark came up with consolations--not without timidity.
His respect for his companion had grown hugely in the last minutes, and
he was disposed himself to assume something of a haughty bearing. But he
got no word from the sullen figure at the bulwarks, till he had
exhausted his vocabulary of condolence.

"Mr. Birkenshaw," said he, "I hae a word to say to ye anent your ways o'
getting to France. I haena your experience, but I can see wi' my ain een
that this road is no the safest. If ye were to land at Berwick, it's no
abune ninety mile across the country to the west. Ye could walk it in
three days, and there ye'd find a boat to set ye ower for something less
than this man's twenty guineas."

Francis flamed up in wrath. "And ye would have me carried ashore like a
greeting child! No, by God, though I have to sweem for it, that man and
his folk will never lay their tarry hands on me," and he stared
fiercely into the mist.

But as he looked and meditated some fragments of a plan began to grow up
in his brain. It would be little to his disadvantage to cross the land
and embark from the west. It would save him the intolerable humiliation
of a voyage in Mr. Berritch's company and another scene of wrangling at
the end. Moreover, it would save him money, and somewhere in Francis,
now that he was cast on himself, there lurked a trace of the old
Birkenshaw providence. Again, it would keep up his reputation in the
eyes of Starkie and his own self-respect; both weighty considerations
for a vain man. But the matter of the landing still stuck in his throat
and had all but driven him to the paths of virtue.

Then Mr. Stark spoke out with resolution.

"It maitters little to me what way I gang, and I thocht o' offering ye
my company. Twae men are aye better than yin, and I ken the Westlands."
The boy spoke with a fine air of the heroical which took the other's
fancy. The offer screwed Francis's decision to the point of some crazy
piece of bravado, and none the less stirred some hidden generosity.

"I have taken a great liking to ye, Mr. Stark," he replied with
condescension, "and I own I'll be glad o' your company. But there's one
thing I must tell you if ye would come with me. If when we come to
Berwick they offer to put hands on me and set me in their bit boat,
there and then I gang overboard and sweem ashore. Are you fit for the
ploy, Mr. Stark?"

"Sweem," cried the other, joyfully, seeing in this a chance of bravery
without peril. "I was bred aside the sea, and I've leeved in the water
since I was a bairn."

It might have been five in the afternoon, but in the misty weather it
was hard to guess the time. They were coasting near the land, for the
light breeze was clear behind them, and the water lay deep under the
shadow of the craggy shore. Through the haze they could discern the red
face of the cliffs, thatched with green and founded on a chaos of
boulders. Even there they heard the lip of water on the beach above the
ceaseless hiss of rain. Gulls hung uneasily about their track, and
through the damp air came the cry of sandpipers, thin and far. It was
mournful weather, and the heart of the soaked and angry Francis suffered
momentary desolation.

But he was recalled to action by the harsh voice of Mr. Berritch behind
him. "Well, my lad," said the captain, "are ye in a better frame o'
mind? Yonder's Berwick and mouth o' Tweed, and yonder ye gang if ye
dinna dae my bidding. So if we are to continue our way thegether, I'll
trouble you for your guineas, Mr. Birkenshaw."

Francis looked over the gunwale to the low shore, not three hundred
yards off. A glimpse of house and wall to the left showed where the town
began. To hesitate would be to end all his bravado in smoke, so he
glanced with meaning at the excited Starkie and spoke up with creditable
boldness,--

"I told ye before, I'm thinking, Mr. Berritch, that you would get no
guineas of mine, and I'm no used to go back on my word."

"Then we'll hae the boat," said the captain. "Geordie, get the boat
oot."

"And I have something more to say to ye, ye thief o' a Fife packman.
Ye've matched me this time with your promises and smirks, but I'll win
my ways without ye and pay ye for a' this and mair some day. So I'll bid
ye good-day, Mr. Berritch, till our next meeting."

And with this tearful defiance he was over the bulwarks, followed by
the dauntless Stark, leaving the grim Mr. Berritch someway between
irritation and laughter. Two heads dipped on the misty waters, and a
little after two mortals were wringing their clothes on the sanded
beach.




CHAPTER IV

A JOURNEY IN LATE SUMMER


The cold of the water dispersed Francis' high sentiments. He shook
himself ruefully, and looked back at the dim outline of the ship. The
journey had fairly tired him, and it vexed him to see Starkie, the
better swimmer, as active as ever. But by the time he had wrung his
clothes and shaken the salt from his hair his spirits had returned, and
with the other at his heel he clambered up the bank of red earth and
made for the nearest houses.

The darkening was already on the fall, and the roofs of the town shone
faint over a field of corn. The plashing Mr. Francis had no care to find
a road, but held straight through the crops with a fine disregard of
ownership. At the end they came to a low stone dyke, and beyond it a
muddy road of the same unfriendly colour of soil. Thence the cobbles
began and a line of little houses, stretching steeply down to what
seemed a wide grey flood. For a second Francis' heart quickened with
interest. This was the great river of Tweed, from whose banks came his
family and his name. The sight momentarily enlivened for him the
listless scene and the clammy weather.

Both were hungry and cold, and there was little cause to be finical in
the matter of lodging; for to both these young adventurers thriftiness
was something of a noble quality, and they sought to husband their
present resources. So they went boldly to the first door in the line of
houses and sought admittance.

A woman came, a tall, harsh-featured woman of forty and more, with her
arms bare and her coats kilted. She stared at the intruders with
incivility, and waited their question.

"Can you give us a bed for the night, mistress? We are two seafaring men
who came ashore the day and are ettlin' to travel up the water to our
hames. We're unco wet and famished, and will pay ye for all that ye may
gie us."

"Whatna vessel came ye aff?" said the woman, with suspicion in her eye.

"The 'Kern' o' Leith," said Francis, readily.

"And whaur may your hames be?"

"In Yarrow at the Tinnies' Burnfoot," seizing upon the only place of
which he had heard the names.

"The Tinnies' Burn," said the woman, meditatively. "There were Scotts in
it in my time, but I heard they had flitted. Ye'll be some o' the new
folk. Come in, and I'll see what I can dae for ye!"

And she led the ready pair into the kitchen.

The place was high and wide, with cobwebbed, smoke-grimed rafters and a
searching odour of comfort. But soon the heat drew the salt fumes from
the wet garments, and the place smelt like a ship's cabin. The woman
sniffed and bustled angrily. Then with some brusqueness she bade them
get up to the garret and put on her husband's breeks, for she would have
no sailor-folk making her kitchen like the harbour-end.

Dry clothes and the plain warm meal which followed restored the two to
their natural cheerfulness. They sat by the fire and fell to speaking in
low tones about their way overland to the West. It was an ill-timed
action, for the housewife's suspicious ears caught names which she liked
ill, and the whispering made her uneasy. She came over to the ingle and
with arms squared broke in on the talk.

"What garred ye come ashore sae ill set-up, lads? I've seen mony
sailor-men, but nane sae puirly fitted as yoursels."

"We're juist ashore for a wee," said Francis. "We got the chance o'
winnin' hame and we took it. Twae days will bring us to Yarrow, twae
days back, and by that time the 'Kern' 'ill be lying loadin' in the
harbour. It wasna an errand to tak ony plenishing wi' us."

The woman laughed sardonically. "What bit o' the harbour did ye lie in?"
said she.

Francis was at a loss, and cast about warily for an answer.

"I've never been here but the yince," said he, "so I canna just tell ye
richt. But we cam maybe a hundred yairds up the river and syne cast
anchor by the richt wall."

Again the woman laughed. "And how did ye win up the river? Did ye a' get
oot and shove the boat wi' your shouthers?"

"Are you daft, wife?" said the dumbfoundered Mr. Stark.

"No, my lad," said she; "but ye're the daft anes to come to me wi' a
story like that. The river the noo is no three feet deep a' ower wi'
sands and the shift o' the tide-bar. Ye're nae sailors. I warrant ye
dinna ken a boom frae a cuddie's tail, and yet ye come here wi' your
talk o' sailors. Na, I'll tell ye what ye are. Ye're Hielandmen or
French, I'll no say which, but ye're ower here on nae guid errand. Ye
cam frae a ship; but it was in a boat under the Tranen rocks. Oot o' my
house ye gang, and ye may bless the Lord I dinna rin ye to the Provost."

The woman stood frowning above them, so clearly mistress of the
situation that the hearts of the two wanderers sank. The soul of Mr.
Stark, already raised high with vague belief in his comrade's dark and
terrible designs, was genuinely alarmed by this shrewd reading of
purpose. He looked to see Francis falter and stammer, and when he saw
his face still calm and inscrutable, his voice yet unshaken, he bowed in
spirit before a master.

As for Francis, he followed the broad path of denial.

"Hielandman or French," he cried with a laugh. "Is't like, think ye,
when I haena a plack to spare I should take up my heid wi' beggars'
politics? Na, na, a Whig am I and my faither afore me. I wadna stir my
thoomb for a' the Charlies that ever whistled. Gin this were a
change-house, mistress, and a bowl o' yill were on the board afore me,
ye wad see me drink damnation to a' Pretenders, and health to King
Geordie."

His words were so violent and so honestly given that the woman looked
momentarily satisfied. "I've maybe mista'en ye," she said; "but at ony
rate, whatever ye are, ye're shameless leears."

"Maybe we are, gudewife," said Francis, with ingratiating candour; "but
for us wandering men we never ken when we are wi' freends. The truth o'
the maitter is that we cast oot wi' the Captain, and have e'en ta'en the
road to the West whaur we'll find another ship. Ye'll forgie us the lee,
mistress?"

"Ye look like honest men," said the woman, slowly and hesitatingly. "You
at ony rate," and she turned to Francis. "Ye've far ower long and
sarious a face to be a blagyird."

       *       *       *       *       *

In the morning they were up betimes, and ready for the road. The shadow
of Mr. Berritch still hung over both, and a dim mist of suspicion was in
the atmosphere of the dwelling. The final affront came at parting.
Francis, with conscious honesty, offered payment for the night's
lodging. The woman haggled and raised the price till she had all but
angered him; then, with a hearty slap on the back, she bade him begone
and live like an honest man. "D' ye think," said she, "I wad tak payment
frae twae forwandered callants? Gang your ways, man, and try gin ye can
be as honest as ye're bonny." And her laugh rang in his ears as he went
down the street.

At first, the glory of the morning set his spirits high. They were
already on the western outskirts of the town, where the grey sea-beat
tenements dwindle to outlying cottages which stare abruptly over
meadowland and river. The September haze was rising in furling
battalions before the wind, and the salt ocean air strove with the
serener fragrance of shorn hay-fields. There was something
extraordinarily fresh and blithe in the wide landscape falling to the
eye under the blue, and the bitter crispness of morn. Insensibly their
limbs moved faster, they flung back their shoulders, and with open mouth
and head erect drank in the life-giving air.

But as they plodded on, Francis soon fell into the clutches of memory,
and his reflections pleased him little. The whole thought of the day
before was full of irritation. On the threshold of high-handed adventure
he had met with a closed door, and had been driven to a poverty-stricken
compromise. Hitherto in dark moments of self-revelation he had buoyed
himself with a flattering picture of a keen brain and a dauntless will.
Now, both seemed to have failed grievously; he had been tricked and
laughed at by a peddling sailor. Even the rhetorical parting did not
comfort him. Seen in the cold light of day it seemed crude and boyish.
He could have torn his tongue out with rage when he thought on the
grinning Mr. Berritch and the gaping crew.

But more than this folly, he regretted his lapse from his first
resolution. The fine renunciation of virtue which he had performed two
nights before on the doorstep of his home was rapidly being made of no
avail. He had been betrayed into compromise, into honesty. The words of
the woman at Berwick still rang in his ears. She had clearly taken him
for some truant apprentice, some temporary recreant from the
respectable. The thought was gall and wormwood. He, the master, the
scorner of the domestic, the Ulysses and Autolycus to be! And--alas for
human consistency!--there was still another trouble of a vastly
different kind. In one matter he was ashamed of deception. He had worn
the badge of whiggery in the eyes of Mr. Stark, and though the need for
the step had been apparent, he could not divest his mind of some faint
scruples, the relics of an earlier ideal of gentility.

The result of such meditations was to drive the meditator into a fine
bad temper, which he proceeded to vent on the ill-fated Starkie. This
gentleman had spoken little, being filled with thoughts of his own.
Somewhere in his curious nature was a strain of sentiment, which
revelled in cheap emotions and the commonplaces of memory. The charms of
Kate Mallison still held her fugitive lover, and as he travelled he
lingered pleasantly over her face and figure, and formed his mouth to
words of endearment. The virulence of his companion did not disturb him.
For this he had made up his mind long ago. After all, if one seeks a
great man as a friend, one must be prepared to bear with his humours.
And when Francis, roused by memories of his fall into virtue, talked
shrilly of desperate plans, Starkie inclined a deaf, yet willing ear,
and went on with his fancies.

But by and by with the hours, another feeling grew upon the elder's
mind. The road ran among low birches with a sombre regiment of pines
flanking it on the right. Through the spaces gleamed the blue sky, pale
with the light haze of September, and on the left among reeds and
willows twined and crooned the great streams of Tweed. Francis was
diverted against himself, and, ere ever he knew, the old glamour of the
countryside had fallen upon him. He, too, it was his proud reflection,
was a son of this land, born of a family whose name was old as the hills
and waters. The ancient nameless charm which slumbered with the green
hillsides, flashed in the streams, and hung over the bare mosses, stole
unbeknown into his soul, and the stout Francis was led captive by the
poetry of the common world.

The mood lasted till near evening, when they slept at a little public
somewhere by Leader-foot. In the morn they were early awake, for those
days of delay in their own land were irksome to both. Now they were in
a stranger country, where hills came down to the water's edge, and the
distance showed lines of blue mountain. The weather was still the placid
and soothing warmth of a late summer with roads running white and dry
before them, and the quiet broken only by the sounds of leisured, rustic
toil. For the nonce the bustling fervour died in Francis' breast, and he
took his way through the gracious valley in a pleasant torpor of spirit.

But by midday, all this was driven to the winds by the conduct of Mr.
Stark. This gentleman, awakened from his sentiments of yesterday, fell
to the purposeless chatter in which he specially excelled. Thence,
finding his companion irresponsive, he glided naturally to the plotting
of mischief. He had some desire to vindicate his name of adventurer in
the eyes of his saturnine friend. So he cast about him for a fitting
object.

Now ill luck sent him an opportunity at once too facile and too mean,
for, when the pair stopped at a wayside cottage for water, he adroitly
contrived to filch a cut of dried beef from the wooden dresser. In glee
he showed it to Francis as they halted at midday a mile beyond. He
expected approval, or at the least tolerance; but his reception sorely
discomfited him, for to Francis, the thing appeared so aimlessly
childish, so petty, that his gorge rose at the sight. It was the act of
a knavish boy, and the whole soul of this man of affairs was stirred to
anger. If there was any flicker of honesty in the feeling it was sternly
suppressed, but to the disgust he gave full rein.

"What for did ye do that?" he asked fiercely.

"Oh, juist to keep my hand in, belike," said the Westlander.

"Ye damnable bairn," cried Francis, "d' ye call this a man's work,
robbing auld wives of their meat, when ye have no need of it? I'll learn
ye better. Come back with me, see, this minute, and if ye dinna pay her
what she asks, you and me will quit company. D' ye think I will have ye
running at my heels like a thieving collie?"

The elder man had too menacing a brow and angry tone for the feeble Mr.
Stark to resist. He followed him grumbling, and suffered to be led like
a sheep within the cottage. The place was bare and poor; the woman, thin
and white as a bone, and long fallen in the vale of years.

"My friend happened to lift something o' yours, mistress, and we e'en
came to pay ye for it," and Francis regarded the strange place with some
pity.

"Were ye starvin', lads?" she asked in a piping voice, "for if sae ye
may keep the meat and welcome. But it wad hae been mair faisable to
speir."

But, try they their best, she would take no payment, and they had to
leave in despair. The thing put both into an ill humour. Starkie nursed
a grievance, and Francis had much the same temper as the Christian who
laments the failure of judgment upon the wicked. They spoke no words,
but stalked silently on different sides of the road, with averted eyes
and tragic bearing.

But continued surliness was little in Starkie's way. At the end of half
an hour he was jocose and making farcical overtures to friendship. When
he found his efforts repulsed, he comforted himself with a song, and
when in a little they came to a village and a public, turned gladly to
the relief of drink. Now, whether it was that the landlord's whisky had
extraordinary qualities or that Starkie drank a wondrous amount, it is
certain that ere he had gone far it became clear that he was grossly
drunk.

Thence the course of the two became troubled and uncertain. Starkie drew
up to the other in maudlin amity. Francis had drunk little and his
gloomy temper still held him. He had never loved drunkenness, and at the
moment his thoughts dwelt on the failure of his plans. So he sent Mr.
Stark to the devil with no mincing words. With drunken gravity Starkie
retorted, and then with more drunken heroism squared himself to fight.
The patience of Francis fairly gave way. Gripping his assailant by the
collar and breeches he tossed him easily to the roadside.

"Lie there, ye drunken swine," he cried, "and I'm glad I'm quit o' ye."

So, pursued by thickly-uttered reproaches, he hastened forward alone.

       *       *       *       *       *

With the next dawn Francis found himself on the confines of great hills,
where the river, now shrunk to a stream, foamed in a narrowed vale. The
weather had changed with the night to cloud and cold, and the even
drizzle of a Scots mist obscured the sun. The slopes gloomed black and
wet, every burn was red with flood, and the sparse trees dripped in
dreary silence. The place was singularly dispiriting, for nought met the
eye but the mire underfoot and the murky folds of mist.

Early in the day he stopped a passing shepherd and asked him his
whereabouts. He was told with great wealth of detail which further
befogged his mind. Then on a sudden impulse he asked where lay Yarrow
and the Birkenshaw Tower. "D' ye see that hill ower the water?" was the
answer. "That's the Grey Drannock, and the far side o' 't looks straucht
down on the Yarrow water." This then was the confines of his own land,
these were haply his forefathers' hills; a sudden pride went through his
heart, but the next moment he was looking drearily on his lamentable
fortunes.

He was sick of himself, disgusted with his ill-success, and half
inclined to rue his parting with Mr. Stark. Where were his fine
resolutions? All vanishing into air under the blast of his spasmodic
virtues. As he looked back on the events of the past days he was driven
by his present sourness especially to loathe his glimpses of decency.
The dismal weather helped to harden him. After all, he reflected, the
world is a battle-ground, where he wins who is least saddled with the
baggage of virtue. Man preys upon man; I may expect no mercy from
others; and none shall others get from me. So it was with fierce purpose
and acrid temper that Francis travelled through the clammy weather. It
had been Starkie, he thought with irritation, and not himself that had
the true spirit; and he cursed the hour when he had left the little
Westlander in the ditch.

By the evening it cleared and the sun set stormily over monstrous blue
hills. He had passed through the town of Peebles in the early afternoon,
and now followed the wide western road up the green pastoral dale of the
upper Tweed. The dusk was drawing on as he left the river and took the
path which ran to Ayr by Lanark and Clyde. Just at the darkening the
lights of a little village beckoned him,--a line of white houses and a
cluster of rowans by a burnside. His legs were growing weary, and he had
not yet supped; so he turned to the inn to bide the night.




CHAPTER V

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY


In such rough and casual fashion Francis came to his Destiny. But to him
there was little sign of aught momentous. The inn-kitchen was
half-filled with men talking boisterously, while the landlord's deep
tones gave directions to the serving-girl. The noise of soft
south-country talk came pleasantly on his ears after the clip-clap of
the Fife, and a wholesome smell of food and drink comforted his senses.

He sat by himself in a corner, for he was in the mood to shun publicity.
Supper was brought him, and then he lit a pipe and stretched his legs to
the fire, since already the evenings grew chilly. In this lethargic
comfort his follies ceased to trouble him, and he tasted the delights of
wearied ease.

But as the hour grew late the room cleared, and Francis awoke to
interest in his surroundings. He asked the landlord what the place might
be.

He was told, "Brochtoun."

The name stuck in his memory. Broughton--he had heard it somewhere,
linked with some name which had slipped his recollection. He asked who
owned the land.

"Murray," was the answer, "Murray o' Brochtoun, kin to them o' Stanhope.
A graceless lot, aye plottin' and conspirin' wi' them that's better no
named. Even now him and his leddy wife are awa to the North, trokin' wi'
the wild Jaicobites and French." The landlord's politics were clear and
vehement.

At the word Francis sat up in earnest. Murray of Broughton was already a
noted name in the land, the catchword of the whole tribe of needy
loyalists, reputed to be the confidant and companion of the Prince
himself. And in every Edinburgh tavern he had heard the toast of the
beautiful Mrs. Murray given with drunken leers and unedifying tales. If
all stories were true, she was a lady of uncommon parts and spirit and
not too nice a conscience. This, then, was the home of the Murrays
on which he, the out-at-elbows adventurer, had stumbled. As he
thought of himself he felt a singular antipathy to this tribe of
aristocrats,--doubtless filled with pride of race and the fantastic
notions of honour from which he had parted for ever.

The thought had scarce left him when a man who had been sitting at the
door came up and touched his sleeve from behind. He turned to find a
face familiar to him,--a little man with ferret eyes and bushy eyebrows,
poverty staring from the rents in his coat. He knew him for a chance
acquaintance in that lowest deep of city life to which he had made some
few excursions.

"D' ye no mind me?" said the man, eagerly.

"I've seen ye before," said Francis, ungraciously.

"Dod Craik," said the man, "I'm Dod Craik. Ye mind Dod Craik. I've seen
ye at the _Pirliewow_ and _M'Gowks_ and the _Three Herrins_, and, d' ye
no mind, ye aince betted me twa crouns I couldna find my way across the
street ae nicht when I was blind-fou. Ay, and I stottit the hale length
o' that lang vennel and fell under a baillie's coach and was ta'en aff
to jail." And the wretched creature laughed with the humour of it.

"Well, supposing I mind you, Mr. Craik," said the unbending Francis,
"I'll trouble ye to tell me what ye want. If it's siller, ye'll get
none from me, for I'm as toom as a kirk plate."

"It's no siller," cried the man. "Na, na, from a' I hear ye're just a
venturer like mysel'. But it's a thing wi' siller in 't, and I thocht ye
micht like to hae a finger in the job."

The notion pleased, and Francis held out a relenting hand to the little
man. "If that's your talk, Mr. Craik, then I am with you."

"Then maybe ye could step ootside wi' me for the maitter o' a few
meenutes," said the other, and the two went forth into the street.

The man led Francis out of the light of the houses into the gloom of the
birk-lined road. "I kenned aye ye were a man o' speerit and withoot
prejudices, Mr. Birkenshaw," he began.

"Let my spirit and prejudices alone," said Francis, shortly.

"And wi' nae scruples how ye cam by money if aince ye but had it."

"Man, will ye come to the point?" said Francis, who was in doubt whether
to be pleased or angry at this narration of attributes.

"Weel, it's this. The Hoose o' Brochtoun is standin' toom or as guid as
toom, save for a servant or twae. It's kenned that Murray is in league
wi' rebels and has the keepin' o' their gold. It's beyond credibeelity
that he can hae ta'en it to the North wi' him, so it maun be left here.
Now I propose that you and me as guid subjects find a road intil the
hoose and lay our hands on thae ill-gotten gains. I've lang had this
ploy in my heid, and I had trysted wi' anither man for the nicht, but
he's failed me. The short and lang o' the maitter is that the job's ower
big for ae man, so when I got a glisk o' ye, I made up my mind to gie ye
the chance." He waited nervously for the answer.

Francis flushed for the moment. "D' ye ken what ye ask me to do, Mr.
Craik?" said he. "It's a job that some folk would call house-breaking
and stouthrief."

"Na," said the other, "it's no that. It's the lawfu' consequence o'
poleetical principles. Think ye, if the sodgers in Embro had word o'
siccan a thing they wadna be the first to tak it? If ye believe me, Mr.
Birkenshaw, it's a naational necessity."

"But what do ye ken of my principles?" asked Francis. "Who telled ye I
wasna as hot a Jacobite as Murray himself?"

The man looked shrewdly at his neighbour to detect his purpose. Then he
laughed incredulously. "Gae awa wi' ye and your havers. Ye were aye ower
fond o' a saft seat and a bieldy corner."

For a little Francis stood in a sorry hesitation, in two minds whether
to join forces with this house-breaker or there and then to give him the
soundest of thrashings. His parting with Starkie still rankled in his
mind. He called up the designs which he had formed for himself, his
abhorrence of trivial virtue, his deification of the unscrupulous. This
was a chance both to better his means and restore his confidence. This
would be the rubicon over which there was no returning to the dreary
paths of the respectable. His course was clear, and yet with a vanishing
pride he could have beaten this little city blackguard who called him
companion.

So he told Mr. Craik of his compliance, and was rewarded with a sigh of
relief. "Man, I kenned ye wad dae 't, and noo we're shure o' success.
Come down the road till I tell ye the ways o' 't. I've been hereabouts
for days till I ken ilka turn o' the place. The Hoose looks north ower a
dean o' trees and a' to the south is the whinny back o' a hill. There's
naether windy nor door kept lockit the noo on that gairden side, for at
a' hoors there's a steer o' men comin' and leavin'." And with a crowd of
such directions he led him into the shade.

It was clear that Murray's folk had small liking for their laird. There
in the inn sat Whiggery triumphant, smiled upon by a Calvinist landlord
and a score of staunch Presbyterian followers. Further down the water
the Cause found many adherents, but there, on the very confines of the
West, there was something dour and covenanting in the air, and the
fervours of the master and his lady awoke no spirit among the men of
Broughton. Had two such characters as Mr. Craik and Francis been seen in
an Athole or Badenoch inn they would have been jealously spied upon; but
there they were suffered to go their ways, and in a corner of the inn
over their glasses they brought the project to completion.

An hour later the two men were climbing the brae which rose from the
green haughs of the burn to the upland valley where stood the house.
Francis had the same free stride as ever, but Mr. Craik hastened over
the brighter patches of moonlight and stole gladly to the shadows. To
himself Francis seemed something less worthy than before. The mist of
daring and escapade, with which he fancied his course to be shrouded,
had begun to disappear under the cold north wind of Mr. Craik's company.
He had set out on the ploy for money and self-satisfaction; but soon he
wished that he had come alone, for his disgust rose at the sight of the
ferret-faced thing which led him.

Soon they were on the bare hill-face and looking down upon the back
windows of the dwelling. To the left there was light in the lower
windows, where probably dwelt the few domestics, but otherwise the whole
of the great wall was black with darkness. Mr. Craik chuckled joyfully
and led the way across the garden fence and down an alley of flowers. At
the edge of the lawn he stopped and held a whispered consultation.

"That windy forenent us is never barred; the lock's broke, for I was up
last nicht to find oot. Now if ye gang in there ye come to a passage
which takes ye to the maister's ain room. It's no the first door but the
second on the left-hand side, and there he keeps his siller and
valuables. It's aye lockit, but I've trystit wi' a servant lass to leave
the key in the door. Aince ye won there, ye wad lock the thing on the
inside and search the place at your leesure. Syne ye wad come back to me
and I wad help ye oot. The reason why twae man's needit is that the
windy canna open frae within, and if there werena ane oot bye to lift
it, there wad be nae mainner o' escape. Now, whilk is to gang and whilk
is to bide?" and he took a coin from his pocket to toss.

"Ye'd better let me try it," said Francis. "I'm bigger and stronger, and
maybe I've a better eye for a hidy-hole." Already he was beginning to
loathe the business, and chose this part of it as the less
discreditable. It was better to have his hand at the work than to wait
outside like a child.

"Man, ye've speerit," said the other, admiringly and not without
gratitude. Fear had already begun to wrestle with his avarice.

So Francis raised the window, which fitted like a portcullis into a
socket above. His companion held it open till his long legs had
struggled through. He found himself in a narrow corridor, pitchy dark,
save for the glimmer from the window. A musty smell, as of an old and
little-used house, hung all about it, and his groping feet detected an
uneven floor. An utter silence prevailed, in which as from a great
distance he heard the click of the shut window.

He felt out with his hand along the left wall. One door he passed, of
stout ribbed oak securely fastened. Then the place widened, and he
seemed to be in a hall with some kind of matting upon the floor. Here
his feet went noiselessly, and some faint degree of light obtained from
a window far in front. Then his hand came on the space of a second door,
and he stopped to test it. This was clearly the place where the key was
to be found, as Mr. Craik had directed.

But this was no less closely bolted than the last, and the key-hole was
empty. He put his shoulders to the panel and shook it. He heard only the
rasp of a great lock in its place, but the door did not give an inch.
Again he tried, and this time the wood work cracked. But the noise
warned him, echoing in that still place with double power, and he
desisted.

Nothing remained but to try elsewhere, so he groped further down the
hall. Again he touched a handle, and this time with better success; for
to his amazement he found the door ajar, and pushing it open entered a
wide room. He turned to look for a key, but found none; this, too, was
not the place appointed; but since he had found an entrance he resolved
to go further. The place was black with night. A dim haze of light
seemed to hang at the end, which doubtless came from a shuttered window.
As he groped his way he stumbled on furniture which felt rich and softly
draped to the touch. A faint odour of food, too, lurked in the air, as
if the room had been used for dining.

This was not the goal which he had sought, but even here something might
be found. So Francis was in the act of beginning a hasty scrutiny when a
sound brought him to a stop. A footstep was crossing the hall and making
for the room. A pioneer ray of light gleamed below the door. He was in a
quandary, uncertain whither to turn; he could not flee by the door, and
no other way was apparent. To hide behind some curtain or cabinet was
possible, and he was about to creep hastily to the back when a hand was
laid on the latch. Some instinct prompted him to sink quietly into a
chair and wait the issue.

The light of a lamp flooded the room, showing its noble size and costly
furnishing. Francis sat silent in his chair, curious of the result, and
busily searching his brains for some plausible tale. The light-bearer
saw at the table-end a long man, his face dark with the sun, dressed
decently yet with marks of travel, and bearing somewhere in his dress
and demeanour the stamp of a townsman, who sat waiting on the newcomer's
question with eyes half apologetic and half bold.

As for Francis himself he saw a vision which left him dumb. He had
expected the sight of a servant or at most some gentleman of the cause
using the house as a lodging. But to his wonder, at the doorway stood a
woman holding a lamp above her and looking full from its canopy of light
into the half-darkness. In the dimness she seemed tall and full of
grace, standing alert and stately with a great air of queenship. Her
gown was of soft white satin, falling in shining folds to her feet, and
showing the tender curves of arm and bosom. Above, at the throat and
wrists, her skin was white as milk, and the hair rose in dark masses on
her head, framing her wonderful face,--pale with the delicate paleness
so far above roses. Something in her eye, in the haughty carriage of
the little head, in the life and grace which lay in every curve and
motion, took suddenly from Francis the power of thought. He looked in
silent amazement at this goddess from the void.

He had waited for surprise, anger, even fear; but to his wonder he found
only recognition. She looked on him as if she had come there for no
other purpose than to seek him. A kindly condescension, the large
condescension of one born to rule and be obeyed, was in her demeanour.

"Ah, you are here," she said. "I thought you had not come. You are my
Lord Manorwater's servant?"

For an instant Francis' wits wandered at the suddenness of the question.
Then his readiness returned, and with some shrewdness he grasped the
state of matters. He rose hurriedly to his feet and bowed with skill. "I
have that honour, my lady," said he; and he reflected that his sober
dress would suit the character.

As he stood a tumult of thoughts rushed through his brain. This was the
famous lady whom he had so often heard of, she who was the Cause, the
Prince, and the King to so many loyal gentlemen. His eyes gloried in
her beauty, for somewhere in his hard nature there was an ecstatic joy
in mere loveliness. But the bodily perfection was but a drop in the cup
of his astonishment. She had clearly been receiving guests in this old
house, and guests of quality, for the rich white gown was like a state
dress, and jewels flashed at her neck and fingers. A swift and violent
longing seized him to be one of her company, to see her before him, to
be called her friend. In her delicate grace she seemed the type of all
he had renounced for ever--nay, not renounced, for in his turbid boyhood
he had had no glimpse of it. To this wandering and lawless man for one
second the elegancies of life were filled with charm, and he sighed
after the unattainable. Then his mood changed to one of fierce
revulsion. This was a lady of rank and wealth, doubtless with a crazy
pride of place and honour, condescending gravely to him as to one far
beneath; and he, he was the careless, the indomitable, who would yet
laugh in the face of the whole orderly world.

But such sentimental reflections were soon succeeded by thoughts more
practical. He had run his head into a difficult place, and might yet
escape by this lucky chance which called him a servant of Lord
Manorwater's. But there was little time to lose, lest the real lackey
should come to confront him. His ready brain was already busy with plans
when the lady spoke again.

"Your master will have told you your errand. This is the letter which I
desire you to carry and put into the hands of Mr. Murray of Broughton at
his lodging in the Northgate of Edinburgh. Your master told me you have
travelled the same road before to the same place."

Francis said "Ay."

"Then I have but one word for you. Take the hills from here and keep off
the high-road, above all near the inn of Leidburn. For I have heard
to-night that a body of rebel soldiers is lying there. When you come to
my husband, he will give you his directions, whether to go with him and
the royal army or to return here. But in any case I can trust the
diligence and loyalty of one of my Lord Manorwater's men." And she
smiled on him graciously.

"And they brought you in here and left you in darkness," she said, as if
in self-reproach. "It is a hard thing to live in such troubled times.
And perhaps you have not supped?"

Francis protested that he had already had food, in mortal fear lest she
should delay him with refreshment.

"I will let you out myself," she said, and lifting the lamp she led the
way from the room, her soft skirts trailing and the light flickering in
her dusky hair. Francis followed in a fervour of delight. The sudden
vista of a great plan had driven all sentiment from his mind. Now at
last he might get free of petty ill-doing, and exercise his wits on
matters of greater import. He carried a letter which meant money from
any officer of Government; he scented plot and intrigue all richly
flavoured with peril. He felt himself no more the casual amateur, but
the established adventurer, meddling with the great affairs of nations.
The thought restored him to his perverted self-respect.

She opened the hall-door and let him pass into the front garden with a
word of good-speed. As he departed he turned for a moment, and his
sentiment flickered to life, for as she stood, a radiant figure of light
in the arch of the door, his mind reverted to this great loveliness.

But a second later such thoughts had fled, and, with no care for the
patient Mr. Craik waiting silently by the back window, Francis took his
path for the highway and the Leidburn inn.




CHAPTER VI

ON THE EDINBURGH HIGHWAY


The moon was up, whitening the long highway to the north, as Francis
sped gaily on. It was still early night; lengthy hours were to come
before the dawn; and Leidburn inn was no more than a dozen miles. But
the exhilaration of escape, of new hope, drove him with eager legs, and
he watched the trees fall away and the barer hills draw together with
pride in his fleet strength.

At the watershed the moors stretched dim and yellow on either hand in a
melancholy desolation. A curlew piped on the bent, and then all was
still as the grave but for the clack of his shoes on the hill-gravel. He
fell out of his run and took to the stride with which he had been wont
to stalk through the back-vennels of the city. The soft odours of
moorland weather hung about the place as over a shrine. The luminous sky
above had scarcely a hint of dark, but shone like an ocean starred with
windy isles in some twilight of the gods.

His first resolution had grown and made itself clear in every part. He
pictured gleefully the incidents of his course. The soldiers found, he
called for their Captain and delivered his letter. The tide of war was
turned, he was honoured with reward, and a life of bold intrigue awaited
him. Exultantly he pictured his fate,--how the world would talk of him
with fear, how his name would be on all men's lips and his terror in
every heart. Then haply Mr. Francis Birkenshaw would set his heel on the
neck of his oppressors.

But his importunate common-sense drew him sharply back from his flights.
It meant but a guinea for his pocket and a glass of wine for his thirst,
for he could only pose as a lackey if he wished for credence. Yet even
in this there was promise. It needed but his wits and his habitual bold
presence to push his fortune far. Here, in his own land, lay his field.
Far better to seize a spoke of Fate's wheel as she twirled it here than
hunt the jade in nations oversea.

The way led him through a bogland meadow and up again to the skirts of a
hill. In a little he was among trees, whence came the chilly echo of
running water and a gleam of light from some sequestered dwelling.
Already a wider vale seemed to open and high, dark hill-shapes rose on
the left. The road was wide and even, for by it men chiefly travelled to
Carlisle and the South. Even as he sped a rumble of wheels came to his
ear, and he was in the roadside heather watching a four-horse carriage
go by. The horses seemed weary with forcing, and within the coach by the
moonlight he had a glimpse of anxious faces. Lord Smitwood, or the great
Lady Blaecastle, or the famous Mrs. Maxwell, he thought, on their way to
put their sundry houses in order against an evil day. Clearly wars and
rumours of war were thickening in the North, and he was soon to have a
hand in the game.

And with this he fell back on thoughts of Broughton and the lady of the
Jacotot lace and dusky hair. Something in her image as it flashed on his
memory roused keen exaltation. He would trick this proud woman and all
her kind, crush them, use them for his purpose. Each feature, as he
reflected on it, roused his hatred. She was fair; well, beauty for the
joy of the strong. Men said she was clever; well, he would match her
with counter-wits and gain the victory. Three hours before, and he had
never seen her; now she filled his whole fancy with her hateful beauty.
He thought of her freely, grossly, as he had trained himself to think of
women. But somewhere in the man there was a string of fine sentiment
which jarred at the incongruous. The exquisite freshness of her beauty
forbade her a place in a gallery of harlots, and to his disgust he found
himself forced to regard her with decency.

The thing stuck in his memory and began to vex him. Vigorously he
questioned himself if he were not falling back to his boyish virtue.
Re-assured by the hot and lustful spirit within him, he searched for
some catchword or badge of his resolve. So all the latter part of the
way he hummed rags of ill-reputed ditties, and now and then in the near
neighbourhood of a cottage made the night hideous with a tune. For he
was now at the verge of settled country, where King George held a tight
rein, and no loyalist gentry would be at hand with a bullet from the
wayside. So leisurely had been his course that the autumn dawn was
already breaking ere he rounded the hill and came out on the level
Leidburn moss. The place was desert,--acres of peat with the film of
morn still raw on the heather, and the black reaches of a lazy stream.
But through the midst ran the fresh-coloured highway, and there, half a
mile distant, rose the white walls of the inn. Even as he walked the
thin air of dawn brought him the noise of hens' cackling and the first
stir of life. Beyond all there stretched a great wide country of meadow
and woodland to the horizon of the morning, the smoke of a city and the
broad curve of the sea.

The scene was so airy and clear that Francis fell into a rich
good-humour with himself, and drew near to the inn with pleasant
confidence. He had expected to find some traces of military, some
neighing from the stable or bustle of servants, but to his wonder the
house was silent. The kitchen door stood open, and through it he passed
with the appearance of a lackey's haste.

"Landlord," he cried, in a voice of importance, and a heavy man came
down a trap-stair from a garret. Francis's manner assumed the ease of
politeness and good-fellowship mingled. "I have word with the Captain,"
he said, "and I maun see him before I hae my breakfast. But quick, man,
get something ready for me."

"The Captain!" the landlord cried with disgust, "and whatna Captain, my
lad? I've had eneuch o' captains in thae fower walls this last week to
mak hell ower thrang for the deil himsel'. But they're a' cleared noo,
gone yestreen the last o' them to fecht the Hielandmen. God, I wish them
luck. They'll find a Hieland cateran's dirkie a wee bit less pleasin' in
their wames than my guid bannocks."

Here was news of vexation. "But where have they gone, and can I no meet
up wi' them?" he asked.

"It's easy to tell that," said the sarcastic host. "They're just in
Embro and nae further. Cope has landed some way doun the Firth, and a'
King George's lads are drawing to that airt. They say the Chevalier and
his Hielanders gang oot the day to meet them. Weary fa' them for
spoilin' an honest man's trade! Fechtin' tae wi' oot breeks and wi' nae
skeel in pouther and leid! God!" And the man laughed deep and silent.

"The Chevalier?" Francis stammered.

"Ay, the Chevalier," said the man. "Whaur hae ye been wanderin' a' thae
days that ye havena heard o' him? Chairlie's king o' the castle the
day, though he may be doun wi' a broken croun the morn."

"I have been long in the South," said Francis, hastily, "and forbye, I
am given to doing my ain business and no heeding the clash of the
country."

"Weel, weel, maybe sae. But if I were your maister, my lad, I wad pick
ane mair gleg at the uptak than yoursel'." And the landlord went off,
rolling with his heavy gait, to fetch the stranger breakfast.

Francis sat down to reflect on this state of matters with some
philosophy. It meant a longer journey for himself ere he disposed of his
business, and a greater risk of frustration. He thought for a moment of
playing the faithful messenger after all, and casting his services at
the Secretary's feet. But the thought was scarce serious, for with it
came the unpleasant consideration that his position would still be a
lackey's, and that he would be likely to have difficulties if he ever
came within range of Lord Manorwater or the Secretary's wife. Soon he
was reconciled even to the twenty odd miles which still awaited him, for
the holding of Edinburgh and the landing of the English general meant a
crisis of war, when news would be bought and sold at a higher price. But
he must be wary and quick, or any wandering loyalist might trick him. So
he cried to the landlord to hurry the meal, and stretched his already
wearied legs in a chair.

"Are ye for Embro?" asked the landlord.

"Even so," said Francis, guilelessly, "since ye say the Captain is
there."

"Ye'll hae a gey wark finding him, my lad," said the other. "Captains
will be as thick as fleas in Embro the noo, and the maist o' them
withoot the breeks. If ye're wise ye'll look for the man ye're seekin'
mair east the country on the road to join the ithers. What did ye say
was his name?"

"I wasna told any name," said Francis, feeling himself on the edge of a
hazard. "A' I got was 'The Captain at Leidburn inn'."

The landlord laughed. "They keep ye muckle in the dark on your side tae.
I had thocht that that wark was left for the Hielandmen."

"What side do ye incline to yoursel'?" asked Francis.

"Nae side," said the man, shortly. "I treat a' the warld as my
customers, whether they wear the breeks or no. But my faither was ane
o' the Cameronian kind, and I'm half persuaded that way mysel'."

But at this moment a rattle at the door proclaimed another visitor.
Francis turned anxious eyes, for might not this be some servant of the
Murrays or Manorwaters? But the sight of the newcomer re-assured him,
for there in all the dust of travel and abandon of weariness stood the
deserted Starkie.

He had not prospered in these last days, for his clothing was much
soiled and his face was lean with exertion. He fell back at the sight of
his aforetime comrade, as if doubtful of his reception. But Francis was
in the humour in which to hail his arrival with delight. Yesterday he
had repented his loss, and now he was in a mood to atone for it. He
greeted him with a cry of pleasure, and drew the hesitating Westlander
to the fire.

"We've forgathered again," said he, "and now we'll be the better
friends. In these stirring times, Mr. Stark, there's no room for ill
nature."

"And I'm glad to see ye, Mr. Birkenshaw, for I have missed ye sair. God,
I'll ne'er forget that weary wander ower the Tweed hills. I've been a'
airts but the right yin since I saw ye."

Both ate their breakfast ravenously, while mutual questioning filled the
pauses. As they talked, the anomaly of their course came forcibly before
each mind, and each asked the reason of this unexpected meeting-place.

"What brought ye to this part, Starkie? This is no road to Clyde and the
West."

"Oh, I've nae doubt it was the same reason as yoursel'. When I came by
the top o' Tweed the hale land was turned upside doun wi' rumours o'
war, and ilka plooman gettin' his musket and sword. They telled me Embro
was gotten by the Prince, and that a' the brave lads were rinnin' to his
flag. So, thinks I, I may as weel try my luck in my ain land as in the
abroad. Forbye, I'll pay out my faither, for gin he heard o' siccan
daeings he wad gang out o' his mind. He bides ower near the Hieland Line
to love the Hielandmen. But if ye've nae objections, I wad like to hear
what brocht you yersel' this gate."

"Wheesht, Starkie," said Francis, looking darkly at the landlord, "I've
a ploy on hand to make both our fortunes." And he watched the host till
he had betaken himself to the far back of the kitchen. Then he leaned
forward and tapped his companion on the arm. "Starkie, man, I have a
letter."

The Westlander's eyes brightened. "That's guid, and whae is it frae?"

"From the Secretary's wife to the Secretary's self."

The announcement was made in stage tones and received with proper awe.
"Mr. Birkenshaw, ye're great," said Starkie, and Francis's vanity was
appeased. It had been somewhat wounded by the independent tone which his
companion had seen fit to assume since their severance.

Then in brief words he proceeded to unfold his plans. He would make
straight for the east shore of the Firth, and meet the Government
leaders. The near crisis of the war would heighten his value and gain
him favour. He had heard enough of the Prince's men to have little faith
in them; time would soon work their ruin; and then would come reward for
the loyal adherent. Starkie listened and approved, so both in their
ignorance saw a roseate horizon to their boyish policy.

But the businesslike Westland mind had one addendum. The letter might be
of the highest consequence; again it might be a trifle, which would
merely expose the bearer to contempt. It would be well to inquire into
its contents.

Francis pondered, hesitated, and then blankly refused. Something, he
knew not what, held him from opening it. He scouted the idea of
honour,--that was flung far behind,--but a sense of fitness even in the
details of roguery was strong upon him. He had still some memory of the
hands from which he had got the letter, and his sentiment had not
utterly flown. The feeling might permit high, audacious treachery, but
not so mean and small a piece of bad faith. He was on the verge of the
humour in which two days before he had flung his companion into the
ditch.

In his luckless way Starkie ministered to the growing repulsion. The
thought of the future delighted him, and he hastened to sketch its
details. Alike in his childishness and his flashes of shrewdness he was
repugnant to the maturer Francis. His view of the conduct of affairs was
so plainly ingenuous that it filled the other with despair, and his idea
of happiness was the craziest mixture of the respectable and sillily
wicked. Francis, still in the heat of a great plan, with his brain yet
fired from the deeds of the night before, had no tolerance for such a
huckstering paradise.

From ill temper the two were rapidly drifting to a quarrel. These last
days had found Starkie some independence, and he was scarcely disposed
to bear with his comrade's megrims. He assumed a tone of consequence,
and replied to Francis's gibes with flat rustic retorts. The landlord
came up betimes and tried in vain to mediate. Francis had the grace to
hold his peace, but not so the other. He sank from vituperation to
complaint, and was on the verge of confiding all grievances to the open
ears of the host.

Meanwhile the hours were passing, and a hot blaze of sun in the windows
warned Francis that he must soon be stirring. For a second he was
tempted to leave his companion then and there, but he curbed his
irritation with the bridle of policy and reflected on his probable
usefulness. He was in the act of conciliating him by timely
concession,--by falling in with the tune of his hopes and throwing him
crumbs of flattery, when a noise of hooves and wheels sounded without on
the road and then stopped short at the inn-door.

Both men sprang to their feet, while the landlord hurried to clear the
table. A woman's voice was heard as if giving orders, and then a step on
the threshold, and the door was opened. The blinking eyes of Mr. Stark
saw a lady, tall and fair, in a travelling cloak of dark velvet, with a
postilion at her back. But Francis's breath stopped in his throat, for
he knew the face of the woman he was playing false to.

"Landlord," she cried in her clear high voice, "the right horse has gone
lame, and I must be in Edinburgh in an hour. Quick, get me a fresh
beast, and have the other looked to." Then, as she haughtily cast her
eyes around the place, she caught sight of the gaping Starkie and Lord
Manorwater's trusted servant. For a second her face looked bewilderment;
then a quick gleam of comprehension entered, and her cheeks grew hot
with anger.

"So," said she, "I have found you at last, you cur. You thought to trick
me with your tales and profession. Doubtless you are now on your way to
your own master with your news. Perhaps it will please you to know that
it is valueless, since the Prince's army has taken the field. It was
well that I warned you against this place, else I might have missed this
proof of your fidelity. Truly my Lord Manorwater is happy in his
servants."

Plainly she still took him for a lackey, and the thought added gall to
his discomfiture. To be defeated in bold treachery was bad, but to stand
condemned as a lying menial was bitter to a man's pride. For a second he
tried to brazen it, but his overpowering vexation made him quail before
her eyes.

But now the landlord spoke out in his harsh, obstinate voice,--

"You will get nae horse frae my stable, my leddy. I am a King's man, and
will see you and your Prince in hell ere I stir a fit to help. Ye maun
e'en gang further and try your luck, mistress."

"Do you refuse?" she cried. "Then, by Heaven, I will take it myself, and
lash you round your own yard. I will burn the place over your head ere
the week is out, and then you may have leisure to repent your
incivility."

The fierce rhetoric of her tone cowed the recalcitrant host, but he had
no time for a second thought. "Robin," she turned to her man, "you will
get the horse while I wait here and talk to these gentlemen. But, see,
give me your whip. I shall have need of it."

The fellow went, and she turned again to the three astounded spectators.

"Stop! What the--" cried the landlord, but she checked him with uplifted
arm. "I have no ill-will to you," she said, "and would prevent you from
doing yourself a hurt. I am the wife of the Secretary Murray, and you
will find me hard to gainsay. So I beg you to keep out of my quarrel."

Then she turned once more to the pair with her intolerable scorn.

"And you are men," she cried, "made in the likeness of those who are
fighting at this hour for their honour and King, while you cower in an
alehouse and lay plots for women. But, bah! I waste words on you. Angry
words are for men, but a whip for servants. You pair of dumb dogs, you
will get a dog's punishment." And she struck Francis full in the face
with her lash.

At the first crack of the whip, Starkie with the instinct of his kind
made for the door, and had the fortune to escape. He had no stomach to
encounter this avenging Amazon with her terrible beauty and cruel
words. But Francis stood immovable, his mind crushed and writhing, his
cheeks flaming with disgrace. This bright creature before him, with
queenly air and her high tone of command, had tumbled his palace of
cards about his ears. He felt with acid bitterness the full ignominy,
the childish, servile shame of his position. The charm of her young
beauty drove him frantic; her whole mien, as of a world unknown to him
and eternally beyond his reach, mocked him to despair. For a moment he
was the blacksmith's grandson, with the thought to rush forward, wrest
the whip from her hands, and discomfit this proud woman with his
superior strength. But some tincture of the Birkenshaw blood held him
back. In that instant he knew the feebleness of his renunciation of
virtue. Some power not himself forbade the extremes of disgrace,--some
bequest from more gallant forbears, some lingering wisp of honour. He
stood with bowed head, not daring to meet her arrogant eyes, careless of
the lash which curled round his cheek and scarred his brow. Marvellous
the power of that slender arm! He felt the blood trickle over his eyes
and half blind him, but he scarce had a thought of pain.

Then she flung down the whip on the floor.

"Go," she cried, "I am done with you. You may think twice before you try
the like again."

He moved dumbly to the door, and as he passed lifted his eyes suddenly
to her face. Dimly he saw that her gaze was fixed on his bleeding
forehead, and in her look he seemed to see a gleam of pity and at her
mouth a quiver of regret. Then with crazy speed he ran blindly to the
open moor.




CHAPTER VII

OF A LADY ON A GREY HORSE


The sun was far up in the sky and the world lay bathed in the clear
light of noon. The long rough expanse of bog lay flat before him with
its links of moss-pools and great hags of peat. But he ran as on open
ground, leaping the water, springing from tussock to tussock of heather,
with his cheeks aflame and his teeth set in his lips. He drove all
thoughts from his mind; the bitterness of shame weighed upon him like a
mount of lead; when he looked back at times and saw the inn still in
view, the sight maddened him to greater speed. So keen was his
discomfiture that he scarcely felt weariness, though he had been
travelling for a day and a night, with no sleep. When at last he came to
the limit of the desert and emerged on fields of turf he ran the faster,
till a ridge of hill hid the hateful place from his sight, and he sank
on the ground.

In a little he sat up, for though utterly tired, his whirling brain did
not suffer him to rest. Now, when the scene of his disgrace was no more
before his eyes, he strove to take the edge from his mental discomfort.
Drearily he conjured back every detail, and for a little it seemed as if
his shame would be driven out by the more bearable passion of anger. But
the attempt failed lamentably. He had wholly lost his old sentiment of
bravado; he saw his flimsy schemes wither before the bright avenging
presence and himself a mere knavish servant in her eyes. In his misery
the sight of her obstructed all his vision. At one moment he hated her
with deadly vehemence; at the next he would have undergone all
humiliation for a sight of her face. The inflated romance which had
first driven him out on his travels was centred for the time on this one
woman, and with it there followed the bitterness of despair.

Then he feebly clutched at his wits and set himself to review his
position. It was black, black, without a tincture of hope. He had failed
in his treachery, and something within him made him dimly conscious that
this form of roguery was somehow or other shut to him henceforth. The
rle of the high-handed adventurer could not be his; even in a simple
matter how dismally he had failed. And yet he could scarcely regret it,
for at the moment the part had lost its charm. He must follow his first
intentions and sail abroad, but with what altered hopes and spirit! For
at that hour Mr. Francis Birkenshaw in his youth and strength felt that
already he was verging on the dull confines of age. But with it all the
thought of that foreign journey was unpleasing. He had ruined his life
in his own land, but yet he was loth to leave it, for the vague
sentiment which was working in his heart was all associated with this
barren country and the impending wars. He had the sudden thought that
his services might still be worth their price in either army, but again
he found no comfort. King George's forces, alien in race and unglorified
by any fantastic purpose, did not attract him; the other side was a
dream, a chimra, and moreover his breach of faith had cut him off from
it for ever. An acceptable recruit he would appear, when Murray of
Broughton was a leader!

So with hopeless purpose he set out over the well-tilled country for the
shores of the Firth. This new ferment would make Edinburgh as safe for
him as a foreign city, and it was an easier task to sail from the Firth
than from a western port. He tried hard to recover his attitude of scorn
for fate and firm self-confidence. But it was little use. No casuistry
could persuade him to see his folly in a brighter light; he had lost his
grip on the world, and now was driven about like a leaf where aforetime
he had purposed to hew a path.

It was well on in the afternoon ere he struck a track, for he had taken
his course at right angles to the main highway and found himself mazed
in a country of sheepwalks. Thence the road ran down into a broad
lowland vale, set with clumps of wood and smoking houses, with a gleam
of water afar among low meadows. Autumn was tinging leaf and stalk, and
her blue haze rimmed the farthest trees and the line of abrupt hills.
But the golden afternoon had no soothing effect upon him; he saw all
things in the light of his own grey future, and plodded on with bent
head and weary footstep. The effects of his toil, too, were beginning to
come over him, and he found himself at times dizzy and all but fainting.
The few people he met--farmers with carts, packmen, and a half-dozen
country lasses--looked curiously at the tall, dishevelled man with his
weather-stained clothing. He stopped no one to ask the way, for the road
ran clear to the city, and at its high places gave a prospect of roofs
and steeples against the silver of the Forth. But sleep overcame him
before nightfall, and he had to content himself with a lodging in the
nearest village.

This he found to be a straggling place with one great inn in the middle,
and a little church in a wood of birches at the end. His limbs were so
weary that he would fain have gone straight to the inn and found supper
and a soft bed; but he reflected that he must husband his money and find
humbler quarters in some shed of hay. But first he had need of meat, so
to the inn-kitchen he went and ordered a modest meal, which he ate
ravenously. The room was full of men, taling hastily in a rich haze of
tobacco-smoke, and the stranger's entrance passed unnoticed. But
Francis, weary as he was, could not keep from catching scraps of their
conversation. In all a note of fear seemed dominant. Words--"the
Hielandmen," "Chairlie," and a throng of ill-pronounced Gaelic
names--occurred again and again till he was perforce roused to
interest. Some great event must have happened since the morning, for
the taking of Edinburgh was news already old. He touched the nearest
speaker on the arm, and with his best politeness asked the cause of the
uproar.

"Whaur d' ye come frae?" said the man, with the Lowland trick of
answering with a new question.

"I'm frae the South," said Francis, "a wearty traivel I have had. But
I've heard no word of anything, so I beg ye to tell me."

"Weel, it's just this. The lad they ca' the Prince has lickit Johnnie
Cope and the redcoats the day at Prestonpans, and the hale land is like
to be fou o' skirlin' Hielandmen."

Here was news. Francis' eye brightened, and he was for asking more. But
the man had had enough of speaking to an ignorant stranger, and once
more he was in the heat of debate, the subject apparently being an
abstruse calculation of the time it would take this new power to give
the land to the Pope.

"Sune," said a grave old man, "sune we'll see the fair eedifeece o' the
Kirk coupit, and the whure o' Babylon, as ye micht say, uphaudin' her
heid amang the ruins."

"Sune," said a Laodicean, "we'll see something mair serious, a wheen men
wi' red heids and naething on but sarks routin' ilka decent man out o'
house and hame."

Thereupon some eyes began to turn to Francis as the last comer and a
probable centre of suspicion. His clothing marked him for higher quality
than a countryman, and something ragged and desolate in his whole
appearance might argue the Jacobite.

"What side are ye on, mannie?" one asked him.

"None. I am for my own hand," said Francis, truly, as he thought of his
ill-fated incursion into high politics; and with brief good-night he
rose to go.

The night had fallen with a great air of dew and freshness, and without
in the village street the smoke smelled pleasantly in the nostrils, and
the noise of the stream rose loud in the silence. From afar, as from the
city, came an echo of a great stir, drums beating, maybe from the
Castle, or the pipers playing briskly over the victory. The sense of his
desolation, his folly, the ruin of his hopes, smote heavily on Francis
in this starry quiet. And with it all his weariness was so deep that it
all but drowned the other; and finding a shed at the village-end he lay
down on a pillow of hay and was soon asleep.

He was wakened about nine in the morning by a heavy hand pulling at his
coat. He stared sleepily and saw a man in the act of yoking a
cart-horse, and another pulling his pillow from below his head. They
were ready to abuse him for a gangrel, but something in his appearance
as he rose stopped their tongues, and they gruffly assented as he gave
them good-morning and went out to the open. Half a mile further on the
road he bathed head and shoulders in a passing stream, and then, with
some degree of freshness, set his face to the six mile road to the town.
Again the day had risen fair, and all the way, beneath the ancient trees
or through fields of old pasture, was fragrant with autumn scents. The
electric air quickened him against his will, and he strode briskly along
the curving highway till it dipped over a shoulder of hill to the city's
edge.

That the place was in a ferment was clear from the din heard even at
that distance,--the intermittent notes of bugles, the drone of pipes
from different quarters, and at intervals the rattle of a drum. Francis
found no guard set; doubtless in the great panic of the one party and
the first jubilation of the other precautions had not yet entered men's
minds. The cluster of little hamlets which lay around the city's
extremities seemed quiet and desert; doubtless all and sundry were even
now adding their share to the main confusion. But when once he had
entered the streets there was a different tale to tell. Never before had
he seen the Highland dress on any number of men, and now the sight of
bright tartans and fierce dark faces, as with a great air of triumph
Macdonalds and Camerons hastened along the causeway, affected him with
wonder and delight. The honest burgesses wore woful countenances, as
they saw trade gone and gains lessened. The graver and more religious
deplored the abomination at street corners in muffled tones for fear of
the passing victors; while the younger sort, to whom the whole was a
fine stage play, talked excitedly of the deeds of yesterday, the tales
which rumour had already magnified. Francis heard names occur in the
snatches of talk, names of Grants, Thrieplands, and Ogilvies, linked
with stories of daring. The ferment was too high to admit of
formalities, and each man joined the first group of strangers and bore
his part in the frightened gossip. In this way he heard the tale of the
fleeing band of dragoons racing for the Castle with a single Highlandman
at their heels, of the gate shut in his face and his defiant dirk stuck
in the oaken panels. Confused tales of rank Hanoverian cowardice, the
superhuman daring of the Prince's men, were diversified with wild
speculating on the ultimate course of things. The Prince was already on
his way to the capital, and in twelve hours the world would be turned
topsy-turvy.

In all the stir Francis found himself in the position of a melancholy
alien. He had no share in this triumph, no share even in the consolation
of defeat. In all this babble of great deeds and brave men he must
remain untouched, for had he not failed lamentably alike in loyalty and
knavery? He was a mere popinjay, a broken reed, and to his unquiet sight
there lurked a sneer in every passer's eye as if they divined his
worthlessness. The man grew acutely miserable. This was his own city,
his home; somewhere in this place his mother and sisters dwelled; the
streets were sprinkled with his aforetime comrades. And he loathed them
all: at the mere thought of his boyhood with its dreams of future
bravado and its puerile vices, he sickened with disgust. Indeed this
honest gentleman was fast approaching that attitude towards life which
ends in its renouncement.

He drifted aimlessly to the end of the town where the streets were
thronged to meet the coming army. The Camerons, who had marched straight
from the battle, were there to meet them, and a host of great ladies and
little lords with the Jacobite favours on their breasts and knots of
white ribbon at bridle and sword-hilt. Even as he stood staring with
lacklustre eyes at the sight, there rose through the lower gate the
brisk music of the pipes and the tread of many men. No music has so
dominant a note, and yet few are so adaptable. In the hour of death it
rises and falls like the wail of a forlorn wind, at a feast it has the
drunken gaiety of a Bacchante, and in the lost battle from it there
comes the final coronach of vain endeavour. But in triumph it is
supreme, a ringing call to action, a pan over the vanquished, the chant
of the heroic. Now with its note went the tramp of feet and the clatter
of horses' hooves, and then up the narrow street came the dusty,
war-stained conquerors. A cry of welcome went up from God-fearing
citizen and ragged Jacobite alike, for in that moment creeds and
practice were forgotten in the common homage to bravery.

But Francis had no eyes for the lines of brown-faced men or the stained
and ragged tartans. Among the bright crowd which greeted them were many
whom he knew from old days, wits and gentlemen of the town, ladies of
fashion, names linked with many tales. In some eyes shone the mere
pleasure in a gallant show, some were wild with enthusiasm, some in a
caustic humour. My Lord Craigforth kept up running comments with Mrs.
Cranstoun of Gair, and the young and witty Miss Menteith chattered to
Lady Manorwater with a vivacity too sharp for enthusiasm. Young
gentlemen with French elegance in their dress flicked the dust from
their cravats, and smiled with gracious condescension to popular
feeling. But others--rosy old lairds from the South and the dark retinue
of Highland gentlemen--wore a different air. As the tune of "The King
shall enjoy his own again"--a catch long hummed in secret--rose clear
and loud in the open street, their feelings rose beyond control, and
with tears running down their cheeks those honest enthusiasts joined
their prayers for the true King.

But with Lady Manorwater rode another, whom Francis' eyes followed till
she was lost in the thickening crowd. She sat her grey horse and gazed
on the advancing troops with eyes so honestly earnest, shining with such
clear delight, that the throng on the causeway whispered her name with
something like affection. Her bridle and trappings were decked with
knots of white ribbon, and on her heart was pinned a cockade of white
roses. The face above the dark velvet riding-cloak seemed pale with
weariness,--or was it excitement?--and her hand visibly trembled on the
rein. The mark of her lash was still on Francis' cheek, but the sting on
his soul smarted a thousand-fold worse. Had she been gay and lively, he
would have hated her like death, this woman who had mocked him. But her
white face and the glory in her eyes affected him with a sentiment too
elusive for words,--a compound of pity and a hopeless emulation of a
rare virtue.

He turned from the show down a little alley, and ran as if from the
avenger. Soon he came to more empty streets which the people had
deserted for the sight of the entering army. He felt himself starving,
so at a very little tavern he ordered a meal. But the food choked him,
and he left the dish almost untasted. He had no mind to think out a
future course, for, at the present, emotion had broken down the last
battlements of sober reason. Soon the street grew full again, and he had
to bear the scrutiny of many eyes. He had no design in his walking; all
he sought was to crush the hot pain of discomfiture which gnawed his
heart. Once the coolest and most fearless, he grew as nervous as a
woman. He fancied his life lay open like a book to every chance passer;
and he detected scorn in idly curious eyes. Sometimes he passed a face
he knew, but he waited for no recognition. His whole past life was so
hateful to his thoughts that he shunned anything that might recall it.
In his wanderings he passed by old haunts of his own, yea, under the
very windows of his mother's house. But old memories had no place in his
mind; the dissolution of a scheme of life had crushed out the
circumstances of his past. He had room merely for a bitter thought on
the farce of this return to his native town; and then his mind was back
once more in the dulness of regret.

Toward evening the stir died down, and save for the sight of armed men
and the excited talk of street-corners, he felt himself back in the
Edinburgh of his youth. His misery only grew the more intolerable, but
it seemed to shape to a purpose. He might yet redeem all and play a
manful part in life. He had tried the rle of the adventurer and failed;
there yet remained the more difficult path of honour. The portrait of
the lady which filled his mind seemed not wholly adamant. He had a dim
remembrance of a gleam of pity at the inn, and the white light of
enthusiasm at the pageant of the morning. He thought upon his first
meeting at the House of Broughton, and her graciousness, which then had
roused his bitterness, seemed now his one hope of salvation. Before his
pride had been his manliest attribute; now he realised clearly and
mournfully that the time had come to humble himself to virtue. It was a
grievous thought to the arrogant nature, but as he wandered through the
streets in the late afternoon he was compelled inexorably to submit. And
as a purpose shaped itself his humility grew deeper, till it brought
him to unconditional surrender.

In the High Street he asked of a Highlander the way to the lodging of
Murray of Broughton. The man told him, adding that the Secretary was
with the Prince at the Palace of Holyrood. The news gave him hope, and
in the September dusk he found the house-door with its watchful
sentinel. Even now Francis' appearance was not discreditable: his
clothes were good though sore worn, and he had just the figure that a
poor loyalist would bear whose intentions were better than his fortunes.
So the guard suffered him to pass, and the serving-man led him down a
dark passage to a hall of some size and elegance. He was told that the
Secretary's wife did much of her husband's work, often meeting the
throng of visitors who crowded at all hours to the house. Now he was
taken for one of those, and the servant opened a door and let him enter.

He found himself in a long dining-room wainscotted in brown oak, and lit
by a blazing fire on the hearth. Two candles burned faintly on a table,
where sat a lady poring over a great map. She started at his entrance,
and then lifting a candle came forward to scan his face. Meantime he
was in a pitiable state of fear. He who had once been cool and
self-possessed beyond the ordinary, now felt his knees sinking beneath
him. Keenly and cruelly he felt the measure of his degradation, and the
last rag of pride fell from the skeleton of his hopes.

She glanced at his face and stepped back. Wrath entered her eyes, to be
straightway replaced by sheer perplexity. She looked again at the
haggard figure before her, waiting for some word to explain his
presence. But his tongue was tied, his speech halted and stammered, and
he could only look with entreating eyes.

"And what is your errand, sir?" she asked. "Has Lord Manorwater
discharged you? I have not yet had time to tell him of your villainy,
but doubtless he has found it out elsewhere."

The words, with the sting of a lackey's reproach, were the needed
stimulant to Francis' brain.

"I am no servant," he said, and then hurriedly and brokenly he stammered
a word of confession.

The lady drew back with angry eyes.

"And you dare to come to me and tell me this!" she cried. "I had
thought it was but greed and a servant's temptation, and now you cut off
your own apology and confess yourself doubly a liar. Do you think to get
anything for this penitence? Do you think that the Prince has open arms
for all the rabble of the earth? Or do you wish to frighten a woman?"
And she laid her hand on a pistol, and stood erect and angry like a
tragedy queen.

"I seek nothing," said Francis, with a groan. "God knows I am not worth
your thought."

"You value yourself well, Mr. What's-your-name. If I had known you as I
know you now, no lash of mine would have touched you. A whipping is for
a servant's fault, which may yet be forgiven. But for such as yours ...
And you are made in the likeness of a proper man," and a note of
wonder joined with her contempt.

The wretched Francis stood with bowed head beneath this tempest of
scorn. The words fell on dulled ears. His own shame was too heavy on his
mind to allow of a poignant feeling. He felt like some ineffectual
knocker at a barred door, some vanquished invader trying to scale a
hostile parapet. By his own folly he had fallen to a place for ever
apart from this proud woman's ken. He could but cry for pity like a
child.

Then she cut short reproaches and looked at him keenly. Perhaps
something in his face or his hopeless eyes struck a chord of pity. "What
may be your name?" she asked, "if you say you are no servant."

He told her shortly, though the words burned his lips.

"Birkenshaw," she cried. "Of the Yarrow Birkenshaws?" And then she fell
to musing, looking up at him ever and again with curious eyes. "I have
heard the name. Maybe even it is kin to my own. I have heard the name as
that of a great and honourable house. And you have lived to defile it!"
And for a little she was silent.

"I would to God," she spoke again, "that you had been Lord Manorwater's
lackey."

The man said nothing. Deep hidden in his nature was a pride of race and
name, the stronger for its secrecy. Now he saw it dragged forth and used
as the touchstone for his misdeeds. It was the sharpest weapon in the
whole armoury of reproach. For one second he wished himself back in his
old temper of mind. Why had he thus debased his manhood to the frigid
and finicking virtue of a woman? Not till he looked again at the face of
his inquisitor did he find justification for his course.

Again she spoke, but in an altered voice, and Francis seemed to read a
hint of mercy.

"No," she said, "I was wrong. I am glad you are no lackey. Had you been
but a lying servant there had been no room for repentance. But you come
of honest folk, you have honest blood in your veins. Gentlemen are none
so common that one should be lost in the making." And she twined her
fingers, deep in meditation, looking to the fire with a face from which
all anger had departed.

Francis' clouded soul cleared at this dawn of hope. He watched the pale
woman with the marvellous eyes and hair, and a sudden wild exaltation
shook him. Sufficient, more than sufficient for him to do the bidding of
this great lady who had drawn him from the depths.

"Take me," he cried. "I am weak and foolish. I have no more sense than a
bairn, and I have done the Devil's work with an empty head. But I swear
that this is by and done with."

"You have made ill work of it in the past, Mr. Birkenshaw," said the
lady. "Will you serve the Prince well, think you, if you have been false
to me?"

"I can say nought," said Francis, "but I beseech you to give me trial."
And then with a touch of old bravado he added, "I am a man who has seen
much and can turn my hands and head to many purposes. I will prove
myself worth the trusting."

The lady frowned and tapped with her fingers on the table, looking over
his head to the wall beyond. "You have much to learn," she said gently.
"Do you think it is any merit in your services which would make me take
you for the Prince?" Then, as if to herself, "It is raw stuff, but it
would be a Christian act to help in the shaping of it to honesty."

Then with a sudden impulse she walked straight up to him and looked in
his eyes. "Lay your hand on mine," she said, "and swear. It is the old
oath of my house, maybe, too, of your own. Swear to be true to your
word, your God, and your King, to flee from no foe and hurt no friend.
Swear by the eagle's path, the dew, and the King's soul."

"I swear," he said, his hand shaking like a leaf as it touched her
slender wrist.

"Now you had better leave me," she said. "Maybe I have done wrong. I am
but a weak woman, and the heart should be steeled for the high business
which presses on the land. Yet you have sworn, and I have given you my
trust. If you will come to-morrow morning you will learn my bidding."




BOOK II




CHAPTER VIII

THE JOURNEY TO THE NORTH


In the autumn dusk Mr. Francis Birkenshaw rode down a path of mountain
gravel into the glen of a little stream. Behind him were the flat
meadows of his own country, with coiling waters and towns smoking in
woody hollows. The sea lined the horizon with a gleam as of steel; and,
fretted faintly against hillside and sky, all but vanishing into the
evening haze, rose the spires and turrets of the city he had left. From
the prosperous cornfields five miles back the way had risen slowly to
the crest of a ridge, whence it turned sharply down to a cavernous
mountain vale, which seemed to lead sheer into the heart of a gloomy
land. All about were acres of dark hills, ribbed, curved, and channelled
by myriad water-courses, forcing sharp peaks into the sunset or falling
back in dismal lines to the east and north. Down the affronting cleft a
storm was coming, and even as he looked it burst upon him, and he was
cloaked in mist and rain.

He had ridden hard from Edinburgh since the early morn with the speed of
a zealous messenger. On the day before, when he had gone to the Murrays'
lodging, he had been tried with many questions, and then trusted with a
message which even he, all untrained in the arts of war, knew to be of
high import. His courage had all but failed him; he had stammered modest
excuses; and then, heartened by bright eyes and brave words, accepted
his commission with diffident if resolute purpose. With a smile and a
face in his memory he had ridden out on the morning of this day into the
new world for him but two nights old. Never before had he felt such
lightness of heart. The September sunrise had been a masque of purple
and gold, the clear air a divine ether. Once more he had found a
standing-ground from which to view the world; he could look frankly in
each passer's eyes; and behind all was a woman's face in the gallery of
his heart to comfort his travelling.

The thought of the complexity and peril of his mission was scarcely
present. That was still in the far future. Meantime there was the
fervour of hope recovered, a fervour still stung at intervals by
flickers of old pride, and stronger still the half-pharisaic feeling
which springs from a dawning virtue. He had no thoughts; the tumult of
his feelings left no space for the clearer emotions. But the sense of
wild adventure was strong upon him. He was venturing on an errand of war
into a land as little known to him as the steppes of Tartary. And the
eternal memory of the lady freshened his fancy till youth returned once
more to the broken man who had two days before been at the feet of fate.
So with blithe heart he crossed the Firth by the Alloa ferry, where sea
breeze and land breeze strive with the widening river, and took his path
for the wall of mystic northern hills.

But now, as a darker country closed in on him, the strangeness began to
weigh on his spirits. He was lowland bred, and, with all his boasted
experience, a traveller within but narrow limits. Moors he knew, the
soft comely deserts which line Yarrow and Tweed and break ever into
green vales and a land of meadows. But this was something new,--this
everlasting bleak land, where God's hand seemed to have placed no
order. The stormy afternoon made the sight wilder, and all around him
birds cried so constantly and so shrilly that the wilderness seemed to
have taken to itself a voice. But soon his natural ardour rose
triumphant to the influence of weather. All was but part of this new
course, instinct with fierce adventure, a list for the conquest of
haughty hearts. As the cold of evening grew, and heavy shadows fell on
his path, he exulted in the mystery of his errand. He saw the long
hillsides on either hand, grey with banks of rock and rough with birken
tangles, down which at times came the cry of a fox or the cruel scream
of a hawk. Little lochs were passed, framed in the ebony of black bogs
or edged with dolorous rushes. All was strange, uncanny; and as he
looked keenly for the light which should tell him of his journey's end
and relief from the craggy path, he felt the joy of the crusader, the
wanderer on a reputable errand.

But somewhere on the high hills a storm had gathered, and hurrying from
mist-filled tarns choked the strait glens with sleet. It caught the
traveller full in the face, and in a trice had him soaked to the bone.
This was all that was needed to give the final exhilaration to his
spirits. Gaily he urged his horse, wrapping his cloak about his
shoulders and lowering his head to bide the brunt. It stung his face to
fire, and sent the blood coursing through every vein. The man gloried in
his strength. He cried defiance to all powers of weather, and thought
lovingly on himself in this rle of doughty knight-errant. Then through
the sheer-falling water a light gleamed, all rayed like a star through
the sleety veil; the way grew smoother; and Francis was aware of his
lodging for the night.

Ere he had dismounted and stretched his legs, a throng of all ages and
descriptions with lights of many sizes gathered about him. The place was
small and the door narrow, and in contrast with the sharp out-of-doors
the air smelled hot and close. Dazed like an owl, he stumbled down two
steps into a wide low room, where some dozen men sat drinking round the
fire or eating supper at a table. A fire of peat burned in the middle
and the air was thick with a blue smoke, which gusts from a broken
window were ever blowing aside. The inmates were all in Highland dress,
save one man who was still at supper,--a florid and stout gentleman of
middle age in knee-breeches and a dark-blue coat. Room was made for
Francis on the settle by his side, and a meal placed before him.

With keen appetite he fell to his supper, looking often and curiously at
his companions. The place reeked of food and drink and generous living.
In a corner stood a great anker of whisky with a spigot, whence the
Highlanders replenished their glasses. A barrel of sugar with a small
spade in it was by its side, and on the peats the water boiled for
toddy. It was a good lodging for men who were fresh from wild, cold
journeying, for such had no mind to mark the filth which was everywhere,
the slatternly look of the maids, the exceeding dirtiness of the
company. The Highlanders were all tall men, with gaunt dark faces and
ragged tartans. One of them, smaller in stature, wore the trews instead
of the kilt and seemed a thought more decent and presentable. They
talked rapidly among themselves in Gaelic, and ever and again one would
raise a catch, while the whole motley crew would join in. It was with
some relief that Francis turned from watching them to the comfortable
figure at his side. He caught the man's eye, and they gravely gave each
other good-evening. Clearly he was a person of consequence, for his
dress was good, and his rosy face had the tight lips and clean chin of
the man used to give orders and be obeyed.

"It's a coarse day for a journey, sir," said he. "Ye'll be going south
to Edinburgh?"

"Even so," said Francis, "and I hope to have the pleasure of your convoy
on the road to-morrow." This personage had the look of a Whig, and there
was no need to enlighten him.

"I am at your service," said the elder man, with a twinkling eye.
Francis caught the twinkle and put a stricter bridle upon his tongue.

"I hear," said he again, "that there are stirring times in Edinburgh. We
country folk in the north hear nocht of a thing till it's bye."

Francis saw the guile and checked the natural desire of the well
informed to make a present of his knowledge to every inquirer. "I've
heard something like it," he said, "but we'll not be long in hearing the
truth. How long do you call in from here to the town?"

The other's rosy cheeks grew rosier with suppressed amusement. "That was
the very question I was on the point of asking you myself," he said.
"But go on with your supper, sir, and do not let me hinder a hungry
man."

Francis ate with sidelong glances at his companion, who had lit a short
pipe and smoked vigorously. Once and again he met his eyes, and both
smiled. Truly this game of hide and seek was becoming amusing. Then he
fell to studying the image of the man's looks as pictured in memory.
Some hint of a likeness struck him; these lineaments, that figure, were
known to him. Carefully he traced the web of his recollections, but
could find no thread. Doubtless he had seen him in the old Edinburgh
days, but where? when? He had all but finished his meal when a sudden
lift of his comrade's arm, a motion to set right his cravat, furnished
the key to the mystery. He had mind of days in the Parliament House,
when he, the lawyer's clerk, took notes and papers to the great lawyers.
Softly he whistled to himself, blinking with amazement. The Lord
President! So far, so good; he had the advantage of his companion;
doubtless the famous Mr. Duncan Forbes had no wish to be recognised in
this Highland tavern.

"It's a wild night," said Francis. "Had ye a hard day's riding?"

"Dub and mire," said the other. "Ye're splashed yourself, so ye ken the
state of the roads."

"I think I had a glisk of ye five mile back at the bridge-end," hazarded
the bold Francis.

"Maybe so. I had a mettle beast, and took the road well."

"Ay," said Francis, meditatively, "it's a lang dreary road to Culloden,"
and he looked innocently at his neighbour.

The man raised his eyebrows a trifle and bowed. "It appears," he said,
"that my name and designation are better kenned in the land than I had
thought. Ye have the advantage of me, Mr. ----"

"Robertson," said the other. "Mr. George Robertson, merchant in the
Pleasaunce of Edinburgh, returning from transacting some business in the
north."

Francis had overshot himself, and the man smiled. "I am at your service,
Mr. Robertson of the Pleasaunce. Your name and trade do credit to your
honesty and your own pretty fancy," and with a sly glance he knocked the
ashes from his pipe.

The ground was dangerous, and Francis sheered away. Moreover, the rest
of the company were fast approaching the state of maudlin
good-fellowship which follows the pugnacious. The smell of hot drink was
grateful in his nostrils after the bitter wind, and he was in a cheerful
mood at the discomfiture of his neighbour. He filled a great jug with
the piping spirits, and drank deeply to some chance toast. The stuff was
raw but fiery, and it sensibly quickened his vivacity. Memories came
back of old tavern nights in his boyhood. The smell of the place, the
uproarious company fostered the impression, and for a little rough
hilarity seemed the extreme of joy. The man's mind was elated by the
day's ride, and still more by the sudden rebound from black despair. His
animal boisterousness, always at hand in his nature, was beginning to
assert itself under the influence of keen air and this northern whisky.
He filled Mr. Forbes's glass till the rosy gentleman cried a truce, and
toasted him with clinking bowls. Then he grew friendly with the others
at the table. The little man in the trews made the first overtures to
friendship by coming over to the pair, bowing with profound if drunken
gravity, and asking them for their commands. Francis received him as a
brother, and ere he knew, found himself singing riotously among the
ragged Highlanders. Toasts in Gaelic were drunk with such generous
frequency that Mr. Francis Birkenshaw, who had not been drunk above
three times in his previous life, who had only that morn been a very
storehouse of high sentiments, who was even now pluming himself on a
diplomatist's wisdom, became gloriously drunk.

It is the nemesis of a vagrant youth that when at a later time the
keynote is struck of some one of these youthful follies the maturer
nature instinctively responds. The mere flavour of good-fellowship had
brought him to a condition of which he would have been heartily ashamed
even in his earliest lawlessness. Once more he was the vicious boy; his
tongue was loosed, and he drew from the rich storehouse of his former
experience. Soon the wild talk of the company had been raised to a pitch
of indecent blasphemy which before it had wholly failed to attain; and
the Highlanders, imperfect as was their English, looked with awe and
reverence on this young spirit whose speech was even as the common
sewer. Gaelic and English alternating filled the place with a din like
Bedlam, while ever and anon some loyalist sentiment gave a chance for
maudlin tears.

In a sudden spasm of such feeling the company waxed political. "Drink,
gentlemen," cried Francis, "to the only King, the only Prince, and the
only Cause. Drink good luck to all honest fellows who take their sword
in their hand and their plaid on their back when their master bids them.
May the dirty Germans be sent packing and our ain lad sit in St.
James'."

All rose with wild cries and breaking glass, and a shrill Gaelic song,
wild as a gled's scream, rasped through the place. All save one,--the
sober Mr. Forbes, who sat smiling and self-possessed in his
chimney-corner.

Then arose Long John of the Dow Glen with his broken speech. "There iss
a man, a fat Southron of a man, who will not trink to the goot causs. By
Heaven, he will get something mair in hiss guts than fusky, if he toes
not." Robin Mactavish and Hamish the Black added like comments. The
little man with the trews was too far gone to speak, but he waved a
threatening glass.

Francis had still the wits to refrain from shouting the dissenter's
name. But he called on him to drink to the King, or he, Mr. Francis
Birkenshaw, would know the reason.

"I will drink a toast, Mr. Robertson (or is it Mr. Birkenshaw?)," said
the man, and he rose slowly to his feet. "Gentlemen all," he cried, "I
drink--to all good intentions."

The words sounded satisfactory and a great shout was the reply, as each
man interpreted the toast into the tongue of his own sentiments.

But Francis was little content. "Ye're a Whig," he cried, "a
smooth-spoken whigamore, unfit for the company of honest gentlemen." And
he turned on him with the abuse of the stable-yard.

For a second the two were left alone, for a debate had arisen between
Robin the Piper and him of the Dow Glen, which distracted the others.
The elder man looked at his drunken opponent with angry and pitiful
eyes.

"Your speech, sir," he said, "is most filthy and shameful. You belong to
the wrong side, and I am glad of it, for it would be a disgrace for the
right party to have you. But you have women in your cause whose memory
should bridle your tongue. I know naught of you or your business, but it
little becomes a man to thus forget himself, when he is of the same
persuasion as so many honest ladies."

"You have spoken the word, sir," said Francis. "And now I propose that
you join me in drinking to the best and bonniest. Gentlemen," he cried,
"I give you the toast of the bonny Mrs. Murray."

The whole tipsy company caught at the name and drank deep to the health
of the famous lady, some calling her by her strange Gaelic name, which
meant "the dew of April." In the wildest glens of the north the story
was told of her beauty, and she was as often on loyal lips as the Prince
himself. So with all the good-will in the world the tipsy crew cried her
name, while Mr. Forbes sat gloomily and angrily silent.

       *       *       *       *       *

Francis awoke the next morning with a burning head and a heart from
which all gaiety had gone. He dressed with woe-begone leisure and came
into the kitchen rubbing weary eyes. The place was quiet utterly; about
the door hens were clucking, a great hum of the farm-yard was in the
air, and through the open entrance he saw the high steep shoulder of a
hill. The company of the night before had gone early; in some haste he
looked about for the Lord President, but he too had departed. He went
out of doors and smelt the fresh air of morn. The rain had gone, and the
whole narrow vale was bright with sun and swollen water. But the sky
warned him that he had slept late, so he cried for the hostess. She came
wiping her hands, a miracle of dirty unkemptness. Where had the others
gone, he asked. "Ach, their own ways. She kent nocht of the folk that
cam to her publick. She was only a poor woman, fightin' to keep body and
saul together in evil days. All had left early, even the old man that
was sae prawly drest." Francis plied her with irritable questions on the
way he had taken. But the woman was trusty; Whig or Jacobite were nought
to her, she would tell nothing of her guests; and to aid her pious
resolution she discovered opportunely that she knew no more English than
the barest smattering.

So he must needs take things as he found them, breakfast on eggs, pay a
modest lawing, and ride off in a violent ill-humour. The memory of the
night's doings still rankled in his heart. He had forfeited all claim to
that character which he had fairly thought he had attained to. He had
slipped back to the worst days of his youth, and got drunk in the
company of filthy barbarians. The figure of the Lord President added
bitterness to his reflections. The man of the world, the true man of
affairs, had despised him as a lecherous boy. He pictured his own tipsy
abandonment, his talk, his maudlin jests, all watched with the keen eye
of the greatest man in the country. The shame of the thing made him cry
out and curse his fortune.

But the gall of the matter was his toasting of his mistress. In his
sober hours the very speaking of her name in such a company and such a
place seemed the sheerest blasphemy. And the circumstances of the toast,
the drunken laughter, the foul talk, the brazen defiance of all decency,
made the crime more heinous. In a common alehouse he had insulted,
grossly insulted, the name of her who had given him a reason to live. He
reviewed every scene in his drama where she had entered,--the midnight
raid on the House of Broughton, the tragic farce at the inn, the sight
of the lady on the grey horse in the street of Edinburgh, and finally
that strange meeting in her own house where he had seen the full
nakedness of his own soul. The memory of her face nigh drove him
frantic. He was riding on her errand, and, lo! he had betrayed her cause
at the very outset.

But with the progress of the day his mind grew quieter. The more
poignant shame died down, leaving only a regret. The weather was clear
and bright, autumn without storm and heaviness. The road rose slowly
from the straiter glens to a high table-land, where shallow vales marked
the extreme upland waters of young rivers. A wide country lay bare to
the view, all alike rough with wood and heather; while in the distance a
circle of dark mountains made a barrier as of some great amphitheatre.
The place had a soothing effect upon his spirits. Something in the
moorland peace, the quiet of these endless fields of heather where deer
couched and wild birds nested, brought ease and some sanity of mind. To
the man who knew only the city wynds or the shrill-sounding beaches of
Fife, this untilled land had an exquisite and elemental freshness, as of
the primeval world.

At a turn in the road he saw a rider before him not a quarter of a mile
ahead. He drew back and stared. Something in the figure and carriage
were familiar. The man was riding in a hurry, for he used his whip
frequently and with vigour. Then recollection came to Francis, and in
spite of his gloom he had almost laughed. This was indeed the Lord
President Forbes on his way to his house of Culloden, doubtless on some
sudden business of state. The man's composure was almost restored.
Clearly the great statesman feared him; he had been at the pains to
deceive him and rise early to outwit him. Strange are the crannies of
our nature; for it is a fact that the sight lessened Francis'
self-loathing and the bitterness of Mr. Forbes' reproof. After all, he
was still of some consequence in the world, and though his heart was
repentant it was remorse without pain.




CHAPTER IX

MY LORD OF LOVAT


That night he lay at a wretched cottage by the wayside where the
hill-air came through the gaps in the heather roof and made the sleeper
shiver on his couch of grass. The land was now a mere chaos of black
mountains, and the road, which at first had borne some likeness to a
highway, was now sunk to an ill-marked scar through the moss. It made
heavy riding, and through the next day our traveller felt more weary
than he cared to own. Had not the sun been bright and the weather dry,
he might have missed the track utterly, for the bogs which lay among the
hills were hard to wrestle through. At evening he was fain to stop at a
hut which lay on the side of a long hill called Corryarrick, up which
the road went in corkscrew fashion for half a score of miles. The man of
the place gave him some kind of oaten porridge and a raw whisky which
burned his palate, and told him many details of his way. This, it
appeared, was still the country of the Athole Stewarts, but over the
affronting hills began the lands of Stratherick and the domain of the
Frasers. The fellow had little good to say of them; nay, by his account
they were a clan of gruesome savages hated of God and their neighbours.
So it was with some foreboding that Francis at the next dawning set his
horse's face to the ascent.

All that day he rode in a bleak land, where wild tracts of moss with
shining lochs scattered athwart them were frowned on by murky hills.
And, to make the road worse, the place was scarred with horrific ravines
running to the westward, at whose bottom foamed impetuous rivers. At the
best they were spanned by rough bridges of tree trunks and heather, but
more than once there was nothing for it but to make the steep descent
and breast the waters. The day was still cloudless, but what with many
wettings and the hardships of the path Francis fell into a dismal frame
of mind. No human dwelling relieved the inhospitable waste, his store of
provisions failed, and, to crown all, his horse fell lame at the
crossing of a burn and had to be led heavily through the hags.

In the late afternoon three men arose as if from the bowels of the
earth, and laid hands on horse and man. As it chanced, this was the best
thing that could have happened, for they were men of Lovat's own clan in
Stratherick, filthy, thieving rascals, but loyal to their lord. So it
fell out that when they had plied Francis with unintelligible Gaelic,
one, more learned than the rest, asked his name and business in a
travesty of English. He replied that he sought the house of Macshimei at
Castle Dounie, for so he had been told to speak of the head of the clan.
The bare word was enough for the men, who straightway became friendly
and set to relieve his wants. They dressed his horse's knee with a
concoction of herbs, bandaging it after a fashion of their own, and led
Francis to a cluster of cabins on the edge of a long loch. Here they
gave him meat,--roast moor-fowl and eggs and a more palatable kind of
bread, with a glass of excellent brandy. And in the morning one
undertook to guide him past the narrows of the loch and set him well on
his way to his destination.

When in the afternoon he crossed the river which formed the outlet of
the lake, he found himself on the confines of a pleasant country. Set
like an oasis among the stormy deserts lay meadows and haughlands and a
fringe of woods, while beyond gleamed a quiet stretch of sea. The place
was green and habitable, and on Francis's wearied eyes it fell like a
glimpse of an Arcady. He could scarce believe his senses, for this
looked more like the Lothians or the cornlands of Fife. But the high
brown towers of the castle rising from the seaward slope and the bald
scarp of Lovat on a cape in the Firth told of a chieftain's dwelling.
The sky was darkening towards evening as he rode to the great pile, and
his heart almost misgave him. He was on a nicely diplomatic errand, one,
too, not without its peril. The man who dwelled there was one of the
most famous names in the land, ill-reputed for lawlessness and
treachery, notorious for a wit too subtle for prosaic earth. Who was he,
a raw, unlettered vagrant, to meet such an one face to face and teach
him his business? He was tired to death, too, with his moorland journey,
and his brain was half clouded with sleep.

There was no guard at the gate,--nothing save two unkempt serving-men
quarrelling over a jug of ale. They asked his business with a high
gravity and led him into a damp courtyard where children squalled and
serving-women chattered. The informality of such a place restored
Francis to self-confidence, and he followed his guides with an assured
step. A noise of rackety mirth fell on his ear, and he was ushered into
the great dining-hall of the castle, where some fifty and more men sat
at meat. The air was thick with the fumes of wine and hot dishes,
bare-footed gillies ran hither and thither, and it took no
extraordinarily acute eye or nostril to perceive that the place was
exceeding dirty. At the lower end of the great table a crowd of ragged
and dishevelled men quarrelled and scrambled for bones and offal. Thence
there seemed to rise degrees of respectability from the common herd who
supped on sheep-heads and whisky to the more honoured, the lesser gentry
of the clan, who had good beef and mutton and plenty of claret. At the
very top sat the lord himself with his more distinguished friends,
Frasers of Gortuleg, Phopachy, and Byerfield, eating French dishes and
drinking many choice wines. One of the ragged servants went to the
chief's ear and whispered as he had been bidden, "Mr. Francis
Birkenshaw with a message from Mr. Murray of Broughton;" and straightway
room was made for the traveller at the honourable end of the table.

The cooking was of the finest, and Francis appeased his hunger with
great satisfaction. No notice of him was taken by his neighbours to left
and right, but each listened to his lord's pleasantries with the anxious
care of the retainer. From the great man himself Francis could not keep
his eyes, and in the pauses of the meal he found himself narrowly
watching the mighty figure lolling in his carven arm-chair. Already
beyond the confines of old age, an ungainly form with legs swollen with
the gout and a huge rolling paunch, he lay in his seat like a mere
drunken glutton. But when the eye passed from his body to the ponderous
face and head, the mind drew his nature in different colours. The brow
was broad and wrinkled with a thousand lines, hanging heavy over his
eyes and fringed with great grey eyebrows. The thick fleshy nose, the
coarse lips, the flaccid grey cheeks, were all cast in lines of massive
strength, and the jaw below the cunning mouth was hard as if cut in
stone. But the most notable point in the man was the pair of little
eyes, still keen as a ferret's, and cruel in their resolute blue. He ate
ravenously, and drank scandalously of every wine, keeping all the while
a fire of compliments and jocularities, coarse as the gutter, at which
the obedient assembly roared.

By and by, and not for a good hour, the feast came to an end, and the
old lord was lifted from his seat by two servants. "Gentlemen," he
cried, "there will be supper here in a matter of two hours, beefsteaks
and claret for all that wish them. See that no man goes empty out of
this house of Dounie. For mysel', ye see that the infirmities of age
creep over me, and the thrang o' many cares compels me to quit ye. Guid
e'en to ye, friends, guid fare and a safe returning." And he hobbled
away, leaning heavily on his bearers.

After his departure the table was turned into a scene of riot, all
shouting in Gaelic, drinking strange toasts and quarrelling at times in
pairs and threes. Francis felt sadly out of place in a company where he
was known to none and heard nothing but a strange language. So when a
gillie touched his sleeve and bade him follow, for "ta great Macshimei
wad speak with him," he rose gladly and left the reeking hall. The man
led him into another room furnished with some approach to comfort, where
rugs of deerskin covered the nakedness of the stone floor; thence into a
passage which led to a narrow stone stair; and finally stopped at the
entrance to a little turret-room. With an air of deep secrecy he tapped
twice, and then with a flourish opened the door and showed Francis in,
crying the announcement, "To speak with ta Lord Lovat."

The place was little and bright, with a cheerful fire and a long couch
of skins. So thick were the walls, so narrow the space, that Francis
felt himself secluded from the world. The chief lay stretched out with
his feet to the blaze, a little black table with wine at his elbow. He
looked up sharply at the entrance, and then stared once more into the
fire as Francis came forward and stood before him. After a little he
raised his head. "Young man," he said, "I pray you sit down. See to your
ain comfort. Ye are admitted to a private and secret audience with a man
who is not accessible to all. I trust ye have the sense to value your
preevilege."

Francis bowed in some confusion. The look of arrogant strength in this
strange old man crushed his spirits. He sorely distrusted his own wits
in contest with this rock of iron.

"Ye will have a letter from the secretary?"

"Indeed, no," said Francis, "for the matter is somewhat too long for a
letter. It is a thing for a discussion, my lord, and not for a scrawl on
paper."

The old man looked grimly at the speaker. "And who are you in God's
name," he rasped out, "that is thocht worthy to come and treat wi'
me?--me, the first lord in the Hielands, the friend o' princes."

"My name is Francis Birkenshaw, at your service," said the other,
conscious that those shrewd eyes were scanning every line in his face,
every thread in his garments.

Once more his catechist plied him. "Are ye gentrice?" he asked.

At this some heat came into Francis' blood, and he answered warmly, "I
am even as yourself, my lord. My descent is none so regular, but I have
the name and blood of a gentleman."

Lovat frowned crossly, for the scandals of his family were common talk.
"Ye have a ready tongue in your head, sir, but ye are somewhat lacking
in respect. So ye are one of Murray's packmen?"

He waited for an answer, but Francis held his peace. "Ay," he went on,
"a deeficult, dangerous job. Murray's a shilpit body, a keen man for his
ain guid, but without muckle penetration. But his wife--weel, d' ye ken
his wife?"

"I have the honour of her acquaintance," said Francis, stiffly.

"Have ye indeed?" said Lovat, smiling. "A fine woman, then, I can tell
ye, sir. A bonny bitch! A speerity licht sort o' body!" and he looked
from below his eyebrows to see the effect of his words.

"If you will pardon me, sir," said Francis, "I fail to see your point.
You are talking of the character of those with whom I have nothing to
do. Be assured I did not ride over your wet hills to indulge in moral
disquisitions."

The man laughed long to himself. "So that's your talk," he said, "and
you're no one o' Murray's fighting-cocks? Weel, the better for my
business. Help yoursel' to some wine, Mr. Birkenshaw, for it's drouthy
work talking."

Further he bade Francis draw his chair nearer the fire and stir the logs
to a blaze. Then silence reigned in the room while the elder man stared
into the glow with a face which even in the dim light seemed to his
companion to be working with some emotion.

"It's a queer warld," he said at length, "and for the auld, a cruel one.
Be sure, Mr. Birkenshaw, that it is a painful thing to feel the life
sinking in your members and to mind again and again o' the days when ye
were young and bauld. _Ebeu fugaces anni labuntur._ Weel, weel, it's the
destiny of all."

He lay back on his couch so mighty a wreck of a man that Francis's pity
was stirred. He was himself of just such a spirit, and he could forecast
in imagination the bitter ebbing of vital force. He nodded gravely to
each sentence. Then the old lord spoke again with a sharper tone.

"Ay, but that is no the worst of an auld man's lot. Ye see me here, me
that has been the peer o' the best in the land, forced to keep the
company o' a wheen wild caterans, and all the while the country asteer
wi' war. I am auld and puir and weak, and so I maun sit still in this
lonely stane tower and hear o' great events through the clash o'
packmen. Once," and his voice rose high and querulous, "once I was the
great Lord Lovat, and every man was cap in hand as I came down the High
Street o' Edinburgh. Mair, far mair,--I hae carried the King himsel',
God bless him, in my arms through the gardens o' Kensington, and my word
was maybe no the least noted at Almack's and the Cocoa Tree. There have
been days, sir, when I walked in St. James' Park, and many a braw lady
cast eyes on the chief o' the Frasers and many great lords were proud to
cleek my arm. And now I maun dwine away my life in the midst o' cauld
hills and heathery mosses. I have no complaint against a merciful God,
but is it not a sair dispensation? But were this all, I would say ne'er
a word. But in my day I have had the feelings, ay, and maybe done the
work, o' a statesman and a patriot. I have sat at the council-board with
Hamilton and Queensberry, I have been the trusted adviser of Buccleuch
and Tweeddale and Aberdeen, and not once or twice, but a score o' times
did Maccallum Mhor himself call me his friend. Can I sit still then and
see the land divided against itself, one king on the throne and another
in the heather, and the wisest heads in braid Scotland at desperation
wi' loyalty and religion pulling one way and common prudence the ither?
Ay, and I maun sit and see and groan in my inmost heart, and all the
while be sae clogged wi' this perishin' body that I canna move."

Lovat spoke fiercely and quickly, and Francis was impressed by the note
of lofty resolution. He was dimly conscious of the grandiloquence, but
the titanic strength of the recumbent figure made it seem only fitting.

"And then," the old man continued, "there is a different side to the
whole matter. Now in this, the hinner end o' my days, I am quit o' all
personal ambition, but I canna help that natural pride which the chief
must feel in his own people. All the great northern clans are taking
sides, Macdonalds, Camerons, and Stewarts for the Prince, Macleods and
Macintyres against him. And whatever way it falls out they will aye have
taken their part in the battle and won great glory. Is it like," he said
simply, "that I could endure that the Frasers should lie quiet like auld
wives or young bairns? You will pardon my enthusiasm for a poor rude,
ignorant people, but they have followed me and my fathers and love my
house dearly. Nay, sir, you who ken but the folk of the towns and the
south country can have little notion of these poor folks' loyalty. I am
called the thirty-eighth of my name and for every lord of Lovat they
have spilled their blood like water. But now in the evil days, when
their lands are narrowed, and men who ken nothing but how to fight must
set themselves to tillage, you can believe that their heart is cast
down. They look to me to help them, and I have nothing to give them, so
the poor folk must quit their bits o' sheilings and the kindly glens
where their fathers have dwelt since first a Frisel set foot in
Scotland, and gang east and west and south to ither lands and stranger
peoples. And there they make what shift they can to live, but their
hearts are aye sair for the heathery hills and the auld glens and
waters. I am no a man easily moved to tears, but the thought of my poor
folk makes me greet like a bairn."

The melancholy voice, the sorrowful words, and the great figure, which,
seen in the dim light, had lost all coarseness and was almost majestic,
thrilled Francis in spite of himself. He had come with a distrust of
this man, with a mind well stored with tales of his extraordinary
character, and in consequence he had brought to the meeting a heart
triply bound against all emotions. But this air of lingering pity was
overcoming him. This fusion of the complaint of an exiled Aristides
with the lament of a chief over the past glories of his clan was
affecting in the extreme.

Then the other changed his tone utterly. Raising himself from his couch,
he looked over to Francis with a keen face of interrogation. "I ken
naught of your politics, Mr. Birkenshaw, though from your errand I might
make a guess. But I assume that ye are an honest, open-minded man, and I
will do ye the honour to speak plainly. I live out o' the warld, but I
have een in my head to see. We will leave the question of politics
aside, if you please, for the moment. It may be that I am for the
present king, it may be for him that's ower the water. But, at any rate,
the blood o' my fathers in my veins still cries out to strike a blow for
a Stuart, and I canna see the Cause misguided without a pang. And what
is it that I see? A brave young lad wi' nae experience o' war and little
knowledge o' men, and a' around him a cleckin' o' wild Highland chiefs
who fecht for their ain hand and nothing besides. And them that micht be
advisers, what are they? A wheen bairnly boys, wi' guid coats on their
backs and fine names, very ready wi' their bit swords, but poor silly
sheep in the day of battle. Take my word, Mr. Birkenshaw, there are
only two heads in the hale concern. There's the Athole Murray, Lord
George. I bear nae guid will to him, but at least he is a man and a
soldier. And there's Murray o' Brochtoun. Weel, the less said o' him the
better. I have come across him in mony a ploy, and the heart o' him is
as rotten as peat. But he is a man o' pairts, his hand is in the making
o' every plan, and abune a' he has his bonny wife to help him. It's
kenned that she has a' her lovers at her back, and that means half the
gentry o' the land."

The old man leaned forward and scanned Francis' face. It was his aim to
find out how far this messenger was sent by a petticoat, and to set him
against his mistress. He had chosen his words with exquisite cunning,
and he awaited the effect. Nor was he disappointed. The young man's
face, to his huge irritation, flushed deeply, and he seemed suddenly
bereft of words. His reason told him that such confusion was
unwarrantable; it was no news to him that Mrs. Murray, the admired of
all, had a train of gallants at her bidding. But the fact had never
appeared to him so real; he had felt, he knew not why, that in this
woman he had a private interest; his goddess seemed tarnished by a hint
of common worship. Lord Lovat's plan had been well calculated, but he
had just missed by a hair a proper estimate of his companion's
character. Instead of the irritation with the world and despair which
such news would have roused in the common man of sentiment, in Francis
it merely awakened a deeper humility, a keener feeling of his own
insignificance, a more hopeless devotion. The thought that his sentiment
was shared by many showed the vast distance which separated her high
virtue from his folly. Somehow the shaft had not only missed its mark,
but performed the very work which its sender dreaded.

"I have spoken to you as friend to friend, Mr. Francis Birkenshaw," said
Lovat. "Ye see my unhappy position. An alien to those in authority,
prevented by my weakness from vigorous action, I must decide one way or
another for the clan. Ye see the responsibility and the hardship."

Francis muttered assent, but his wits were busy with another
question,--whither all this talk was tending. He had his clear mission
to win this lord to the Prince's cause, but the problem had now a
different aspect. With much trepidation he waited on the issue of
affairs.

But Lovat had little disposition to give a ready answer. "Have ye any
news for my ear?" he asked. "I have heard of the victory at Preston
Pans, but I would like to ken if any mair lords have risen, if England
is yet ripe, and if the army has gotten an increase."

Francis could say nothing but that Lord Lovat appeared as well informed
as himself.

"Tut, tut, but this is a difficult business," said the old man, and he
stared once more into the fire. "See here, sir, you see the wretched way
I am placed. God knows I hold my country's welfare next to my own soul.
I am ower auld to care a straw about which king has his backside on the
throne; all I seek is that the land prosper. But it seems to me that the
scales are about level. James would make a good king, and there's nae
doubt but he has the richt on his side. Geordie makes a tolerable show,
and if Chairlie is no strong enough to ding Geordie down, why, there
Geordie will sit. If I thocht that there was a fair chance, I would set
a' my people off the morn to fecht for the Stuarts. If I was clearly
persuaded that there was none, they would join the ither side with all
despatch, that the rising might be the sooner quelled and peace
restored. I am ower auld to take the field mysel', and it's for my poor
feckless folk I maun consult. But the devil of it is that I canna make
up my mind one way or anither. I live ower far out o' the warld, and
I've ower little news. My friends among the Jacobites are wi' the
Prince, my friends on the ither side, like the Lord President, are a' in
Edinburgh and like to be there for mony a day. Truth, I kenna where to
turn," and he looked to the other with an air of great perplexity.

"On one matter I can ease your mind," said Francis. "I overtook the Lord
President on the road, and as he was some three hours before me, he will
be at his house of Culloden ere now."

Lovat shot one sharp glance at the speaker. "Say ye sae," said he.
"Weel, I'm glad of it. But I fear ye maun be wrong, for Duncan in a time
like this would come first to Castle Dounie. It was aye his way wi' his
auld friends."

At the words and look which accompanied them, Francis had some suspicion
that the presence of the Lord President in the north was well enough
known to his interlocutor. He declared bluntly that he knew the face and
had made no mistake.

"Weel, weel, we'll let the matter be," said Lovat. "If ye're richt, sae
muckle the better for me. But how can I make up my mind when I get such
word as this?" and he reached his hand to a packet of papers. "Here is a
memorandum from Culloden's self with great news o' King George's forces
and the peaceable and law-abiding spirit of the citizens of Edinburgh
and the folk of the south. 'My dear lord,' he says, 'I do assure you
that the thing will be nipped in the bud, so I counsel you to take no
rash steps.' So says Mr. Duncan; but what says Lochiel? 'All the land is
with us; forbye there are ten thousand French to be landed immediately,
while in England every house of distinction is all for us and our
Prince.' God, Mr. Birkenshaw, if ye had brought news to settle this
kittle point, ye would have been an acceptable messenger."

Francis was in a quandary from which he saw no outlet. This man was
clearly playing high for his own hand, but he had cloaked it cunningly
under a pretence of love of clan and country. So he spoke guardedly.
"You make the question difficult, my lord; but if the odds are so even,
if whatever way you turn a like peril attends you, is there no sentiment
to turn the scales?"

Lovat nodded wisely. "There ye are right," he said. "I have a sentiment
for the old house, which is ever tugging against my prudence. When I
heard the news o' Preston Pans I was daft. I cast my hat on the ground
and drank damnation to the White Horse o' Hanover, and this very day I
had seven hundred men drilled on the green, a' wi' their white cockades
and springs o' yew in their bonnets. Were I no a discreet and
weel-principled man, the clan would ere now have been marching over
Corryarrick."

Francis spoke with rising irritation. "You see that I can advise you
nothing, my lord. My opinion on the enterprise is my own, but I am here
with a clear message. Are you willing to take the step and trust your
fortunes and your clan's to God and the Prince, or will I take back the
answer that my Lord Lovat is old and timid and prefers to bide at hame?"

"Na, you will do no siccan thing. I was but talking the matter over in
a' its bearings, for my mind was made up lang syne. I am faun in years,
but my spirit is not quenched, and it will never be said that the chief
o' the Frasers was feared to take a chance. But I am no young hot-head
to rin at the sound of a trumpet, and my habit of due consideration is
strong in all things. Just rax me that pen, Mr. Birkenshaw, and I will
write the Secretary the word ye want."

The old lord mended a quill and wrote diligently for some minutes, while
Francis watched the great mask-like face with a mixture of admiration
and distrust. He dimly guessed at the purpose of the whole talk, and
this sudden decision did not increase his faith. By and by the writer
finished and looked up with a twinkling eye. "Ye're a trusted servant of
the Cause, Mr. Birkenshaw, so ye'll be preevileged to hear a bit o' my
epistle. Am I to add any kind messages about yoursel'? Ye will see that
I have omitted no one of the flowers o' sentiment which ye so admire."
And he read:--

"I solemnly protest, dear sir, that it was the greatest grief of my life
that my indisposition and severe sickness kept me from going south to my
dear brave prince, and never parting with him while I was able to
stand, but venture my old bones with pleasure in his service and before
his eyes, while I had the last breath within me. But I send my eldest
son, the hopes of my family and the darling of my life, a youth about
nineteen years old, who was just going abroad to finish his education,
after having learned with applause what is taught in our Scots
universities, and was graduate Master of Arts. But instead of sending
him abroad to complete his education, I have sent him to venture the
last drop of his blood in the glorious prince's service; and as he is
extremely beloved, and the darling of the clan, all the gentlemen of my
name (which, I thank God, are numerous and look well and are always
believed to be as stout as their neighbours) are gone with him.

"What do ye think o' that effort in your own line, sir?"

"I am not sure that I take your meaning," said Francis. "You cannot go
yourself, but you will send the clan under your son?"

"That is my meaning," said Lovat, "and what do you think of it?"

"Why, that it is most honourable and generous," said Francis, in
incredulous tones.

The old lord looked at him for a little, then pursed up his mouth and
smiled. "Honour and generosity," he said, "are qualities o' my house,
and we'll let that subject alane. But I look to reap the reward o' my
action, sir. This is no wild clanjamphray sent down from the hills, but
a great and weel-disciplined clan wi' my own son at its head. If the
rising ends in naething, then there's my poor folk at the mercy o' their
enemies, when they were sent out maybe against their will by their
chief, who a' the while was weel disposed to both governments. If,
again, the Prince gets his desires, there is honour and glory for man
and master. I put both possibilities before you as a man o' some sense
and experience, and I trust that if the first case come about before ye
get the length o' the Prince's army, this letter whilk I have written
will never get further than your pocket. And, further, that supposing
you have delivered it, you will do your best to see it destroyed."

Francis stared in downright amazement. This was an extreme of brazen
audacity which he had not reckoned with. The man's eyes were peering
into his, and every line of that strange face spoke of daring and wit.
"But," he stammered, "the clan will be out, and that will involve you
without any scrawl of writing."

"Precisely," said Lovat, "the clan will be out, but perhaps it may be in
spite o' their loyal chief, who sits at hame lamenting their defection
and the woful ingratitude of children." His eyes were filled with
sardonic mirth as he watched the changing face of his companion.

But Francis was already roused to keen suspicion, and he found at once
voice and a cool bearing.

"Your methods are simple, my lord, and do credit to your politic mind. I
will not say that they are dishonourable, for I have no reason to judge
you. You have talked to me of your forethought for your people, which
does you credit, and if this were the only motive your policy might be
blameless. But I have heard talk of a dukedom for the lord of Lovat if
all turned out well."

"Ay, and what of that?" asked the old man, with great calmness.

"Why, this," said Francis, "that if a man have recourse to tricks for
the sake of others, he is pardoned, but if for his own advantage, he
gets a more doubtful name."

"Meaning?" said the other.

"Meaning," said Francis, "that men use the ugly word treachery."

"Your knowledge of affairs is excellent, Mr. Birkenshaw, and what do ye
say yoursel' in the matter?"

"Why," said Francis, "if you press me, I will say that I have heard that
there were such virtues as honour and loyalty in the world."

The speaker was astonished at the issue of his words. The old man's face
grew white with rage, and he half raised himself in his seat. Then he
fell back with a cry as the pain twinged, and lay scowling at Francis,
mumbling strange oaths. "You talk to me o' honour," he cried, "me, a
very provost in the virtue, who for threescore years have lived wi'
gentlemen o' the highest repute. And a whippit bitch o' Edinburgh lad
comes here and preaches in my lug about honour! Honour," and he laughed
shrilly, "as if honour werena mair than the punctiliousness o' a wheen
conceited bairns."

Then as his anger passed, his face softened and he looked quizzically at
Francis. "Ye are doubtless a mirror o' all the virtues yoursel', Mr.
Birkenshaw, since ye talk about them sae weel. But I thought I heard
word o' a daft lad in the publick o' Clachamharstan, no three days syne,
whose tongue wagged to a different tune. The description I got o' him
wasna unlike yoursel'."

Francis grew hotly uncomfortable as the memory of his folly came back to
him, but it roused his anger and obstinacy. He was no more to be laughed
out of his purpose than terrified by a dotard's threats. So he looked
squarely at his tormentor with no sign of irritation.

Then Lovat changed his tone and spoke kindly. "Ye are a sensible man,
Mr. Birkenshaw, and gifted wi' some subtlety o' mind. I will do ye an
honour I am little used to do to folk, and explain my exact views on
this matter. It is possible that I may desire safety for my folk and
honour for myself both with the highest intentions. I may have thoughts
of the great old glory of my name and seek to see it bright once more in
these latter days. I may have a great and patriotic policy of my own
which I seek to work out through the clatter and fechtin' o' Whig and
Jacobite. I may feel my own power, and ken that through me and me alone
a better time can come for this auld land. I may believe all this and
mair, Mr. Birkenshaw; and who is to blame me if I use what means I can
summon? I have heard the word that the end justifees the means; and I
can tell ye, sir, there are things better than honour, and these are
knowledge o' the times and a great love for an oppressed people."

The words were spoken in a low, soft voice and with an accent of deep
pathos. The effect was nicely calculated, but once more it missed by a
hair. Francis was touched in his emotions, but surprise at the recent
scheme of bold impudence was still strong upon him. Earlier in the night
the old lord had moved him almost to tears, but somehow this boastful
romantic stuff left him untouched.

"I will bring this letter to the Secretary Murray," said he, "whatever
be the upshot. On no other conditions can I take it from your hands."

Lovat sighed deeply, sealed the missive, and gave it to the other. "I
maun e'en be content," he said, "and I trust that God will prosper the
richt."

Then his whole demeanour changed, and he lay back and laughed long and
heartily. "Sic a warld!" he cried. "Here's a young man thinks me a
traitor when he serves Murray o' Brochtoun, who could give lessons to
the Deil. Well-a-day, Mr. Birkenshaw, get ye gone and be damned to ye
for a sour pernickety law-lander. Keep this meeting weel in mind, for be
sure it's the first and last time ye ever will forgather wi' a man o'
intellect. But, dear, dear, Simon, ye're back at your auld boasting
ways, whilk is a bad example to the young man. Tak a glass o' wine, Mr.
Birkenshaw, and one o' my men will show ye where ye are to sleep. But
stop, man, ye winna get through the Fraser country in sic a time without
a bit word from me. This will pass you," and he gave him one of the many
rings from his fingers. "Take it and keep it in memory of auld Simon
Fraser, who some way or ither took a fancy to ye. But I doubt, sir,
ye've mista'en your trade. Ye should hae been a minister and a prop o'
the Kirk."

And with the queer cackling laughter of age still in his ears, Francis
left the room.




CHAPTER X

WASTE PLACES


The next morning before the crowd of guests were well awake, Francis had
left the haughlands which lined the Firth and ridden once more into the
land of storms. The image of the old lord was still vivid in his memory.
Every word in their conversation, every look of that strange face, was
clear in his mind, and he rehearsed the tale a dozen times in the first
hour of his journey. Plainly he had been of sufficient consequence to be
worth conciliating. This in itself gave him pleasure; but to temper it
he had the other thought that Lovat in some way had heard of his conduct
at the inn and had thought his character a fit mark for cajolery. The
air of powerful cunning, of sinister wit, which the great lord seemed to
bear, had left in his mind a sense of his own futility. This man had
been pleased to play with him as a cat with a mouse, to talk him fairly
and treat him well; but the same man, had he so willed, could have
crushed him like a child. For a little he tried to fathom his own
political feeling, but could find no more than a personal sentiment. The
enterprise had no charms for him; he had as little care for the Prince's
success as for the Prince's person; and he saw with cruel exactness the
quixoty of the whole business. But he had no mind to see any man play
false to a cause with which he had linked himself; and he swore that
Lovat would find himself bound to his promise. If he could reach
Edinburgh before the army left for the South, it would be possible to
give Murray the letter and so bind the clan to follow the Prince's
standard whether the wind blew fair or foul. If he were too late, some
reverse might happen which should send the Frasers and their chief to
the arms of the Government. Clearly the best policy was speed.

Yet in his feelings to Lovat much kindliness was mixed with awe. That
huge and intricate face had humour and rich nature in its crannies. He
remembered the infinite changes of his speech, his heroical sentiments,
his coarseness, his essays in the pathetic. The whole attitude of the
man awakened a kindred sentiment in his own heart. He liked his great
vigour, his rhodomontade, his palpable and masterful strength. This was
the man whom a month ago he would have worshipped as the perfection of
the loftily unscrupulous. Now though he was somewhat estranged from such
an admiration and there was something repellant in what would once have
been wholly attractive, yet enough survived to make the figure pleasing
to his memory. He had a mind to help the cause which he had espoused,
but if the interests did not clash, he was a partisan of Lovat's. The
great lord's ring glistened on his finger, a garnet cut with a cluster
of berries, and as he looked at it he felt for its giver almost the
affection of a clansman.

When he crossed the river at the neck of the loch and entered the steep
glens of Stratherick, he found his purpose of speed hindered. The road,
which had hitherto been like a rough carriage-track, was now suddenly
transformed into a bridle-path among rocks and heather, sometimes
obscured in bog, as often winding steeply along a hillside where a
stumble might mean death. The morning had been cloudy, and now a wind
from the south-east brought up great banks of wrack and obscured hill
and valley. Francis had no desire to follow the devious track he had
come by, for he had been told of a better path leading into the upper
Spey valley and thence into the Athole country and the head-waters of
the Garry. He had planned to stay the night at the house of a cousin of
Lovat's among the wilds at the head of Nairn, but the place was
difficult to come at and needed clear weather. At the first sign of
storm his spirits dropped, for craggy heights when cloaked in
rain-clouds had still a dreary effect upon his soul. Now, as he looked,
he saw the whole land grow wilder and bleaker. The glen up which the
bridle-path mounted opened on a flat space of moorland, whence ran the
waters of another stream on a new watershed. Down this burn lay his
path, but to find it was a hard matter, when there were few marks of a
track and the traveller was supposed to be guided by hill-tops
invisible. Just at the edge of the moss the first drizzle of rain began,
and Francis looked blankly into a wall of grey vapour, rising sheer from
the plashy heath and merging in the lowering sky. The air was bitter
cold, and he was ill-provided for a winter journey, seeing that he had
ridden from the city at short notice. The man was hardy and bold, but
mere hardihood is not enough to find the track in an unknown moorish
country. So, bewildered and all but afraid, he set himself to grope his
way across the desert.

Then came an hour of incontinent misery. He no sooner found the road
than he lost it. The rain wet him to the skin, the wind buffeted his
face till he was half-dazed, and ever and again he would find his horse
floundering in a hag and panting miserably. The moor was seamed with
craggy water-courses, and once astray from the track he could not tell
what awful ravines lurked below the white shroud. The mere constant
looking-for of danger became a bodily discomfort. His eyes were strained
and aching, and his head seemed to swim with his incessant vigilance.

At last the flat ground ceased and he felt dimly that he was descending
a slope. He could hear a loud rushing as of a multitude of streams, but
the mist hid all from view. Sometimes the noise grew louder, sometimes
it seemed to die away, and only the slipping of the horse on the sodden
ground saluted his ears. He was cold, wet, and hungry, and now he began
to be eerily afraid. This could be no path; he must be astray in this
chaos of fierce hills, where precipice and loch barred the traveller's
way. By a resolute closing of his thoughts he kept his head, and gave
all his care to holding up his horse. Meantime that strange din of
waters was never silent: now and then he seemed almost on the edge of a
great stream; but nothing appeared save the white wall and the wet earth
beneath.

Then the expected mischance came, and with fatal suddenness. Gradually
it became clear that his horse was slipping, and that the ground beneath
was an abrupt green slope where no beast could find footing. He pulled
it up by the head, but the time for restraint was over. The poor
creature with terror in its eyes and its nose between its forelegs was
sprawling down the hill ever nearer to the awful roar of cataracts.
Francis after a second's wild alarm flung himself from its back and fell
on the slippery descent. The horse, eased of its burden, made one
desperate effort to stop, but the struggle only quickened its speed.
With a neigh of terror it went over some abrupt brink into some gulf of
waters. The sound of the fall was drowned in the greater noise, and
Francis was scarcely aware of it till he himself, clutching wildly at
the spongy soil, shot over the verge into a spray-filled chasm.

He felt a great wash of waters over his head, and then with choking
heart he came to the surface in the midst of a whirling, seething pool.
He made feeble strokes for the shore, but all his efforts achieved was
to carry him into the main line of the current. He felt himself being
whirled downward, and then with a sickening thud he was driven against a
rock. His left foot caught in a cranny. Down, far down, under the stream
his head sank. He had no power to move his leg till by a merciful chance
it slipped, and he was able once more to come to the top and ease his
bursting heart. He felt his strength ebbing, and made futile clutches at
every tuft of heather and jutting stone. But his hands had no power, and
they all slipped from his grasp like the cords which a man in a
nightmare lays hold on to drag himself from an abyss. It had soon been
all over for this world with Mr. Francis Birkenshaw, if the storms of
the last winter had not blown a rough pine-tree right athwart the
torrent. The swollen waters lipped against its side, and he found
himself washed close under the rugged bole. With despairing strength he
gripped it and struggled till his head and breast lay over it. Then it
was but a matter of time, and slowly inch by inch he worked his way to
the bank and fell exhausted in a covert of bracken.

He lay for half an hour with the water forming pools at his side and
feet. Then he shivered and half-roused himself to ease his breath. The
thought of his horse struck him; it had long since gone to death among
the misty waters. He crawled to his feet and essayed to walk, and then
for the first time he felt his feebleness. His left ankle was broken, a
mere trailing encumbrance with a hot fire burning in the splintered
bone. His faculty of thought began to return to him, and he weighed
brokenly the difficulties of his position. Speed was his aim; ere now he
should have been near the house of Lovat's cousin; and instead he was
lying in a nameless ravine with his horse lost and his body maimed and
shaken. He felt hazily that he was very ill, and at the helplessness of
it all he leaned his head on a bank of heath and sobbed wearily.

Then he set his teeth and began to drag himself from the place. A
deer-track seemed to lead upwards, and thither he crawled. At the top
of the chasm he saw a hill-slope to the right and a glen in front which
seemed to promise easier walking. He tried hard to think out his
whereabouts, for it might be that this stream flowed back to the Ness
waters and in following it he would be returning upon his tracks. But
his mind refused its duty, and he could get nothing but a blank
confusion. He had no hope now of fulfilling his mission and scarcely any
desire; all he sought was to reach a human dwelling and have rest from
his agony. His body was the seat of pain of which his bruised ankle was
the smallest part. It was so bitterly cold that even in his anguish he
felt the hostility of the weather. For the grey mist was drawing closer,
and the land was growing mossier and rougher. Slowly, laboriously he
limped through the waste, sinking up to the knee in bog-pools, or
falling heavily on banks of stone. He was so scourged by rain that his
clothes seemed no cover to his nakedness; he felt bleached and scourged
as a whitening bone among the rocks.

Hitherto he had kept a tight curb upon his wandering wits. But as
exhaustion grew upon him and the flickerings of hope died away, wild
fancies arose, and he was hag-ridden by memory. He began to forget the
disappointment of his errand,--how Mrs. Murray would call him faithless
and believe him returned to his old paths, when all the while the
Badenoch winds were blowing over his bones. He lost all immediate
recollection, and in the stress of his physical want was back once more
in the old Edinburgh days, busy picturing the gross plenty of the life.
Now he was wearied, wet, and famishing, and as if to point the contrast
there rose a vision of reeking suppers, of rich, greasy taverns, and
blowsy serving-girls. His high sentiment of the past week was a thousand
years away, and he revelled in the very unctuous vulgarity and dirt.
There, at any rate, had been human warmth and comfort; and in that
endless moorland his thoughts were lowered to the naked facts of life.

The mist hung more loosely, and it was possible to see some yards in
front, though the sight was blinded by a solid sheet of rain. Rocks and
dwarf trees raised their heads like islands, and a chance bog-pool
seemed so vast that he crazily fancied he had come to the sea-coast. The
path was growing easier, and a flat valley-bottom seemed to be taking
the place of the precipitous glen. A trail of fog looked for a moment
like smoke, and he hailed it as a sign of human dwelling; but as the
mirage grew commoner even the comfort of delusion failed him, and a
horror of great darkness grew upon his soul. His wits were growing
clearer--intolerably clear. He saw the whole wretched panorama of his
misfortunes, and the blank ending which stared in his face. His mind was
still in the bondage of old memories, and the revulsion sickened and
drove him crazy. He stopped and leaned on a crag to give himself breath,
and as in a flash the memory of Mrs. Murray and all her high world
passed over him with disgust unutterable.

"Curse her!" he cried. "Am I to be damned in hell for a woman's face?"
He poured forth a torrent of hideous abuse to the bleak weather. But for
that proud jade with her face and hair he would have been content to
seek common pleasures and the luxury of the unscrupulous. She seemed to
mock him out of the fog, mock him with her beauty and her arrogant eyes.
Passion made him half a maniac. He leaped forward with a drawn sword,
but it fell from his nerveless hand and slashed his knees. "May she grow
old and poor and withered, may she be a thing of the streets, may her
pride be crushed in the gutter, may she see her friends killed before
her eyes, and may she be damned immortally at the end!" And then his
maledictions died away in a moan of weakness.

And now the cold seemed to have gone from the air, and his body grew hot
with fever. Night was already beginning to turn the white wall of mist
to black, and with the darkness came a surcease of storm. In still,
dripping weather he stumbled onward down the valley. Flushes of heat
passed over his face. Somewhere in his head a great wheel was revolving,
and he forgot the pain of his foot in telling the number of its circles.
One, two, three, he counted, six, ten, one hundred, and then he wandered
into immensity. Something seemed to block his path, on which he hurled
his weight despairingly. He felt himself borne back, and then the soft
contact of the dripping earth, and the grip of a man's hand. Then the
darkness deepened into unconsciousness.

       *       *       *       *       *

A sudden flash of light pierced his brain, and he seemed to be staring
glassily through his eyes. He saw light--a fire, and the outline of a
dwelling. Men seemed crowded all about him, choking him, pushing him
for room, and laughing with idiot laughter. One held a point of light in
his hand, which seemed the gold of a ring. Hazily he was conscious that
this was his ring, which Lord Lovat had given him, and even in his utter
ruin of body he felt the aching of the finger from which it had been
roughly pulled. He cried for it like a child, and then the whole
concourse seemed to leap upon him and stifle the life from his heart.

       *       *       *       *       *

The days passed into weeks and months while Francis lay helpless and
raving. Once he awoke and found himself on a bed of brackens in a
low-roofed, smoke-filled hut. Snow blocked the window, and he saw that
it was the winter-time. But the thick odour of the peat-reek choked him,
and he sank again into that terrible deep slumber which lies on the
boundary of death. Meantime the people of the cottage went in and out on
their work, nursing cheerfully the stranger who lay by the wall. They
had found him in the last stage of weakness on the hill, and would have
doubtless left him to die but for the chance of plunder. And when they
brought him to the light they saw the chief's ring on his finger, so in
all honesty, accepting this as a mandate from their lord, they had set
themselves simply and ungrudgingly to nurse him to life. They were
wretchedly poor, and could give him only the coarsest nourishment. The
household, five in all, consisted of the father, Neil Mor na Cromag
(Great Neil of the Shepherd's Crook, as the words mean), who was a herd
of Lovat's on the farthest south-east hills of his territory. There were
his wife and two sons, Rory, who played the pipes ravishingly, and Black
John, who was his father's helper, both tall, well-grown men, who
flourished on the rough fare and toilsome life. Then there was a girl
just growing to womanhood, whose name Francis never heard, for all spoke
of her as M'eudail or Caileag Beg, when they were well-pleased, or
harsher names, Oinseach--witless or shameless--when they were angry. But
for the most part they were good-humoured, for the Lovat men were
gnial, cunning, and abundantly humourous, very little like the short,
dark Campbells or the fiery Stewarts. There was a cow in a shed not five
feet from his couch, and three goats fed on the hill. Thence they got
milk, and at times a kid to roast. Also Neil Mor would get a sheep for
himself now and then at the gatherings of the herds, when he tossed the
caber a yard further than any other, and he would sometimes take deer on
the mountains and trout and salmon in the river. At times he even went
down to the corn country, and bought bolls of fine meal, which all
relished gladly after the tiresome diet of flesh and herbs. But they
prospered all of them on the fare, and grew ruddy, full-blooded, and
straight of limb. All day the men-folk were out on the hills, while the
women cooked meals or carded wool in the firelight. Then at night Rory
would get out his pipes and play springs which set the feet trembling,
or sad wild strains of the men of old and the great kings of the North
and the days that are gone. Sometimes, too, he played a lilt of the
fairies who dwell in the green-wood and the crooks of glens, and the
listeners would hush their breath and look to the barring of the door.

In the height of his illness the people of the cottage had given Francis
up for dead, and walked with stealthy step and spoke softly as befitting
those with death in the house. The winter was mild, but some blasts of
snow came from Monadliadh, and made the women heap on peats and wood and
choke the room with smoke. All this was little good for the sick man who
lay wrestling with fever. They had dressed his ankle and put it in the
way of healing; but the more dangerous ailment was so little known to
them that they came near to killing him altogether, for they used to
bathe his brow with cold well-water, and allow him to toss the coverings
from his body. But for his extreme strength he would have died in the
first week. As it was, the fever burned him to a shadow and then fled,
and he was left with just sufficient life to struggle through. For two
days his life trembled; then his eager vitality triumphed, and slowly he
began to mend.

The people had little English, and they were so far from the chief's
dwelling that they heard nothing of what happened. Francis in his
ravings had often mentioned Lovat's name, and they heard with nods of
recognition, arguing that this was some trusted friend of the great
lord's. When dawning consciousness brought him power of speech, the
whole miserable and futile tale of his misfortunes was clear in his
memory, and he realised how bitterly he had failed. He strove to find
out the turn of events from his hosts, but one and all they were
ignorant. They knew dimly of a certain Tearlach, who was said to be a
Stewart and a king, and they had heard that all the Rannoch and Athole
men and the western clans had taken the field with him. But it was as
nothing to them, for the old kings of Scots had no place in their
mythology, which embraced so many other kings, and no straggler of
Tearlach's had ever strayed to their door. But they told him of other
things, all the simple talk of their narrow world; and strangely enough,
these men who had rescued him with designs of plunder now cheered his
recovery as if he had been their own blood-brother. Rory would play him
soft, low tunes on the pipes, and John would tell of the days of herding
and hunting; and every one waited on him with grave, silent courtesy.

But on the girl fell the chief share of his entertainment. She was
little compared with her tall brothers, but wonderfully slim and active,
with eyes like sloes, hair blown over brow, and a crooning voice. In the
early days of his recovery, while he still lay on his back, she would
give him food and bend over him with strange Gaelic caresses in the
frankness of innocent pity. She was never more than half-dressed, for
indoors her breast and shoulders were always bare, and outside a plaid
was all their covering. Then as he grew stronger and the early spring
came, he would lean on her as he hobbled out of doors, and sit by her
side on the green bank above the stream or in the midst of birches on
the hill. As colour came back to his cheeks and some of his old vigour
to his frame, it may be that the simple child fell in love with the tall
stranger. Be this as it may, no thought on the matter ever crossed his
mind. He endured her pitying caresses and the warm touch of her skin
without a tremor. He had never been the prey of such emotions, and now
he was something less than before. The fever had purged him of much of
his old fervour, and raised, as it were, a bar between this new man and
his old life. The one thing which survived strong and vivid from the
wreck of memory was the image of the lady who had sent him on this
errand, and even in the thought of this goddess his former boyish
sentiment had departed. It was a grave, old-featured man who looked down
the glen of an afternoon and prayed for the return of full strength and
tried to redd the tangle of his affairs.

Then at last it befell that one evening Neil Mor returned from a
lambing-visit to the Nairnside with news. Tearlach had come again, this
time from the South, with a great tail of dhuinewassels and Sassenach
lords, and a following of Macdonalds and the like. Also the folk said
that the Southron forces were waiting for him in the North and that a
great battle would be fought ere the moon was old. Francis puzzled over
this word, and by dint of counting the weeks of his own illness, guessed
at the truth. Some great misfortune had overtaken the Prince in the
South, and he had returned hither to make his stand. His services might
still be wanted. The whole news was so vague that he might yet have the
chance to fulfil his errand. So with new hope he set about brushing his
garments and preparing for the way.




CHAPTER XI

THE PRINCE'S CABINET OF WAR


Black John set him some miles on his way, leading him down glen and up
corry till he brought him out on the strath of Nairn. The day was warm
for a northern spring, and the guide grew exceeding cheerful and hymned
the joys of war. "There will be braw battles," he cried, "for all the
craws will be fleeing north, and they are the birds that ken." Sometimes
they met a lonely shepherd, and then John would stop for a parley in
Gaelic and leave Francis to find the path for a mile or so alone. But
when once they sighted the broad river valley, he left him with shrill
farewells. "If seed o' mine meet seed o' yours," he said, "brothers they
sall be," and he spat in his hand and clasped his parting guest's.

And now it was clearly the seat of war, for the tracks in the vale were
rough with ruts and all the meadowland was trampled. There were few
houses in the land--now and then a turf sheiling on the brae-face and
once the grey wall of a castle; but the place was Lowland and habitable
contrasted with the wild country he had dwelled in. He had already
walked far, and soon his head began to swim with faintness. It was a
long toil for a man so lately sick, and it was with many pauses and
long, helpless reclinings on the wayside heather that he made the
journey. He had a desperate fear of falling ill a second time,--a thing
bitter to dream of now on the very seat of war. And yet his hopes hung
on the frail thread of his strength, so with circumspect and elderly
care he nursed his body, choosing dry places to lie on, drinking but
moderately from the hillburns, and sipping the whisky which he had
carried out with him from the morning.

One man only he met in all that green, silent vale. This was a pedlar
with a pack, a man seemingly half-witted, but to Francis' delight able
to speak Scots easily. When he met him he was swinging on, with a vacant
eye on the hill-tops, singing some nonsensical catch. He was about to
pass without noticing his presence, but Francis stopped him short and
asked him the way. Clearly there could be no danger in getting news of
the land from a crazy packman.

"Saw ye any soldiers," said Francis, "as ye came up the water?"

The man with difficulty cut short his star-gazing and looked at the
questioner.

"Sodgers ay, sodgers mony," said he, and he went on with his singing,--

    "If ye hae plenty and winna gie,
      Besouthen, Besouthen!
    The deil will get ye when ye dee,
      And awa' by southron toun!"

Francis weariness made him cross. "Where saw ye them?" he asked.

"There were some at the Nairn and mae at Iverness and mony mae at the
Spey-side," said the man. "There'll be war, bluidy war, and mony deid at
Beltane."

"Then where is the Prince's army?"

"Whatna Prince?" said the man, dreamily.

For answer Francis took him by the collar and shook him soundly.

"Give me a plain answer, you fool. Ye may be daft, but ye are none so
daft as that."

The man looked at him quizzically. "See here, my freend," he said, "if
ye are an honest man like me and nae moss-trooper, but traivellin' for
your ain eedification, when ye meet a man in thae camsteery times ye'll
let on that ye're no quite wise. It's the safest way. As for the Prince,
as ye ca' him, he's in Inverness; but Cumberland's at Nairn, and they
say that Chairlie will march out to Culloden the nicht to be ready for
him."

"And Culloden," said Francis, "where is it?"

"Ten mile doun the haughs when ye win by the hills and come to the land
muir. And guid day to ye, freend." The man went off, and as if anxious
to keep his hand in, fell back on his old melody. Francis heard the
words quavering down the road,--

    "My shoon are made o' the red-coo's hide,
      Besouthen, Besouthen!
    My feet are cauld, I canna bide,
      And awa' by southron toun!"

Those last ten miles were not far from the limits of his endurance, but
with teeth set fast in his lips and his knees knoitering he accomplished
them. A great wide plain running straight to the sea-line lay before
him; so vast it was that it looked like the beginning of a shoreless
ocean. Woods seemed to rise on the far right, and to the left the dim
points of spires, while many scores of miles away over Firth and
haughland rose blue ridges of mountain. Not half a mile off a bald,
square house stood in the waste, and all around was rough with heather
and ridges of moor.

But what chiefly caught his eye was the stir around the house, a great
armament of men already in camp, and straggling lines still coming from
the North. It was already almost sunset, and fires were being lit in the
hollows of the moss, and rough tents stretched on their poles. Troops of
horse seemed to move about like pawns on a board, and even at the
distance he could hear distinct words of command. And yet it was not the
sight of a great army entrenched, but rather of a gathering of reiving
bands, already in the act of moving. The chimneys of the house smoked as
if it were well inhabited, and the sight of men hurrying in and out
proclaimed it the Prince's quarters.

The first sentry he met was a wild man of the Camerons, who had scarce a
word of English, and showed much desire to dispute the passage. As it
was, he marched by his side with drawn claymore, till he handed him to
a more civil clansman with many warnings. Francis found himself led
through a line of bivouacs to what seemed to be the limits of a garden.
There he trod the relics of a lawn, all trampled into ruts, with the
bushes torn to ribbons and field-pieces lying blackly in the twilight.
At the house door two sentries in kilts stood negligently, while a dozen
ragged wretches quarrelled before the threshold. From within came a
great riot as of many men speaking at once, mingled with shrill wailing
from some miserable women who cowered in the shadow. Even in the
mysterious half-light of the spring dusk the place and people seemed
tattered, dishevelled, and ill-ordered. This was no camp of a conquering
force; rather the hopeless last standing-ground of desperate men. Every
face was pinched like his own, and their clothing was sadly worn. The
hollow eyes had the look of famine, and weariness blinked in their
unheeding looks.

He was led through the hall up a narrow oak staircase to a room above
the chief door of the house. Here he had to give an account of his
errand; before "business with the Prince" had been sufficient pass-word.
But now he must declare himself the bearer of a letter, news of moment
to the Cause. He had no thought of the nature of his reception. He had
his duty to do, to give the letter; this fact alone in his weakness was
clear to his brain. He was months late; events to change an era might
have come to pass while he lay helpless; after all, it was but an empty
errand to fulfil the letter of his mission; and then--ah, then he might
wander to the ends of the earth and leave the struggle. An overwhelming
desire for rest and sleep was upon him, and he faced the ordeal of the
council-room with scarcely a thought.

Five men sat up and down the room, one at a table busily writing,
another in a great arm-chair by the fire, and the three others taking
off their boots at the hearth. The soldier--one of Cluny's
Macphersons--walked to the man in the chair with a rough salute and told
him Francis' errand. Then he closed the door, and the messenger advanced
heavily to the company.

He in the chair was a slim young man dressed in the somewhat tarnished
splendour of stained tartans, dusty lace, and dull gold braiding. His
hair was powdered badly in patches, and his whole air was of unrest and
weariness. Dark hollows lay below his eyes, and his cheek-bones stood
out so sharply that he seemed to be smiling. Something of grace, of
delicate breeding and long-descended pride, lay in his mien, but he was
so huddled with lassitude that one could not judge him. He looked up
drearily as Francis entered, and then with the forced grace of kingship
asked him his business.

"I am the bearer of a letter from the Lord Lovat to your Highness," said
Francis, and he laid it humbly in his hand.

At the word all looked more curiously, and the man at the table jumped
to his feet. He was a big, handsome man with a large, well-formed face
and little twinkling eyes. Here in this land of want he seemed the one
thing prosperous, for there was something lawyer-like and diplomatic in
his smooth forehead and mobile, twitching lips. He stood watching his
master with eager eyes as he broke the seal.

At the first look the Prince cried out and flung the letter to the
other. "Why, man, it is dated from October. The thing is months old, and
you come with it here! What has delayed you, in Heaven's name, or do
you think this is a fitting time to play a fool's pranks on desperate
men?"

Francis heard him only as if far away. His weariness had come over him
as he stood, and a sea of angry men seemed to be rising on all sides. He
staggered, and caught at the table to save himself.

"Tut, the man is ill," cried the Prince, with ready sympathy, and he
poured out a glass of wine from a bottle at his elbow and handed it to
Francis. "It's ill speaking with a fainting man."

Meantime the Secretary had read the letter carefully through with his
face puckered in smiles. "So," he said, "this is Lovat's confession of
faith! Little he thinks that it has just reached us, or I'll warrant the
Frasers would be anywhere but in the field;" and he passed it to a tall
man in tartans who had risen from the hearth.

"But I am waiting on your answer," said the Prince. "How comes it that
you are so far behind the day?"

The tall man read the letter and threw it on the table. "It's a thing of
no value," he said; "ye may burn it whenever ye like. But tell me, sir,
[this to Francis] how ye came to keep the thing back?"

Francis' ears were humming again, and he looked helplessly from one to
the other. "I fell ill," he said aimlessly; "I fell ill somewhere in the
hills and am just now recovered."

"A likely story!" cried the tall man, but the Prince bade him hold his
peace. "The man's condition speaks for itself, my lord," he said; "he
has the look of one walking in delirium."

"But who in God's name are ye?" cried the Secretary. "I have never seen
ye in my life, and kenned nothing of your errand to the Lord Lovat."

Francis put a strong grip on his wits and answered him. "It was at the
bidding of Mrs. Murray of Broughton that I went that road."

"Oh, ho," said the man, whistling softly, "and that was one of Meg's
ploys. Well, well, she kens her own mind as well as most," and he fell
to turning up a small book of memoranda. "Here it is," he cried,
"written with her own hand. 'Mr. Francis Birkenshaw sent to a great
Gentleman in the North, September 29. M. M.' Well, Mr. Francis
Birkenshaw, ye have made a bonny hash of the business."

Now Francis heard the rest scarcely at all, but the mention of Mrs.
Murray pierced clearly to his dazed wits. Who was this smooth, sleek man
to talk of her thus? His hands itched to get at his throat.

But the Prince saved him by breaking in. "Let the poor fellow alone, Mr.
Murray; it's no time for recrimination. God knows we're all in the
devil's own mess, and there's not one to mend another."

In a moment Francis' wits were awake and he was staring hard at the
Secretary. This, then, was her husband. He had pictured a strong, silent
man, wise in council and great in battle, one stern, proud,
irreconcilable. And this was the real thing, this man who looked almost
elderly, who had the air of a cunning lawyer rather than a great
captain! He had been ready to hate or worship Murray of Broughton, to
resent bitterly his unattainable power or to follow him with the
hopeless loyalty that bound him to his wife. Instead he found a man he
could all but despise, and his heart rejoiced. If he were unworthy of
the lady's glance, still more was this thing that called her wife.

"We will put off Mr. Birkenshaw's story to a happier time," said the
Secretary. "Meantime it may rejoice him to hear that the clan of Fraser
has been in the field for months. No ill, trust me, sir, has been done
by your misfortune, save that our deep affection for the Lord Lovat had
had some time to wait for confirmation." And he folded the letter and
placed it in his pocket.

Then the men turned to other matters and fell a-talking. Francis still
stood gazing at the coals and leaning on the table, uncertain of his
purpose and too weary to care. He heard much talk of the mad
surprise-party which Lord George was to lead that very night, and he
noted that this Athole man was the only one of the Council who had the
air of brisk, soldierly bravado. He talked boldly of success, and
stirred the others to some hope. The Secretary still sat quiet at the
table, drumming with his fingers, and the Prince had risen and was
walking uneasily about the room. Months of hazard had left their mark on
him, for his eye had no brightness and his step halted; he looked like
one on the eve of a great crisis, so much depressed by the overwhelming
chance that even the uttermost defeat would set him at peace with
himself. One thing burned into Francis' memory. Charles came near the
window and looked out to the wild camping-scene. Then he turned drearily
to the fireplace. "My lords," he said, "we are a little people and a
poor. It is the war of the stag against the hunters." And, leaning his
head on the wall, he burst into tears in his foreign fashion, while the
grave lords around him looked on wonderingly.

Then he raised his head, and seeing the drooping Francis, was recalled
to his business. Calling a sentry he bade him send for Golis Macbean.
"You will be better for a long sleep, Mr. Birkenshaw," he said, "and on
the morrow you will be fresher for the difficult job before us. I will
give you in charge of one of my own body-servants, who will see to your
quarters." Then, turning to the Secretary, "And what are your plans, Mr.
Murray?" he asked. "Will you stay here or go back to Inverness? I should
recommend the latter, for this will scarcely be a safe place for a sick
man."

"I will go back to Inverness," said the Secretary, dolefully. "My legs
are no fit to carry me two yards. These humours of the body affect me
painfully, and though I grieve to part from your Highness' side, yet I
am more in the nature of an encumbrance than an aid."

Francis looked at him and saw that for all his air of health, the man
was indeed sick, for his face flushed and paled irregularly, and when he
rose his legs tottered below him. But the sight of him wakened a
remembrance in his mind, and he turned to him doubtfully.

"It's a small thing that I have to ask, but I promised my Lord Lovat
that the letter would be destroyed when the clan came out. I have to beg
you to lay it on the fire and so set me free of my promise."

"What a daft-like request!" said the Secretary, laughing. "It shall be
done of course, for it is not the custom of the honest side to keep
incriminating scrawls. Set your mind at ease, Mr. Birkenshaw, I will see
it done."

Then he hobbled from the room with many apologies. A minute after a huge
man entered and bowed at the Prince's hand. "Take this gentleman,
Golis," said the Prince, "and see that he has some refreshment and as
comfortable quarters as may be. It will be a poor recompense for his
misfortunes."

Francis followed the big man through the house into a small
out-building where a fire burned with beds stretched round it. Here he
was given some food, coarse and scanty, and with the remnants of the
whisky-flask he washed down his supper. His attendant clearly had little
English, for he sat and watched him stolidly through the meal. Outside a
small rain was beginning to fall, and beat through the broken window.
The place was full of the sighing of wind, and as he lay down before the
sputtering fire, Francis felt that he was indeed in a land forlorn,
waiting the last extremity of a dying cause.

       *       *       *       *       *

He slept the dreamless sleep of exhaustion till near midnight, when he
was awakened by a noise of men and horses,--the return of the fruitless
night-expedition. When he woke again it was early morning, and Golis was
shaking him. He felt almost vigorous; the weakness of the night before
had gone, and though his limbs ached he was no longer the feeble
wanderer on the verge of faintness. Golis brought him food, and when
asked of the events of the night shook his head dolefully. "It was no
good," he said, "for the road was as black as hell and they made ower
muckle noise. Some they were wantin' to go on, but Lord George he wad
not agree, and the Prince, Got bless him, is very thrawn. It will have
been a bad night's work for all." And he relapsed into taciturnity.

Half in a dream Francis heard the drums and the skirl of the pipes, and
found himself looking over the level moor to where it grew black with
Cumberland's troops. He saw the new addition of Frasers and Macdonalds,
he watched the marching of the clan-regiments to position with the
far-away interest of a spectator at a show. One thing he saw clearly,
that the Loyalists were utterly outnumbered, and in their ragged,
starved look he saw the premonition of death. Once Charles passed him
and greeted him with a smile. "You will be still too weak for this work,
Mr. Birkenshaw, so you had better stay behind with me and my
attendants." Then as the forenoon wore on and the enemy grew so near
that he could see the outline of their features and the details of their
dress, they opened a cannonade on the Highland army, which was answered
as best they could. It was the signal for the fight, and as the Prince
rode down the ranks with brave words on his lips, the men answered with
that cheering which only the desperate raise,--the fierce cry of
hopeless bravado.

From his position in the rear he saw the whole battle at his feet. A
wild blast of snow came down from the northeast sheer in the face of the
Highland lines. In the teeth of the storm the long ranks of the hopeless
pulled bonnet over brow, set their teeth, and went forth into the mist.
It was no ordered charge, for the Macintoshes had broken away without
word of command, and the Athole men, the Camerons, the Frasers, and the
Macleans followed in a tempestuous rush. As if from far off came the
noise of the meeting, and then through the hail there came a glimpse of
a wild mle, of heaped ranks of the dead, and a deadly phalanx of foes.
But there at least was the shock and fury of fight. On the left wing all
was different. The Macdonalds stood rigid, like pawns on a board, their
ranks ploughed up by the enemy's musketry, too proud to fight in their
ignoble position,--men with the face of death hewing at the heath with
their swords in an impotent fury. In the murky weather and the loud din
of war Francis could not see the close of that bitter drama. Though the
Duke of Perth implored them to follow him, declaring that thenceforth
he would call himself Macdonald, though their own chieftain Keppoch
besought them with tears not to shame his name, the stubborn
irreconcilables stood still, waiting upon death. As the whole Highland
lines were broken, and clan after clan fled to the South, the Macdonalds
too gave way. Not so their chief. "My God, the children of my race have
forsaken me!" said he, and with pistol and sword he rushed to his doom
among the advancing lines.

In a very little it was all over. The host seemed to recoil upon its
rear-guards, and in a trice Francis was swept wildly back by a rabble of
dying and wounded. He was separated from the Prince and Golis, enclosed
fast in a haggard troop who with wild eyes and wilder lamentations
staggered over the heather. Their faces dripped with blood and sweat;
many were gashed to the open bone, and every now and then one sank on
the ground to be trodden under by the panic-stricken. Behind was a broad
pavement of carnage, up and down which rode the English horse, slaying
the hale and giving the last stroke to the dying. The air sickened with
the hot, fresh smell of blood, and as they fled Francis' old sickness
came back on him and he well-nigh fainted. At last the rout grew
thinner as it widened out on the extremity of the moor, and with a sob
of fatigue he sank in a hollow among the rushes.

He lay for a little choking with the new excitement, listening to the
thunderous trampling of hooves which seemed to assault the heavens.
These moments were his salvation, for the van of cavalry passed by after
the others and left the moor open to the right for escape. In a little
he got to his feet and looked out. The air was still dim with snow and
powder, but he saw scattered troops riding up and down, and the dull red
blotch on the heath where the fight had been hottest. He had no plan of
flight save to regain the hills he had left, haply to find Lord Lovat
and share his fortunes. But when he tried to walk he found his legs
bending under him, and he was dismally conscious that at this pace he
would fall an easy victim to any wandering trooper.

At that moment a horseman appeared on the right, galloping hard toward
him, an English orderly on a good mount, looking spick and clean even
from the dust of battle. Francis, haggard and silent, crouched in the
heather; it was his one chance for life, and he was desperate. The man
came nearer, riding easily, with a pleased smile on his face as of a
bloodless conqueror. Suddenly a wild man rose from the earth and gripped
him by the leg. A pistol cracked into the air, and a bullet splashed in
a bog-pool; the next instant the elegant young gentleman was rolling in
mud, and Francis was trying wearily to mount the frightened beast. Lying
like a sack on its back, he suffered it to bear him whither it pleased;
then slowly and painfully he clambered upright in the saddle and found
rein and stirrup. The horse went back on its haunches, and Francis
stared round the blurred landscape, seeking direction. He found it in
the sight of old Culloden house rising bare on the right, and thither he
turned. At the wall of the courtyard he found a party of dragoons set
round a huge man who alone and wounded to the death still kept a fierce
front to his assailants. A dozen lay dead around him; his head was
gashed on either side, his breast bled freely from bayonet stabs, and he
could scarcely stand with a broken thigh-bone. Francis recognised Golis,
his friend of the morning, and with a cry to him to bear up, he urged
his horse towards him. After all, death must come, thought he, and this
seemed a fitting place and time. But Fortune would have none of such
aimless heroism. A stray bullet grazed his horse's flank and set that
already maddened beast off in a wild fury to the South. Francis could
only cling feebly, careless whither he went and praying vainly for some
rest from this awful toil.

Of a sudden he found himself in the thick of a party riding pell-mell
from the moor to the hills. A man looked up and recognised him.

"Who are ye for?" said Francis, dismally.

"For the Prince," said the man.

"And where is he?" asked Francis.

The man pointed to a little body somewhat in front, with a man in soiled
fine clothes in the middle, hurried along on a weary horse led by a
barefoot Highlander.

"There goes your master," said the man, "and this is the end of an auld
sang."




CHAPTER XII

AFTER CULLODEN


By midday the line of fugitives was in the thick of the dark hills, with
Francis sitting dumb on his horse and puzzling his poor wits with vain
projects. A council had been held at the Nairnside when they crossed the
Ford of Falie. Thence the remains of the troops were sent to Ruthven in
Badenoch, while the Prince with some dozen of a suite set out for the
West. Francis went with him, caring little where he went so long as the
way took him far from the accursed field. By chance he had heard the
name of Fraser and Lovat linked with their destination. The words were
centres round which to gather his wandering wits. Drearily he felt that
as his mission had been to Lovat, so he must see it through to the end.
The Cause was lost; why, then, he must perish with the Cause, and as he
had drawn the old lord into the affair, he must get to his side in the
disastrous climax.

But his horse was wearied and wounded, and its rider was foolish with
sickness. So at the house of Faroline he began to lag behind the party,
and two miles further had given up the vain effort. In the sleet of
midday he managed still to follow their tracks, but when the weather
cleared in the early afternoon he saw them many miles ahead in the
extremity of the glen. The sky changed to an April blue, and with the
warmth and freshness his exhaustion grew less burdensome. He stopped and
bathed in a roadside tarn till the mire of battle was washed off, and
then with more spirit he crossed the nick of the pass and came out on a
wide, boggy moor with the great square house of Gortuleg set in the
middle, and a few wretched sheilings jumbled into a clachan by the
highway. There was no man in sight; clearly the Prince's party had but
halted for a moment and gone on. The moss-pools were shining blue, and a
great crying of birds enlivened the stillness, while through the midst
gleamed the links of a slow stream.

The great house was in disorder, for the door stood wide to the wall and
from within came the shrill cry of women. The news had already reached
them, and there was mourning for a lost cause and ruined fortunes. The
hall was empty and littered with a confusion of cloaks and riding-gear,
with half-cooked food placed at random. A little girl stood weeping by
the stair-foot, and at the sight of Francis ran screaming down a
passage. The place was like a house seen in a bad dream, where all
things are upside down and no human being appears. But Francis was
beyond ceremony. He knew the place for a dwelling of the Frasers, and
here he could not fail to have news of the chief. So he climbed the
stairs heavily, only to find a worse confusion above, and some dozen
ragged serving-girls who fled like rats at his approach. He opened the
door of a room which was empty and stripped of all furniture. Again and
again he tried, but all alike were tenantless. Then at a little room in
the far corridor he found the door locked and heard the sound as of some
one moving within. Angry with his aimless search, he put his shoulder to
the wood and drove the hasp back. As the door flew open a little chamber
was revealed with a dying fire on the hearth and an old man sitting
hunched up in a chair. The figure turned a quick eye to the intruder,
and Francis saw with joy that it was Lovat himself.

"Come in, sir," said the old man. "Come in, and God speed ye if your
errand be fair." And he turned a face of such dumb misery, such baffled
wrath at war with the feebleness of age, that Francis took two steps
forward and then came to a standstill. He knew that he was not
recognised, and, all unknown, was the spectator of the tragedy of a
career.

"Come in, man, I say," piped the old voice. "If ye are a freend, what
news bring ye o' the last dispensation?" And he turned his ambiguous
eyes upon the newcomer to give a further shade of doubt to his ambiguous
words.

But something caught his notice in Francis' face and awakened
recollection. He pulled himself up in his chair and glared at the other.
"Is't you?" he cried, "you, the man that played the hell wi' my fortunes
and set me out on a daft venture! Come awa in, Mr. Birkenshaw, for
'faith ye're a welcome guest. Ye're the man of honour to be sure, and
ye've come to gloat ower the issue of your wark. Ay," he cried shrilly,
"it was your accursed tongue and your damnable clash that has been the
ruin o' an auld man and a loyal people. Ye'd best see your job to the
end. There's no a man in this house, nothing but greetin' women. If ye
have sic an animosity to the name o' Lovat, here's an auld life wad
thank ye for a speedy quittance. I kenna if ye're still for the Prince,
since you gentry have a trick of keeping your honour and your pouches on
the bieldy side o' the wall; but if so be ye are, here's auld Simon
Fraser who wad drink damnation to the Prince for leading him sic a road.
Simon's a renegade, do ye hear? He renounces the Stuarts and a' their
warks. So do to him as ye think fit. Or if ye are for King George, ye
see before ye a man who sent his folk to the forefront o' the battle,
one who canna look for mercy and doesna seek it." And he held out his
great hands and craned his neck as if for a blow.

The sight and the words sickened Francis. The trivial inflation of the
talk, the luring cajolery of the eyes, were hateful to one who had just
ridden from the naked terrors of war. Remorse for his share in this
man's fate slipped from him like a garment; he felt relieved, but he had
also the bitterness that here had gone his last friend in the North. Had
he found the Lovat of his former interview he had been ready to follow
him to the death; now the last mooring had been cast from the bark of
his unsteady fortunes.

He turned to go, wearily, dismally, while the old lord yelled obscene
reproaches through the open door. "Gang back to the jade that sent ye,"
he cried; "gang back to the weemen, man. Ye're ower empty and nice for
the warld o' men." Then he did a queer thing, for with infinite
difficulty he struggled to the window, and there watched Francis pick
his way through the moss, till he was swallowed up in the smoky clachan.

Meantime that unfortunate gentleman was in a sad temper. He had seen the
degeneration of enthusiasm; he had been a witness to the palpable decay
of a man's spirit. The sight of the great cumbrous body, leering,
twisting in an agony of fear, made him despair of life. When he came to
the village he found some makeshift for an inn in a two-roomed thatched
cot, where a dirty red-haired man sold raw whisky and pointed out
straw-beds to forlorn travellers. Francis had great arrears of sleep to
overtake, his head rang, and his limbs ached from weakness. He ate what
meal they could give him, and then asked for a place to sleep
undisturbed. The landlord nodded, and led him to a garret between the
ceiling and the thatch, where on a bed of bracken and heather those
might sleep who desired rest and a hiding-place. The temper of the man
was fast sinking to a dogged carelessness. In a few hours these hills
would be scoured, and King George's men would be knocking at this very
door. Let them come, let them take him; after all, a tow on the Carlisle
walls would be a brave ending to an inglorious and hopeless life.

The afternoon was hot after the storm and drew to a quiet evening.
Without on the moor broken men passed at odd times, now sitting on a
worn horse, now leading their mount, or haply merely stumbling on foot.
They were the rearguard of the fugitive, for in an hour after there came
a lonely party of horse, picking their way with many complaints. This in
turn was the van of the pursuit, and from Culloden field to the West
there would soon stretch a line of redcoats, and there would be no
passage beyond the Stratherick hills.

Francis slept on till the garret-loft was dark and stars twinkled
through the thatch. Then there came a rattling of the ladder which
disturbed his dreams. Half-dazed, he saw the landlord's red head thrust
up, and the landlord's dirty fingers beckoning him down. From his
wanderings he had learned the need of quick action, so he scrambled to
his feet and followed, rubbing sleep from his eyes with weary knuckles.
The red-haired man wore an air of secrecy, and he noted that the one
door was closely bolted. Had the man not been clearly of the honest
party, it would have savoured of betrayal. But when he entered the room
he saw the reason of the thing. An old fleshy man lay groaning on a
sedan-chair which had been set near the fire. "It's the chief himsel',"
said the innkeeper, urging Francis forward and retreating nervously to
the back. "It's the great Lord Lovat."

The door closed with a clang, and the pair were left together. Francis
with drowsy brain looked hard at the unwieldly presence before him. Then
Lovat checked his groanings, recognised him, and cried out in the
kindliest tones.

"Ye'll excuse my ill-tongue in the morning, Mr. Francis. I was the
deil's ain plaything wi' the gout. Ach, the unholy gripes, they play
hell-fire wi' a man's speerit and mainners. Forget an auld man's
clavers. I have come the night at sair bodily discomfort to make it up
wi' ye. And oh, sir, is this not an awful thing that has happened?"

Francis drew his breath short and sat down. Culloden was still too raw
in his memory to speak of it lightly. "I have an explanation to make to
you, my lord. I was a poor carrier of your letter. I had not gone twenty
miles in this vile country when I met with an accident which laid me on
my back for months in a hillside cottage among your own clansmen. I have
to thank your ring for the hospitality. It's not a week since I
recovered, and it was only yesterday that I gave the Prince your letter.
The clan had been long out, the thing was so much waste paper, the
Secretary said; but though the time was bye I had to complete my
errand."

He stopped, appalled by the change on the old man's face. He scrambled
from his chair, seized Francis' hand, and mumbled it like a child. "Ye
havena given the letter, my dear laddie! Blithe news, bonny news.
There's life in the auld dowg yet, gentlemen." And then, as he dimly
heard the last words, his mirth ceased. He flung the hand from him, lay
back like a snarling dog, and gloomed from beneath shaggy brows. "Just
yestreen, nae further back than yestreen," he moaned, "and I was a safe
man. A merciful God stretches the doited creature on a sick bed, and the
thing defeats the purposes of the Almighty by rinnin' to the Prince,
like a leevin' corp, and giein' him my bit letter. And now there's a
rope round Simon's craig as sure as if King Geordie's self had tied it.
Oh that a Fraser had stuck a dirk intil ye afore ye did the evil! What
for in God's name was I sae daft as to gie ye the ring? Ye micht have
fund fine clean caller burial in the Stratherick heather, and nae man
been the wiser or the waur. Eh, hech, the auld man and the puir people!"
and he sighed with maudlin pity.

Francis saw the position at a glance. The clan had been sent out while
the chief thought that the Prince already had his letter. As the unhappy
cause grew hopeless they had not been recalled, doubtless because Lovat
saw himself already involved beyond escape. Now, in the final
desolation, on him as one of the greatest rebel lords the punishment
must fall heavy. And the bitterness of it all was that but for this
scrawl of a letter he might yet be safe. He himself had not taken the
field; he might represent his clan's action as flat rebellion, the
disobedience of a son.

"The letter seems to stick in your throat," said Francis. "I had mind of
your desire and asked the Secretary Murray to destroy it before me."

"And you saw it done?" cried Lovat. "Say ye saw the damned thing in
twenty pieces and I'll gie ye a' I hae in the warld."

"The Secretary was ill and on the road for Inverness, so I dared not
press him. He swore he would destroy it with his own hands, for it was
not the custom of the honest party to do otherwise."

"But did ye no see him dae it?" screamed the old man.

"I confess I did not," said the other.

"Then it's a' up. Murray o' Brochtoun has the letter. Had it been any
ither man it would have mattered little. The Prince, Lord George,
Lochiel, Keppoch, they're a' men o' honour, but the Murray--my God, the
thing has faun intil the richt hands. Murray! His heart is as black as
bog-water; he's an easy, canty man, what ye ca' a pleasant fellow, but I
would sooner lippen to the traitor Judas than just this canny Murray."

The man buried his face in his hands and rocked himself in his chair.

Francis was in lamentable despair. In his heart he could not contradict
Lovat's words, for he still had mind of the Secretary's eye, and he
cursed his own inertness at the moment of parting. He had been culpably
remiss, for he had played into a traitor's hands; and though the victim
was no stranger to treachery, it was treachery of the open, braggadocio
kind, and no cowardly fear of his skin. But as he looked at the figure
before him repulsion began to choke his remorse. This ungainly man with
white hair all dishevelled and a mottled, rubicund face who alternated
between the foulest abuse and a beggar's flattery--it was hard to rise
into heroics in such a cause. For a moment Francis clapped his hands to
his head and looked into sheer vacancy. His wits wandered, he seemed to
be leading a crazy, phantasmal life. Without was the black darkness of
endless moors and hideous, ragged hills, men were seeking him as a
fugitive, his whole course was that of a derelict without aim or hope;
and within the sordid room was this phrasing chieftain, weeping
senselessly or leering with the ugliness of age. He was astray on the
very backbone of creation, tethered to a madman's company. The thought
roused a ghastly humour, and sitting on the table he laughed shrilly
till even Lovat stopped his moaning--the laughter of wits half-unhinged
and a fainting body.

"See here, my lord," he cried, "we are two men in misfortune. I have
done you an ill turn, though I never intended it. But this is your own
country. It cannot be hard to find faithful servants to carry you to the
wilder hills, where you can bide till the blast blows by, and laugh at
Murray and all his kind."

"Dinna talk," said Lovat, solemnly. "The finger of God is upon me. I was
intemperate in my youth, I loved wine and women, and now in my declining
years I am carried whither I will not. I canna put foot to the ground on
a carriage-road, and is it like I could gang on the stanes o'
Corryarrick? Forbye I must traivel wi' mony little elegancies and
necessaries for the toilet and the stamach. I am no rude barbarian, sir,
to be ready to flee at a moment's notice. I am an auld man wi' an
uncommon experience o' the warld and its ways, and some pretensions to
fashion. Is it no a peetiful thing that I must tak to the muirs like a
bog-blitter?"

He had raised his head and twisted his extraordinary face into an
expression of grave sorrow.

"I do not presume to advise your course," said Francis. "I only say that
whatever you may choose I am willing to share its danger."

Lovat looked him up and down gravely.

"There's some sense in that thick heid o' yours, Mr. Birkenshaw. But
what will ye serve? Ye will be but another mouth to feed."

"Also another sword in extremity," said Francis, dryly. He felt himself
bound to stand by this strange man, in whose ill-fortune he had had some
hand. It was his one remaining duty, and irksome though it was he had
braced his mind to it. But this reception of his generosity damped him
sorely.

The thing so set his teeth on edge that he resolved with obstinacy to
see the game to the end.

"Do you accept me, my lord?" he said humbly.

But Lovat had seen fit to change his mood. He adopted a gushing,
patriarchical kindness and welcomed him with effusion. "I accept you,"
he cried. "Ye are my one true freend, my one support, the son of my old
age. May the Lord in Heaven reward ye for standing by an auld man in the
day of his affliction. I can give ye nocht in return but my blessing."
And there and then he pronounced solemn beatitudes on the confused
Francis with the air of a desert saint.

At the door his natural manners returned. "Keep the door wide open, ye
gander," he yelled. "Can a camel win through the eye of a needle or an
auld gross man through a key-hole?"




CHAPTER XIII

CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH


In two hours Francis found himself at the tail of a little troop of men
heading across the hills to the North. There were four stout bearers,
for Lovat could move only in a litter, three strong fellows who carried
food, and one special servant of the chief,--these were all the House of
Gortuleg could muster. The night was moonless, but the men picked their
way with surprising rapidity over the break-neck land. At first they
seemed to traverse an interminable ascent, up which the bearers
struggled with short breath. Then at a ridge they dipped all but sheer
into a woody valley, where thickets of birch and ash made a tanglewood
around a brawling river. In a little they lighted on the shore of a loch
at a place where a cottage was built and a boat lay beached. The thing
was rough and tarry, but four strong arms sent it quickly across the
moonlit water. Then began another dreary climb, this time up a rocky
cleft in the hills, where fine hill-gravel made the feet slip and an
incessant dust troubled the eye. Once more they were on the high moors,
crossing one shoulder of hill, skirting another great barrier ridge,
till Francis--East-country bred--felt a whiff of salt in the air and
knew the near presence of the sea. His legs ached with travel, he had
been hurried since midnight up dale and over mountain at a speed which
he could only marvel at. These tall men, even with the burden of a
litter, could cover their hills like a good horse on a level road. For
himself he was all but broken down; only the thought of the sneering
Lovat kept him from yielding to exhaustion.

Just before dawn they came to the last ridge and looked down on a green
strath with a firth lying pale in the midst of it. The place looked
faint and far-away in the haze of night, save that in the foreground an
angry glow told of burning dwellings. The men stopped and looked over
the edge with scowling faces and harsh Gaelic oaths. Lovat himself awoke
from his broken sleep and made shift to look down on the valley.
Instantly his brows grew dark, and he cried shrilly for Francis. "Look
there," he cried, "that is my braw house, my ain Castle Dounie, loweing
like a pharos on a rock." His tone was half-jocular, but in a moment his
rage mastered him. "God, my lads," he cried, "if I had just my fingers
on your thrapples, I'd thraw them fine and send your gutsy sauls to the
deil that begat them." He clenched his thick hands and remained staring
at the sight. But soon rage gave place to deep self-pity, and in a
little he was moaning on his back for the hours he had once dwelled in
it, and calling on his fathers to pity their miserable son.

With the open daylight they shifted their course to the wilder parts,
and marched with frequent pauses in the deep recesses of the hills.
Lovat slept, snoring loudly under the midday heat. Francis drank of
every well to ease his thirst, and followed the strange procession with
no sense of purpose or hope. No one there save the chief himself, had
any English, and even though they had spoken his own tongue, it is like
that he would have had small disposition to talk. The man had lost all
interest in his life; cold, sickness, and war for months had so wrought
upon him that he had grown a new creature from the fantastic Mr.
Birkenshaw of the Edinburgh taverns, even from the punctilious
gentleman of the journey to the North. Again and again through the
dreary day he asked himself the cause of this mournful position. Whence
had flown his hopes; what had befallen that far-reaching scheme of high
ambition which he had once planned to follow? Yet in the severing of
each strand one remained firm. Had he looked to the bottom of that
dogged instinct to share Lovat's fortunes he would have found the
lingering sentiment which inspired his whole errand. His mission had
been to Lovat, a lady's lips had joined their names in one command, and
by Lovat's side he would see the end of the play.

As he stumbled along, when his thoughts rose from his immediate bodily
weakness, they rested with disgust on the sleeping figure in the litter.
To Francis--thin, blackavised, in the main free from gross excess--this
cumbrous load of elderly flesh was indescribably repellant. He could not
resist a dim affection, for the old lord had that tolerant humour, that
sudden warmth of kindliness, which is no unfailing sign of charity of
heart. The first interview had produced on his mind an impression of an
extraordinary intellect and an abundant knowledge of life. Somewhere in
his heart pity lurked,--pity for the ruin of it all, the frustration of
deep-laid plans, and the misfortunes of one already feeble with age.
When he did not look at the litter he was prepared to serve this fallen
chieftain to the last, but one sight of the heavy face and his nice
senses revolted. Times had changed with one who had revelled once in the
raw vulgarities of the Pleasaunce that now he could not abide a
slovenly, unheroic old man. Nor is the explanation hard; for he had met
this man when still in the first heat of sentiment, he had grouped him
in his mind with the choicer figures of memory, and now he resented the
degradation with the fierceness of one whose sacred places are profaned.

At midday they stopped for food, and a rough feast was spread on the
grass from the stores they carried. It was good, even rare, of its kind,
for the indomitable gourmand had left Gortuleg with excellent provision
for meat and drink. It seemed a strange thing to be drinking rich French
wines on the short heather under a blazing sun, when the limbs were
aching, and to Francis, at least, an hour's sleep would have been more
than all the vintage in the world. Lovat's eyes brightened at the
display; he fell back to his old humour, and was for quizzing Francis.
But the poor boy turned on him so dull an eye that he forbore, and had
recourse instead to crazy affection, which was harder still to bear.
Once more the poles of his chair were raised, and the troop climbed
slowly the skirts of a great, mossy hill, where the feet sank at every
step and savage water-courses barred the road. Then they came to a
greener country,--an upland valley between precipitous hill-walls, level
for many yards on either side the stream, and sweet with
hawthorn-blossom. Here stood a sheiling, a heather-roofed place of some
pretensions, and the shepherd came running out and talked darkly with
the chair-bearers. Lovat asked him some questions in Gaelic, and his
face cleared at the replies. "The road is open yet," he cried to
Francis. "He says that no one has come this way for a month save two
packmen from Dingwall, and that he saw no sign of any man when he went
round the hill this morning. We'll jink the lads yet, Mr. Birkenshaw,
for the Fraser is on his ain rock, as the auld proverb says."

The shepherd accompanied them to the Glenhead, while the old lord plied
him with questions on his work, his kin, and his profits. "Is the
lambing to be guid this year?" he asked, and the man replied in good
Lowland Scots, for he was from the south of Perth, and had another
tongue than the Gaelic. Then he wandered into a string of tales about
the shepherd's south-country kinsmen, and though the thing was the
purest fancy the intention was kindly and the result good, for the
lonely man's eyes brightened and he drank in the stories with greedy
ear. Francis walked on the other side of the chair, and as he watched
the shepherd's placid face, the strength and ease of his great stride,
and his open front to the world, he felt a sudden envy. The hills were
full of the crying of sheep; it was the time of the shepherd's harvest,
the birth-time of the flocks, when a man is on his feet from dawn to
sunset, striving against the weather for the life of his charge. This
man spent his quiet days here in this fragrant solitude, face to face
with nature and death and life, an intimate of the elements, an heir of
deep mountain calm. And here was he, a poor straw on the whirlpool of
events, playing a desperate game with little spirit. At other times he
would have consoled himself with the thought that after all he played
for high stakes in a high region where success, if won, was more worthy
than in a little field. But now every vestige of self-esteem had been
driven forth; his eyes looked blankly upon naked facts, and he knew
himself for the puppet of Fortune.

The way had grown more perilous as the stream grew smaller, and soon
they were walled between sheer sides of rock, while water brawled far
down in scooped troughs of slate-grey stone. The road seemed to end
again and again, but always there was some passage around some shoulder
of hill, some byway among tanglewood which the shepherd showed them. At
length they came out on the shore of a dark lake, which ran from the
shadow of frowning hills to an open ridge of moor, whence the eye could
discern a wide sunset country falling to the sea. By the loch shore was
a cottage, empty save for a boat which lay across the floor. The men
launched it and pulled to an island near the further shore, a place some
hundred yards either way and planted with wind-blown firs. Here all had
been made ready for a prolonged concealment. The low hut was scarcely
distinguishable from the banks of heather, and the smoke of a fire was
so sheltered by trees that no one from the shore could see a sign of
habitation. Once inside, the place seemed extraordinarily large and
well-equipped. There were barrels of meal in one end, and dried venison
hams hung from the roof. A little old man greeted them, casting himself
before the chief's litter and mumbling blessings. Lovat cut him short
with a word, and surlily bade his bearers lift him to a chair. The sight
of this final rest, which was like cold water to the wearied Francis,
vexed him with the thought of his great stone halls now the shelter of
others.

Throughout the evening the place was scarce habitable for his venomous
tongue. There are some men--great souls--whom no trouble can crush;
there are some--little souls--who are prostrate at its advent. Lovat, a
mixture of both, laughed at misfortunes, but his ridicule was filled
with irritation and chiefly affected his friends. He stormed at every
servant in impetuous Gaelic, for his voice had lost none of its
strength, and had found with old age a harsh, penetrating note which
rasped on the ears. He had out the French wine from the baggage, and
drank it greedily without the common civility of passing the bottle.
Francis noticed nothing, for he slept in snatches since ever he had come
to the hut. But Lovat needed someone to torment in such frolicsome
moods, and he preferred one nearer his own quality than his clansmen. So
he woke him effectually from his slumbers, and poured into his unwilling
ears much low gossip about great folk, many tales of his own wrongs, and
much other scandal without point or foundation. Francis listened,
patiently polite. He had volunteered to share this man's exile, and
whatever the provocation, he swore to do it with a good grace. The filth
wearied him, for had he not once been a connoisseur in the unbecoming,
but he gave exact attention with a fixed smile, till Lovat returned to
an easy humour.

       *       *       *       *       *

A week passed in the place, and Francis would have called it years. He
could go abroad as he pleased, but the country was the most desolate
conceivable, a plain of broken moor flanked by abrupt treeless hills. It
was a type of that cold land to which the greater royalists were already
fleeing, and round which Cumberland's lines were slowly drawing. But as
yet no redcoat came to the lake shore, and Francis was left, with
illimitable moors abroad and a querulous old man indoors, to pass his
laggard days. The weather was broken by cold and wet, and the few bright
days that intervened found a soaked and blackened country and brimming
rivers. Once he shot a deer, which caused a violent outburst on the old
lord's part, inasmuch as the animal was out of its proper season. The
fare, too, in the cottage dwindled to poverty. The finer viands were
soon consumed by the chief's improvidence, and the party were reduced in
three days to oatmeal brose, tough venison steaks, and plain water from
the loch. This last was the prime grievance, for by an oversight little
spirits had been brought, and though the Lovat men searched the country
round, none were to be had for love or money. Lovat groaned deeply over
his tasteless dishes, and observing that Francis ate with equanimity,
heaped on him the most childish insults. "Does that mind ye o' the day
when your mother fed ye, Mr. Francis?" he would say. "Parritch is
halesome fare, an excellent diet for the lower classes in this land, as
doubtless ye ken by experience, sir." Then, failing to irritate him by
such clumsy means, he inevitably fell back on the subject of the
Secretary and the Secretary's wife, and when the poor boy with burning
cheeks marched out of doors he was pursued by the chuckle of elderly
malice.

Yet with it all these days had the strange effect of strengthening the
tie between the ill-matched pair. The helplessness of the one in spite
of his bravado appealed to the good nature of the other. The more Lovat
stormed and fumed, the harder was Francis' life and consequently the
easier was his conscience, for then and only then he felt the
satisfaction of the man who is struggling to accomplish the wholly
unpleasant. Every hint of comfort vexed his soul, for he felt bitterly
that he had marred everything he had laid his hand to, and that while
wiser and better men were in peril of their lives, it was a disgrace
that he should be in safety. So much for his humility, but the novel
virtue in his nature had not rid itself of his awkward pride. It was a
torture for him to be mocked at before the servants; had they understood
English well, it is probable that he would have finally revolted. A
dozen times a day he found himself pulling savagely across the loch
with an odious, leering face dancing in his memory. The old lord knew
nothing of his family history, and but the barest scraps of his life;
but by shrewd inconsequence he stumbled upon the truth not once but many
times, and Francis had a hard fight of it to keep from rage. Once he was
betrayed into reprisals. Lovat was on his unfailing topic of women,--a
topic in this case not localised but airily, generally treated by a
master mind.

"What's become o' your wife a' this time, Mr. Birkenshaw?" he asked.

Now this was a subject on which Francis was open to no assault, so he
had a less strict guard on his tongue, since there was no anger at heart
to preach carefulness.

"What's become o' yours, my lord?" he said, in unthinking, rude
repartee.

In a moment he remembered the notorious scandals of the Lovat household,
and repented his words. His companion became a volcano of emotions.
Screaming out curses he lay back in his seat with a purple face and eyes
red and starting. His men rushed to help him, but he waved them back and
bade them leave him alone with this Lowland swine. Then for an hour he
made Francis' ears tingle with abuse, ending it all with a sudden
flight to the pathetic. Sobbing like a child, he deplored the
ingratitude of youth. "Me that micht be your father, Francie, an auld
man that surely deserves the consideration due to a loving parent. But
ye're of a piece with the rest. Auld Simon is the butt of one and all,
and every midden-cock craws ower the Fraser's downfa'." Then came a near
approach to apoplexy, and Francis loosed his cravat amid maudlin
upbraidings.

Two days later Francis went out to the hill to shoot hares. It was the
breeding season, but necessity compelled, since the table must be
replenished. He stayed out till the late afternoon, and as he came down
to the loch he saw to his amazement the boat leave the island with
several men on board. Horses were waiting for them at the shore, and
they rode off to the deeps of the moor. Twenty minutes later he arrived
breathless at the edge and pulled himself over. A dozen vague notions
ran in his head: was this some treachery, an attack upon their solitude,
or was it a lonely conclave of the army's remnants? When the keel
touched the reeds he leaped on shore and ran hard for the hut.

In a corner of the place the servants were talking eagerly in whispers.
Lovat was as usual huddled by the fire, but something in his look struck
Francis as strange. His forehead was puckered into large knots, and the
veins on his face and neck stood out with extraordinary prominence. He
spoke to himself, and his lips were twitching with what might be anger
or delight. Francis laid his hand on his shoulder ere ever he looked
round, and the great face turned slowly from its meditations. "Sit down,
Mr. Birkenshaw," he said, and he spoke with a precise accent very
different from the freedom of his usual talk, "sit ye down, for I have
much to say to ye.

"I have had a visit from some of our north-country gentlemen," he said,
"who are sojourning just now in these parts."

Francis nodded in silence.

"I need give no names, but Lochiel and Clanranald were of the number,
and there were others who are no less well-kenned."

He took snuff gravely, and, for the first time, tendered his box. It
marked the admission of the younger man to a great intimacy.

"We talked of the late unhappy events, and we had some words of a plan.
I need have no secrets from you, Mr. Birkenshaw, for I can trust you. I
proposed to defend these mountains with a body of men till we were
granted fair terms of war. They jumped at the thought one and all, but
when I looked at them I saw their unfitness. Brave, honest gentlemen,
sir, but with no brains--no sae muckle as a spoonfu'--in one o' their
skulls. So I told them I despaired of it, and they rounded on me and
called me a turncoat." All this he said with a certain mournful
amusement, as of one above all base suspicion.

"A wheen men o' strae, sir, I tell ye," he went on. "Had I been a
younger man I might have thought fit to move them to my purpose and
guide their efforts; but I am auld, and I can but sit and look helpless
on. They upbraided me, as if I were safe and they the ones in peril. My
God, sir, it's hell to me to bide here, to see my whole castle of
ambition in the stour, and to thole these moorland vapours. And I
foresee worse to come. When the redcoats warm to their work and the hunt
gets hotter, it'll no be a decent cot-house for Simon Fraser, but wet
bogs and heathery hillsides. But I make no complaint. It is the common
heritage of unfortunate Loyalists. What I have to say concerns ye more
closely. The Secretary Murray was one of those who came here to-day."

"Murray," cried Francis; "then he is recovered?"

"Recovered! Oh, in a fashion. The body still looks dwining, but that was
aye a common thing with Master John when his plans went ill. He is in a
lamenting, Lord-forgie-me kind o' mood, and no the brisk crouse lad
ye'll probably have mind of. But there's one thing that may interest
you. He spoke sagaciously to me of the folly of the hale business, and
to try him I affected surprise, declared I was wholly innocent, that the
Government had no grip on me, that I would welcome the sight of a
redcoat, and that I was out here on the muirs for my health. He got as
thrawn as Satan. 'Ye're muckle mistaken, Simon,' says he. 'The law has
terrible long fingers, and can lay its hand even on you.' It was easy
seen what he meant, and ye ken now the way the wind blaws."

"But the man may not be taken. There's every chance that he may win to
France, where he'll be free from any temptation to hurt you. The man's
young, and as likely to escape as any."

"So, so," said Lovat, drily. "That is true enough if Mr. Murray o'
Broughton were willing to let Providence take His ain way with him. But
what think ye o' our gentleman going to meet the pursuit and give
himself up to justice?"

"And turn a traitor?" said Francis, in amazement.

"Ay, just that," said the old lord, "and become one o' the fingers on
the hand o' the Law that he's aye craikin' about. For our gentleman's
game will be like this. Barisdale, Clanranald, and the others gang north
and west. Mr. Murray gangs south under pretence of finding shelter in
the Appin country. But at the first chance he is south of the Forth, in
his ain house of Brochtoun, where the Government finds him, a melancholy
man, lamenting his pitiful follies. What can they do wi' such a penitent
but take him into favour, and in the course of private conversation it
comes out that he had a bit scrawl that incriminates a great Highland
lord whom they have long been seeking. So Mr. Murray gets a free pardon,
and this Highland lord, if they lay hands on him, will even get his heid
chappit off;" and he laughed wildly.

Francis' face was hot with dismay. "Forgive me, my lord," he cried, "if
I have been the cause of your peril."

"Nay, Francis, I dinna blame ye. Indeed it is me that has to ask your
pardon, for I have been an ill companion on these traivels. But now I
can at least die with a clean hand and a proud heart. It shall never be
said that a Fraser, though feeble and stricken in years, was feared o'
the hale black gang o' them. _In utrumque paratus_," he quoted with
inimitable gusto, "_seu versare dolis, seu cert occumbere morti_."

Francis went to bed, but not to sleep. The image of the savage, heroic
old man, his hypocrisy discarded, fronting death with equanimity, was
burned on his mind. A fierce anger against Murray possessed him, and as
he thought of what one proud woman would think of such conduct, and all
the misery which awaited her, he groaned in bitterness of spirit. But
his wits were clearer, now he had a plainer duty before him, something
which an active man might effect without presumption. Above all, now was
his task more closely connected with her who had been his task-mistress.
Henceforth he wrought for her direct, palpable good.

In the grey misty morning Lovat was wakened by the young man standing at
his bedside.

"I have come to make my farewells, my lord, for it is time for me to be
off."

"Are you like the rest then, Francis, and leave the sinking ship?"

"You know well enough to the contrary, my lord. I go to seek the
Secretary."

"Good lad," said Lovat, "but how will you find him? I ken nothing of his
road save that he went south by Appin."

"Then I will go to Appin, and maybe I will get word of him there."

"And then, when ye get him?..."

"Why, then," said Francis, "Mr. Murray and I will have words, and a
certain bit of paper will find its way to my pocket, or I will ken the
reason why."

"It's a great plan, Francis," cried the old man, "and God speed your
hand. Shake the tod weel, once for me and once for yoursel' and once for
his leddy wife. If I never see ye again in this world, I'll see ye in ..."

But the place was empty, and Francis was gone.




CHAPTER XIV

HOW MR. FRANCIS CAME TO THE LOWLANDS ONCE MORE


At this point the industrious narrator passes from a sober tale into the
realms of wild romance. Nor can he help himself. For take a wild young
lad, or rather a serious man still in his youth, whose mind has been
strung high by vain enthusiasms, who is spurred by a desperate hope.
Conceive such an one to have climbed with difficulty the first steps of
the ladder of virtue, to have curbed his mad fervours, to have bowed
before the eternal commonplaces of love and duty, to have found himself
in a difficult and unmanly place, and now at last to have a faint chance
of great deeds. Suppose him strong in body--for the week in Lovat's hut
had restored him--give him a plain task, a sword at his side, not a word
of Gaelic, the mistiest notion of the hill-country, and burning cause
for speed--and you will find that he will run into many stone walls ere
he pass the Highland line.

With Lovat's directions he came to the Linnhe coast and met no mishap.
The way had been a terrible toil over a birk-clad moorland and bare
scarps of slaty hill. Finding some poor fishermen on the beach, he slept
the night in their hut, giving them a piece of Lovat's money in payment
for the oatcake and dried fish which they put before him. The men were
honest and considered the payment ample, for they took him aboard the
lugger and set down the loch to one of the long water-arms which run
into the east. He repeated the name _Appin_, at which they nodded to the
beach; and when he found himself ashore he comprehended their gestures,
recalled the old lord's directions, and realised that this was indeed
Appin. That night he slept on the moor in a ditch among heather, and at
daybreak was on his way in a pleasing land of green valleys, where the
smell of salt hung over bent and tussock. By the afternoon he had come
to the house which he had been bidden to seek, the house of John Roy
Stewart, called sometimes John Howglass and sometimes John of the Hairy
Legs. The man was kin to the Fraser, and--what was far above
pedigree--had some little English. When Francis had eaten his fill and
slept heavily for some hours, he put the question to his host.

"Murray?" cried the man, "Murray never came here, though he sent a man
to beg from me while he was hiding by the Leven Loch. That was a week
syne. Murray darena show his face in Appin, for ten years back he had a
kind o' bicker wi' Ardshiel, and it's kenned that the Drummonds canna
thole him. Faith, it would be a back-cast of the Lord's hand that sent
Murray to Appin, and Sim maun be failing in mind or he would have had
the sense to ken that."

"It was Murray's own word," said Francis.

"And Sim believed him! Dinna tell me that! Na, na, your gentleman will
be skelping lang ere this ower Balwhidder braes, and he'll soon be
casting his coat in his ain house of Brochtoun. That's to say, if ye
read him richt, but I confess I had a juster opinion of the man."

"If he's gone south, then south I must go," said Francis.

His host propounded to him a choice of roads: He might go south by the
Campbells' country, take a chance of a ferry over the lochs, and come
to the right shore of the Clyde above Dumbarton. Thence lay a level ride
to Broughton in a quiet land among Whiggish countrymen. Or he might go
straight through the wilds of Awe to the young streams of Forth and
enter the Lowlands by Lennox or Lanark. Francis chose the first, and so
all the next day he strode through the green country of Appin in a land
channelled with bright streams and ever filled with the noise and scents
of the sea. Few of the people had been out; but it was a miracle that he
passed unchallenged, for the place was watched jealously by its
neighbours of Lorn, seeing that of old Campbell had been at war with
Stewart. At night he came to a herd's dwelling on a lonely hill, where
his path turned inland. The man gladly kept him the night on the mention
of John Howglass, but again it was a monotonous feast of silence, where
he sat and smiled into the eyes of a friendly tangled giant.

The weather still kept calm and blue as he struck the next morning into
the remoter deserts. Twenty miles straight by the south-east wind, John
Roy had said, and he would come to the sea. But Francis had little
hillcraft, and it may be that the twenty became forty ere he looked
down on a dark sea-loch, sleeping between strait mountain walls. All day
he had met not a soul, save that an hour before midday he had seen two
figures on the skyline of a hill at the head of the glen in which he
patiently stumbled. They, too, seemed to have caught sight of him, for
instantly the place became void. This was the one warning he got that he
was in a country of war; but he was puffed up by the ease with which he
had won thus far, and forgot the thing the minute after.

Ere he came to the shore he learned the moral of the figures on the
hill-top. As he slipped heavily from rock to rock down one of the
shallow corries which dropped on the sea, a bullet suddenly sang by his
ear and bored into a bank of sand. He had the sense to lie prone in the
stream and pray that the shot might have been intended for other game
than himself. But the noise of feet on the stones spoiled his hopes; he
was too footsore to run; so he surrendered helplessly to three ragged
men who leaped on him from above. One who had some words of English
asked, "What ta devils he was crossing ta Cruart Vhan so hot-foot;" but
Francis' reply sounded deeps of language unknown to him, and all that
was left was to hurry the unhappy captive along the hill-face, till his
arms seemed torn from their sockets with rough handling.

How long and how far he went he soon lost the power to guess. His shoes
were filled with small sharp stones which galled him severely. He
struggled to prevail upon his guides to slacken pace, but their only
reply was deep, convulsive laughter. At last their path was barred by a
deep glen down which a salmon stream roared to the Firth. At its foot
was a rude fisherman's hut,--a few stakes and boulders with a simple
roof of turf,--which seemed to be the goal of the violent journey. At
the door stood a very great personage, dressed in plain Lowland garb,
save for a magnificent scarlet hat which surmounted a very well-kept
periwig. The three men greeted him with the most abject reverence, and
pushing Francis forward left him to explain the posture of affairs.

"And who may you be, sir?" said the great man, tapping a snuff-box and
looking with disfavour at the three dirty Highlanders.

"I have yet to know by whose orders I am held prisoner," said Francis,
"and who it is that has the right to ask me."

"Hoity, toity," said the man, "heard ye ever the like? Are ye aware,
sir, that this is the Campbell country, and that I am the Duke's own
cousin? Do ye ken, sir, that the Campbells, serving as they do the
lawful king, have a warrant to search these hills for any members of the
disaffected clans or Lowland rebels who may be lurking there? And ye
question my right!"

"I ask your pardon, my lord," said Francis, with diplomacy. "I am glad
indeed to find allies in a good work. I am at present in pursuit of a
notorious Jacobite, one John Murray of Broughton, who is known to have
come from Appin southward through this very country; and if you can
enable me to lay hands on him I will be everlastingly your lordship's
debtor."

The man was vastly flattered by the tone--still more by the tide.

"Then it is my part to ask your pardon for the unseemly conduct of my
poor people, Mr. ----"

"Birkenshaw," said Francis, speaking the truth at random.

"And if it turns out to be as you say, and I doubt not it will, I will
aid you with all my heart. Meantime I must beg your company to sup on
such poor fare as is here provided. My uncle of Inverforth will be here
in three hours' time, and he will explain matters to you more fully."

"Three hours' grace," thought Francis, for before Inverforth he must
stand unmasked, seeing that he had no tale to meet the ear of one who
had been at Culloden and was famed as the bitterest foe of the Prince's
in the land. Before three hours' time he must give this gaudy gentleman
the slip, and with the help of Providence put the loch between himself
and his pursuers. He had noticed a boat on the beach; if he could but
reach it, he was safe. Once over the water and he was not far from the
confines of settled country, if he minded John Roy's words aright.

They supped daintily on fresh-caught salmon, hill mutton, and some
bottles of foreign wine which the man fetched from a store in the hut.
The Campbell talked volubly on a score of subjects, as if glad to find
one less barbarous than the hill-men to listen to his elegant talk.
Francis humoured him as far as he was able, and bandied the names of
great folk to his own admiration. Three several scandals linked with
the name of Lord Craigforth did he invent on the spur of the moment, and
tell to the greedy ears of his companion. He had to listen in turn to
many weary recitals of slights and successes, of days in Edinburgh and
London where it seemed that Mr. Campbell had played a great part, and a
minute account of the interminable Campbell pedigree. Meantime he
feigned exceeding interest and a growing fuddledom. His cheeks flushed
and he rubbed his eyes, blinking. Then he complained of the heat, and
the effect of wine on one who had been so long without it, paying a
compliment to the strong head of the other. He wound up with a request
for a second's walk in the open. "I am somewhat confused with my long
journey and the strength of the Bordeaux. Three turns on the heather
will set me right, so I beg of you to excuse me."

Mr. Campbell, himself approaching hilarity, was graciously pleased, and
in a second Francis was on the moor and out of sight of the gillies. The
loch lay purple-black, for the night was moonless, but a line of pale
light marked where the stream entered and the boat lay moored. A minute,
and he was there, feeling for the chain and the stone to which it was
fastened. To his chagrin the thing was padlocked, and passed through a
stout ring of iron in the boat's stern. He searched for a weak spot but
found none, nor could he move the great stone which did duty for an
anchor. Despair seized him, and he tore at the thing like a madman. The
ring creaked, then as the tugging grew fiercer the stern planks
shivered, till at last the wood gave and he found himself sprawling with
the chain in his hand and a ragged end of timber encircling the ring.
The noise was loud enough to be heard across the loch, so in a fright he
scrambled into the boat and put out the oars.

He could hear men come crying from the hut as he shot into the
blackness. If this were the only boat, he was safe enough; but he dare
not risk the nearest point of the far shore, but drew down the water as
he guessed its direction. The mountains rose wall-like in inscrutable
night, towering into the blacker arch of the high heavens. He scarce
could see the tips of his oars, scarcely the murky water beneath; he
felt like one entering into a fantastic land without law or limit; and
yet he was no more weary, but extraordinarily light and active. Then he
heard in his wake the clear splash of oars; the gillies must have found
another boat and be giving chase. He was hailed in strident Gaelic by
some angry man, and then the world was quiet save for the monotonous
sound of rowing. Francis grew perfectly cheerful. Often on the Fife
coast had he played at this game--on an angry firth and not on a placid,
land-locked sea. He could tell that the boat behind was not gaining, for
though there seemed to be two men at the oars, it must be heavier and
coble-shaped, whereas his was an elegant pleasure-boat.

But as the minutes passed and the chase continued he began to cast about
for a refuge. If he turned into the shore, they would follow; and now,
as his arms grew sore, he could not hope to put such a distance between
them and himself as would suffer him to land unnoticed. His wits failed
him, and he could think of nothing. Wild schemes of upsetting his boat
and swimming ashore flitted across his mind, but a remembrance of the
width of the loch as seen by daylight warned him to prudence. Even in
darkness his pursuers could track him easily by the sound, so he could
not hope to baffle them by any ruse of turning. Suddenly, to his
delight, a chance arose for his salvation. The outline of a ship all
blurred with night leaped up on his left, apparently not more than
twenty yards away. Here was a case for neck or nothing. With a moment's
thought he kicked off his shoes, tossed the oars into the water, and
dived overboard, and a minute later was clambering up the bowsprit of
the vessel.

He ran down from the bows to the deck-house, picking his way amid a
multitude of ropes and bales. The door was shut, but a light came
through the foot, so without parleying he opened. A man sat alone at a
table, working out some figures and sweating with the toil.

"Francis Birkenshaw!" he cried in amazement, as he saw his visitor.

Francis stared; then "Andra Gordiestoun" he stammered, in open-mouthed
surprise.

"So ye've taken to this trade," said the captain, sourly. "I suppose ye
will be for him they ca' the Chevalier."

"Indeed I am," said Francis.

"I micht have jaloused it. Ye were a blagyird in the auld toun o'
Dysart, and it's no like ye'd be convertit on the Hieland hills."

"There's a boatful o' men behind me," said Francis. "Are you minded to
give me up?"

"To be sure I am," said the man. "I am a decent supporter o' the
King--God bless him,--and I'll hae nae rinaway Jaicobites on my vessel."

At the moment there came a great crying from the bows, as the pursuers
came up with the deserted boat and the moored ship. The men hailed the
captain in their scanty English, and Francis sat down despairingly to
await the issue. The conversation--heard in snatches--was of a kind to
cheer and surprise him. For the captain argued, first, that no man had
come aboard; secondly, that if one had, it was no business of theirs;
and, thirdly, that they might be damned for a set of dirty Highland
beggars, and, if they stayed longer, he would rouse his men and send
them and their boat to a better place. Which last point--and the
gestures and tone which accompanied its deliverance--was found so
convincing that the party retired in haste.

"You're better than your word, Andra," said Francis, on his return.

"Say nae mair about it," said he. "And look ye here, Mr. Birkenshaw, ye
may be a michty scoondrel, as I have nae doot ye are, ye may be fresh
frae cuttin' the throat o' Maccallummore himsel'; but ye come frae my
ain toun, and I have drunk mony glesses wi' ye at the Harbour-walk, so
I'll see ye through wi' this bit business, if it does na interfere wi'
mine."

"If you can put me in by the Renfrew shore you will do me a great
obligement."

"And it so happens that that is my very road," said the captain, "so the
Lord has lookit after ye better than ye could guide yoursel'."

As Francis lay down in a ship's berth he could hear the anchor lifting,
and soon they were dropping down the loch with a fair breeze behind.
When he awoke late in the morning, they had already left the loch and
were making their course by the south end of an island in what seemed a
broad sea, lined on one side with craggy hills and on the other by
far-stretching lines of level country. For the whole of a long day they
made slow progress up the Firth, tacking against a difficult wind, while
Francis looked idly from the bows, busy with his own reflections. The
skipper was always by his side, leaving him only to make short inroads
below or to yell orders to his men. To his amazement Francis found that
he was no more the godless Andra Gordiestoun of the old days, but an
enthusiast in religion on the watch for a proselyte. True, his language
was violent as ever, and he seemed little less drunken; but his talk was
always of theological mysteries, and unctuous texts fell easily from his
lips. He preached Francis a vehement sermon on the error of his ways,
adjured him to flee from a wrath to come, painted this wrath in awful
colours, and dwelt zealously on the joys of the redeemed. Francis heard
him out with impatient grace. He himself had been the arena of so severe
a struggle, good and evil had fought such a duel in his breast, that he
was willing to lend an ear to anyone who could teach him the way of
life. But these phrases, this fluent rhetoric, seemed paltry to one
whose soul was scarred with the grim reality. He was in the actual
throes of a vain endeavour; little to him these commonplaces of the
throng. And yet this man, sent with such words out of his own tattered
past, was a sting and a remembrance of years mis-spent.

"I will pray for ye, Francie," said the man, on parting, "that ye may
yet be reclaimed. It's a puir warld withoot hopes o' a better."

"I say 'Amen' to that," said Francis, and he stepped ashore on Lowland
earth.




BOOK III




CHAPTER XV

THE HOUSE OF BROUGHTON


By the afternoon of the next day Francis had put many broad Lanark and
Renfrew cornfields between himself and the sea, and had come to the
upmost streams of Clyde, where the land begins to fall away towards
pleasant Tweeddale. He had bought a horse with some of his Highland
gold, since his business demanded speed, and ridden through the quiet
Whig clachans with none to gainsay him. Only at the change-house of
Roberton did he stop to wet his dry lips with ale. The landlord was an
honest, sunburnt countryman, so Francis ventured a question.

"What like is Tweeddale now when the steer is over? Are there still
Murrays to vex it?"

The man looked suspicion for a second and quietly stroked his right
cheek. By luck Francis knew the current Jacobite sign and responded.

"I ken but ae thing o' the state o' affairs in Brochtoun," said the man,
"The Leddy was bidin' there hersel', but yestreen yin came bye on a blae
horse and syne yin on a broun, and I think the last was awfu' like the
shape o' the Laird. Hae ye ony word yoursel'?"

"None save that soon there's like to be a flittin' from Brochtoun
House."

"Across the water belike?" said the man.

"Maybe scarcely so far," said Francis.

"But he'll ne'er be ta'en. Brochtoun's a dour bit, but the lave o'
Tweeddale is leal and no Whiggish ava'."

"I have nought to tell you," said Francis, "but if you do not hear
within a week that Mr. John Murray went up the Edinboro' road wi' a
company o' dragoons to keep him cheery, then thank God for saving a poor
gentleman from himself." And he rode on, leaving the man a prey of vague
suspicions.

The flush of early summer was on hill and wildwood as he rode from the
green moor-road into the shadowy vale. To one sick of rock and heather
and the sour unkindly odours of moss and torrent, the place seemed
goodly beyond dreams. It was mid-afternoon, and in the mellow glow all
was softened, touched with enchantment and old romance. The glen was
asleep; scarcely a murmur of water reached his ears; the white stone
cottages by the meadow-edge, the grey walls of the Place among the
trees, the faint lines of far-away mountains,--all were part of an
ancient primordial peace o' the world. And the air of the place
bewitched him till he lost all settled thoughts. Before he had been
puzzling sore over the knots in his destiny and striving to form a clear
plan of conduct. Now he was in a fairyland of sentiment, where a woman's
face shone ever from the still and golden skies.

He came on the Edinburgh highway above the bridge of the burn, some
hundreds of yards from the road to the Place. His heart began to beat
painfully at the thought of the near meeting. The whirligig of time had
been playing pranks since that morning a year before when he had ridden
down Edinburgh streets to the North. And what had been the end of his
mission? Dust and ashes! He had no news but the worst, news of
treachery, of suffering and black fortune. Was she likely to find
pleasure in his presence for all his high-flown dreams of service? And
at the thought Francis brought his horse to a walk and braced himself
for the inevitable.

Suddenly, at a turn of the bridge, he came full before the eyes of a
party of three who were riding leisurely up towards the great avenue.
They turned round at the sound of steps, and his heart stood still,
while he felt the blood palpitate about his forehead. For the meeting he
longed for and dreaded had come. The lady rode between two tall,
harsh-looking gentlemen, one a grey-headed man with a soldier's bearing,
the other younger, but with the same grim, narrow features. A far-away
resemblance in the eyes made him hastily set them down as distant
kinsmen.

At the sight of him the lady's eye grew wide with wonder, and she
involuntarily drew rein. Then she nodded to her companions.

"Wait for me, Henry," she said, "I have a moment's business with this
gentleman," and she turned and cantered to the bridge-end.

"You have returned, Mr. Birkenshaw," said she. "Have you any news for
me?"

For a little Francis could only look. Her face was so pale and thin, her
eyes so impenetrably sad, that he was lost in pity. Then, "I took your
message to the Lord Lovat," he said lamely, "but was prevented from
returning by a sore sickness. I saw the Prince on the eve of Culloden,
and was by his side in the battle. I followed him to Gortuleg, and
there, finding the Lord Lovat, I conceived it to be my duty to attach
myself to his cause. Now I am come from him on a matter which closely
concerns yourself."

"You have done well," she said. "I heard that you had reached Lovat from
other sources, and when no further news came of you, I had thought you
were dead. I am glad to see you safe. But I cannot wait longer lest I
make my friends impatient. You have done my errand loyally, and I thank
you from my heart. I would offer you the hospitality of my house were it
not old and half-dismantled; but the village-inn will receive you for
the night. I will lay no more toilsome missions on you. Farewell, Mr.
Birkenshaw." And ere he could say a word she had ridden up to the
others.

Francis' heart sank to the ground. This was the dismissal, the end of
his long service. For this he had endured sickness and weariness, cold
mosses and the cruel hills. She had used him only as a servant, when he
had thought he was a friend. His humiliation was bitter, his
disappointment so utter as to benumb his mind. In a state of dreary
bemazement he turned his horse's head to the village.

But he had told her of private news, and she had not waited to listen.
What woman, least of all what woman of her eager temper, could have
acted thus? And then her talk of the inn--and with this, light broke in
upon his brain. She had feared suspicion on the part of the two
sour-looking cavaliers. She had to all intents bidden him go to the inn
and await her further commands. Clearly she would find ways and means to
visit him. The thought was so wholly comforting that he fell into a
state of unreasoning joy. She seemed solitary and friendless; then he,
and he alone, would right her wrongs. This pale-cheeked lady was not the
glorious beauty he had left, but she was something finer, subtler, more
enchanting, pure gold refined in the furnace of sorrow.

The landlord of the inn was changed, the stout old Whig being dead, and
a zealous Murray's man reigning in his stead. He eyed Francis with
undisguised annoyance, clearly suspecting the designs of a stranger so
near a noted harbour of the outlawed. Nor did Francis improve matters by
his cunning questions to find out the man's leanings. The host adopted a
robustious Whig tone, and professed a violent love for Hanover and all
its appurtenances. This compelled the other to a like avowal of loyalty,
and soon the two stood in a posture of mutual suspicion. Then the main
purpose of his errand began to stir in Francis's heart, and he asked
cautiously about the Laird's whereabouts, if haply he were yet lurking
in the place. The man affected secrecy and drew him aside.

"Ye ken the tap house in the clachan," he said. "Weel, that's John
Bertram's, and at its backside is a bit gairrden. There abune the tattie
beds is a kind o' hole in the solid rock, whaur Murray has been hiding
thae twae days."

The news fired Francis to action. Could he but get speech of Murray all
might yet be well, false faith might be prevented, and the honour of a
great family saved. He learned his directions from the man, and made his
way up the fields to the garden back. With some pains he pierced the
thick thorn hedge and found himself in a lone strip of ground, half
planted with greens and half the bare rock of the hill. By dint of much
searching he found a hole of some dimensions, and bearing marks of
recent use. But now it was empty, utterly. When he came out he saw
through the dusk a face at an open window in the cottage watching him
closely. He ran down to the garden foot, but ere he reached it the
window was shut and closely barred; and though he knocked hard at the
back door he could get no admittance.

In some irritation he made his way back to the inn, where he found the
landlord waiting with a clouded face.

"Why the Devil did you send me on such a goose-chase, sir?" Francis
asked fiercely. "Where is Murray?"

"Let that be," said the man, sullenly. "Look ye here, sir. This is a
letter sent to you this moment from a certain lady. Now, before ye get a
sicht o' 't, ye will tell me plainly your way of thinking, for I will
see ye damned afore I will have this lady come to any hurt."

The man stood so fully revealed by his words that Francis felt the need
of caution no longer. "Why, man," he cried, "I am honest to the
backbone. I have just come from the North with news for my Lady. I was
by the Prince's side at Culloden, and am not a week from my Lord Lovat's
company."

The landlord looked relieved, and gave him the note without further
scruple. It proved to be a mere line to arrange an hour of meeting. Nine
of the evening was the time she fixed, when with her servant she would
seek Mr. Birkenshaw's presence. Francis read it and dropped it into the
fire.

"Perhaps you will tell me now where the Laird lies," said he.

"Till this morning he was in that hole I telled ye o', and I kenna why
he left it. He micht hae lain there canty for months. This countryside
was ill-inclined to him, but there's no a man wad cheep a word o' where
he was hidin'. But this morning he gaed off to Powmood to his
guid-brither's, and I sair misdoot if he'll find it as quiet a biggin'.
The mail gaed bye the day wi' twae-three lads that hadna the look o'
Moffat dealers. I wis I kent if they gaed bye Powmood."

Francis groaned in spirit. This was the confirmation of his worst fears.
Even now the man might be in the Government's hands with all his weight
of secret knowledge. His first thought was to fly to Polmood and strive
by main force to arrest calamity. But the thought of his own frailty
deterred him, and, moreover, it was near the hour appointed for the
meeting with Mrs. Murray. Even as he waited the clock struck the
half-hour; so he went upstairs to spend the thirty minutes in snatching
supper.

He had finished his meal and sat watching the firelight strive with the
last fading glow of day on the wainscotted walls. He felt very
melancholy, what with the ruin of a great cause and the futility of his
little plans. Of what worth was he after all save to follow a greater's
lead? He had not it in him to originate or to command. Something of his
boyish sickness for cutting a fine figure in life came back to him at
the moment, and added a pang to his regrets. And bitterer than all was
the thought of his mistress's sorrows, of the long loneliness and shame
which lay like a pall athwart her future.

Then when he had lost all cognisance of the present and was deep in
dismal fancies, the door opened and two women entered. One was a maid, a
little, rosy-faced countrywoman, and the other was the lady of his
dreams. She advanced to greet him with both hands held out after her
impulsive fashion, and before he knew he had taken them and led her to a
seat. She wore a heavy dark cloak, and when at length she laid it aside,
there were no bright robes beneath, only a sombre gown which made her
white face paler. Her manner, too, had changed utterly. Of old she had
looked at him with the calm, sovereign air of a mistress, now there was
hesitation, diffidence, the tremulousness of grief.

"You understood me, Mr. Birkenshaw. I was vexed to turn from you so
hastily, but my cousins of Romanno are ever suspicious. And now I can
thank you for doing my work so well. In this lamentable confusion, when
the best blood has been spilled like water, it is a pleasure to see a
kenned face. And you will have heard, sir, I am desolate now, and have
no one to look to save such honest gentlemen as serve me out of good
will," and she smiled a little ghost of a smile.

Francis' blood was painfully stirred. He could not bear to see her
sitting there so changed from her high estate. A great tumult of
compassion arose in his soul.

"And now for your news," she said, "for I believe you have something to
tell me in private. My maid is a sharer of all my secrets."

Here was a quandary for the unhappy man. How could he tell this pale
heroic woman of her husband's perfidy? It seemed cruel beyond thought,
and his heart failed him.

"It had to do with your husband," he stammered; "but if--"

He got no further, for at the word "husband" he saw she knew all. She
covered her face with her hands and her bosom heaved with her sobbing.
"Oh, it is true," she cried. "I am near crazy. I have fought--Oh my
God!--I have fought to prevent it, but I could not. I knew his heart,
but he denied it when I asked him, and put me off with smooth phrases
till it was too late. And now he has gone to Polmood, and I am left to
curse my woman's weakness. And he was the King's friend, the first man
in Scotland to stand by the Prince, and the wisest head in his
councils." She rocked herself to and fro in an impotence of agony.

Suddenly she rose to her feet and had flung herself beside him with her
hands on his arm. "Oh, save me from myself," she cried. "I shall go
mad, I have been alone for so long and my mind is sick with care. Oh,
help me, help, do not go away. The Saints sent you here to-day, and I
have been alone so long, and I have no friends but you." And she ended
in stormy tears.

Francis was at his wit's end with sorrow and perplexity. To see his
proud mistress humbled pierced him to the heart. He raised her and with
the help of the maid reduced her to something like calm. All the while
there was an undercurrent of crazy delight. Now at last she had summoned
him to her aid, he need fear no rival in her service any more; and at
the thought he felt the ragged ends of his life gather to a centre. Here
lay his duty and task; his toil was but beginning.

At that moment through the window came the noise of a carriage driving
rapidly along the highway to the North. It had the sound of a great
equipage, and Francis instinctively drew back to the shadow of the
curtain. Then came the sound of a stopping at the inn-door. The three in
the room looked at each other in fear; even Mrs. Murray's eyes lost
their vacancy. Francis peeped through the curtain's edge, but all he
could see was a splash of light in the mid-road from the carriage lamps
and the open inn-door. There was the sound of a man alighting, then of
some talking with the landlord, in which the remaining inmates seemed to
join. Then the man re-entered, the door was closed, and the echo of
wheels died in the village street.

Francis rushed from the room with a foreboding of tragedy. He met the
landlord at the stair-head with a face somewhat whiter than his own.
There was no need of question; the man's look was eloquent of all.

"It's twae captains frae the Castle," he faltered, "and Murray o'
Brochtoun is sitting atween them."




CHAPTER XVI

A COUNCIL OF HONOUR


When Francis came to the house on the next forenoon he found it silent
as a mausoleum. The smokeless chimney, the wide avenue beginning to show
traces of lack of gardening, the great mass of untrimmed blossom on wall
and border, and the sealed, dusty windows seemed to tell of a masterless
home. Curlews screamed over the flower-garden, and in one spot where the
heather had encroached on a clipped lawn two melancholy peacocks
strutted in the confusion.

The solemn maid opened the door to him and took him to the self-same
room where he had sat that night a year before and waited on the lady
with the lamp. The same air of lost splendour which had afflicted him
without, oppressed him within,--the deep rich wainscotting, the carved
shelves of books, the emblazoned mantelpiece, all with a subtle
atmosphere of neglect and disuse. The carpet still bore the mark of a
man's mud-stained boot: here doubtless the Secretary Murray had bidden
farewell to his house and his honour.

Then Mrs. Murray came to greet him, and led him to a summer-room looking
out upon the hill and the western valley. She was no more the distracted
woman of yesterday, but composed and pale, with heroism at her lips and
eyes weary of life. Francis trembled at the sight of her, for this face
argued some quixotic resolve and he anticipated troublous days. Night
had worked changes in his temper. He had lost his first tumultuous anger
and grief; the fervours of his spirit had abated and left his soul cold
and exceeding bleak. He wavered nothing from his purpose, but he would
have welcomed gladly yesterday's high sentiment. What though it were but
vain elation, it had at least made the world roseate for an hour. Now he
was a wiser, stronger man, but one with teeth set and his back to the
wall, fighting against inclination, prudence, and his own unregenerate
heart.

But this new mood of his lady's matched his own, and relieved him of one
difficulty. For with all his compassion he had a horror of tears, a
shrinking from the pathetic; and the spectacle of a weak woman looking
to him alone for aid could in certain moods arouse only repugnance. But
now all dealings between the two were passionless and kindly. This tall
lady was again the mistress, and he waited to do her bidding. He asked
her purposes.

"There can be but one way," said she. "He will go to London, and there I
must follow him. I cannot hope to mend matters, for I am poor and have
little purchase, but I may see him and try. I have no hope, Mr.
Birkenshaw, but it is better to press on in some sort of endeavour than
eat out my heart here in despair."

"But where can you bide in London?" asked Francis. It was his duty to
look after the plain fact in the wrapping of the romantic.

"I do not know," she said, "unless with my cousin Lady Manorwater, who
is of my religion, and if all else fails will take me with her
over-seas."

"But how will you make the journey?" he asked.

"Why, how would I make it but alone, with my own horses and the one
servant who is left me?" she said, with a faint attempt at vivacity.

"But who is to see to your lodging on the road and guide you safe
through an unsettled country?" he asked again.

"Ah, I cannot tell. I must use my mother wit--and there is all the need
in the world for hurry;" and she twisted her hands with a sad gesture of
impotence.

"And above all, my lady, is it likely that you will convince your
husband in a hurried sight of him, if you failed before his arrest when
you had leisure and safety?"

"I can but try," she said simply. Then, "Oh, Mr. Birkenshaw, the thing
is less a journey of hope than of despair. I well know that I have left
nothing undone, and that may be a solace in the dark years that remain
to me."

She spoke so sadly that Francis was moved, and the old sentiment began
to rise in his heart.

"I owe a duty to--a great Highland lord," he said, "which I must
sometime fulfil. If you go to the South I go also. Our journeys have the
same purpose and may well lie together, and perhaps I may help you in
some of the difficulties of the road."

At his words, her face shone for a moment with gratitude, then it
suddenly paled. "I will only be a drag, and my company will be the
least safe in the world for you. I am already deep in your debt, and I
cannot accept this service."

"But if the lord be the Lord Lovat," said Francis, "if I have sworn to
him that I would keep the Secretary from any such step though I followed
him to the Tower, will this not change your decision?"

"But you said yourself that the errand was idle. How will you get a
sight of him; and even if you see him how will you bring him to a better
mind?"

"I can but trust to chance to show me a way," said he, speaking thoughts
which had been with him on his road from the Highland glens. "I do not
value my life at overmuch, and for a desperate man there are many paths.
But if the mischief is not done and he still lie unconfessed in the
Tower, there is some hope; for a road may be found out of that place
even for Mr. Murray of Broughton." Yet while he spoke he felt the
futility of such a scheme--these two folk in a moorland house half a
thousand miles from the capital, plotting a great state crime.

But to the lady it seemed a way out of all perplexities. "We can do as
Lady Nithsdaill did, as Anne Carew and Sir John Haltwhistle, and many
others. Oh what a thing is a bold man's mind! With you to help me I have
hope, and I thank you from my heart, for it is most noble and generous
to risk your life in my desperate cause. I cannot thank you, but God
knows I shall ever remember." And as cheek and brow flushed with the
emotion of the feelings, Francis for a moment sat lord and king in a
crazy palace of cloud.

"We must not delay," said she, "for they will let no grass grow under
their feet now they have got him. I have already made preparations for
the journey, and I cannot see how two people should not travel quicker
than a body of horse. There is my maid Anne who will follow me to the
end of the world, and I will take a serving-man to see to the horses.
You will find me the road, Mr. Francis?"

Francis felt anew the desperation of his quest, but he had not the heart
to throw obstacles in the way. This heroic lady might bid him steal the
crown-jewels, were her mind to be set at ease by such a deed.

"I accept the charge, my lady. God grant we meet with a happy fortune!"

"Nay, but I will have no 'my ladies' or 'Mrs. Murrays' or 'madames,'"
she cried. "Do you not see that the quest is ours, and we cannot enter
upon it with a hedge of formalities between us? You have shown yourself
a gallant gentleman, sir, and we set out on this journey as sister and
brother. You will be Francis to me, and let me be Margaret, and then we
shall be the better friends." She spoke simply, but a blush rose to her
cheek, and she played with the tassel of her chair.

Francis bowed, himself in turn violently out of composure. It was a wise
rule for both; but the sudden change in his position, the dizzy
companionship of a dream, threw him out of his bearings.

He rose and went to a window which looked over a courtyard to a long
wooded valley. There was now no bustle in the place, no moving of
horses, nor running of serving-men. Only in a corner stood a great
travelling-coach, which a single groom had washed and made ready, and
was passing a brush over the panels.

Mrs. Murray had come over to his side, and looked on at the picture. He
could not forbear to glance at her as she stood by his shoulder, so
tall that her hair was but little below his cheek; and he noticed that
her eye had filled as she gazed.

"What is the fellow doing?" he asked.

"He is doing my commands," she said. "Can you not see his work? He is
painting out the arms of Murray from the panel, that no roadside passer
may know them and witness the tragedy of an old house."

He looked, and sure enough the man had all but obliterated any colour
from the level black wood.

"It was a handsome coat as one might see in all the land," she said
softly, as if speaking to herself. "First and fourth there was the old
coat of Murray, three silver mullets on an azure chief with a black
hunting-horn below on a silver field; second, it bore three silver
fraises for the kinship to the house of Fraser, and third, the three
gold cushions of the vanished house of Romanno. Did you know the motto
and crest of Mr. Secretary Murray, Francis? There it is; Robin is almost
at it, and soon it will be no more. A dove with an olive branch, and
_Pacis nuntia_ for a device! Now I wonder what old raider chose that
foolish text to set below his arms. I had never heard that the Murrays
carried peace to all men in their hearts, save--Ah, God help me!--that
traitor's peace that one of the house is now seeking! A dove with an
olive branch. Ay, it is suitable irony, and I praise the wit and
foresight of the old cynic who first wrote it. At any rate it is all
done with now, and I go out to the world without blazon or history.
Heigho, I feel quit of a load, and yet I am melancholy to-day over the
end of so long a story."

Then Francis took his leave and went down to the village, where he found
the landlord and held long consultation; for much of Mrs. Murray's own
possessions were to be left in his charge against that seizure of the
house which must soon follow. But the main point was the line of
journey, and here he found a ready informant. For in the old days of the
'15 this man had travelled far into the Midlands of England, and since
then had gone many times to the South with droves of cattle. He drew up
an itinerary as far as his knowledge permitted, and gave it into
Francis' keeping, adding many prudent hints about lodging by the way and
the least frequented paths. The honest fellow had much ado to speak
clearly, for grief at the melancholy fortunes of his mistress choked
his voice and confused his judgment "We hae a' our troubles in thae
times," he cried, "but to see the sair end fa' on our puir feckless
leddy is eneuch to wring tears frae a heidstane. The men are to bide
canty at hame, but the women must up and awa' to weir their herts on a
desperate ploy. Lord, siccan days!"

When he returned to the house on some small errand it was already
drawing toward evening. He found Margaret in the same west-looking room,
fingering for the last time her treasures. "I must carry little," she
said in answer to his look, "for a burdenless rider gangs easily, as the
folk say, so I am taking a last look at certain old things for which I
have a sort of affection. Men sit loose in those matters, but we women
are cumbered about with a host of memories, and must always have our
trinkets." She placed some jewels in their case, and shutting it went
towards a spinet which stood by the window. "I used to play old tunes on
it," she said, "for the amusement of my father when he tired of idleness
in his latter days. It's a long farewell to my spinet as to all else,
but I must play one last air before I shut it. Have you any favourite
catch, Francis?"

Francis shook his head, for in truth he had little music in his soul
save of the large rough-and-ready order.

"Then I will play you an old tune of the Cause, which loyal ladies have
sung for many years and will doubtless sing for years to come, seeing
that there is little hope of their dreams being fulfilled. It is called
'Lady Keith's Lament,' and the music was made by the King's own piper,
who was a Macrimmon of the Macleods. It goes haltingly to a spinet, but
you shall hear it." And she played a wild melody, singing to it some
such words as these:--

    "A' are gane, the gude, the kindly,
      Low in the moss and far on the sea,
    Men o' the North, men o' the muirlands,
      Brave to battle and laith to flee.
    I was aince a lady o' pride,
      High my hame abune the heather;
    Now my silken gown I tine,
      I maun fare in wind and weather.

    "Kin and kith in weary battle
      By stranger waters across the faem
    Fell, and dying had mind o' sweet Argos,
      The man of auld and the hills of hame.
    The ship is rocking by the pier,
      The hour draws nigh when we maun pairt.
    Then fare thee weel, my loved, my dear,
      Bide I canna, though breaks my hert."

"They are rude, simple verses," she said, "but to me they are
extraordinarily touching. There are some other lines which tell of a
brighter hope." And with some enthusiasm in her voice she sang:--

    "But though I now maun wander dowie,
      And drap the tear on cheek sae pale,
    Yet shall our dule be turned to joy,
      For God maun let the richt prevail.
    My father was a gude lord's son,
      My mither was an earl's daughter;
    And I'll be Lady Keith again
      The day the King comes ower the water."

As she finished, she sat for a long time motionless, looking out of the
western windows. As for Francis, he fell into a like mood, and neither
spoke for long. The sight of this woman, young, unfortunate, bright with
a long-descended, subtle beauty, sitting there singing a sad old ballad
on that last day of calm before the stormy morrow, moved him more than
he could tell. Something in the haunting notes of her voice, the sunset
light on her hair, or the long line of golden hill-land which gleamed
from the window, seemed to him an epitome of all the fervours and
sorrows of life. He sat musing till Margaret rose and shut the spinet.

"It is time to have done with old songs, Francis. Henceforth it is
grimmer work for you and me."




CHAPTER XVII

A JOURNEY TO THE SOUTH


From Broughton to Moffat is a short day's journey even for an old
travelling coach, but the way is rough and grass-grown up the narrow
glen of Tweed to the high moors and the precipitous source of the Annan.
Thence in a long day through pleasant Annandale you may come to the
Bridge of Esk and pass on to Carlisle walls. The two days were days of
sunny, windless weather, and the clear air of the hill-tops put an edge
upon the travellers' spirits. Margaret seemed to forget her troubles,
and after the way of woman, was interested in each passing face. As for
Francis he had a heavier burden, but even he accepted the inevitable. He
served the lady in a somewhat clumsy fashion, for he had no notion of
the civilities of a fine society; but as the hours passed the two grew
very excellent companions, while some spice of humour enlivened their
sombre talk. For take any two clear and honest souls and set them in
such a position; you will find them at first constrained and foolish,
but as time goes on they will know each other for the human being that
he or she may be, and look sanely into the future.

Carlisle was in an extraordinary stir, what with things political and
the yearly summer fair. Daily batches of prisoners came South to these
walls, and soon many brave hearts sighed out their life from a tow on
the Gallows-hill. Farmers from the hills were everywhere in the streets,
drovers and wide-eyed shepherds thronged the ports; and each inn was
filled with brown-faced bedlamites who made the night hideous with their
din. In a little inn near the south gate, Francis found lodging; this
much he had settled at Broughton, for the place was quiet, and the
landlord no ill friend to the lost cause. There he left Margaret and her
two servants, and went out to the streets in the late evening to ponder
over the tangle of his affairs.

Money must soon be thought of, for his funds were already running low.
He had no knowledge of the lady's wealth, but though she had been amply
rich he would have died sooner than let her pay a single crown. When
she came to Lady Manorwater's house his task would be ended; meantime
she was his charge, the journey was by his advice, and he alone would
see to the lawing. It was an old-faced, grim-looking man who stalked
through the rabble of drovers in the noisy, darkening street.

Suddenly he brushed against a man who stared full in his eyes. It was
the face of an elderly grizzled gentleman, clad in stout, simple country
clothes, with a long jowl and deep eyebrows. Something in the air
demanded recognition, and Francis involuntarily stopped. The man did
likewise, and for a second the two blocked the causeway. Then like a
flash came a happy intuition to Francis' brain. "May I have a word with
you, sir?" he asked.

The stranger nodded and led the way across the street to a little
public, where he climbed a stair to a room above the causeway. The place
was still yellow with sunset, and in a mirror on the wall Francis saw
his own reflection. He almost cried aloud, for save for the twenty or
thirty years' difference in age his was almost a double of his
companion's face. His chance thought was now certainty.

"And now, sir, what is your business with me?" said the elder man.

"Why, my business is simple," said Francis. "I have come to claim
kinship, sir. You, I think, are my uncle Robert?"

"So," said the man solemnly, "I jaloused as much the first glisk I got
of ye. Ye will be Francie's son. Ye favour him, save that ye're sae
muckle wiser-lookin' as ye seem less drunken. God, man, ye have the
Birkenshaw glower maist uncannily in your een. Ye are the leevin' image
o' my father. And what is it ye seek wi' me, nevoy Francis? Abune a',
what brings ye to Carlisle toun in thae days o' war?"

"Listen to me," said the other, "and I will tell ye a bit story." And
briefly he told of the last year, of his wanderings and his toils, and
now of his final charge. The man heard him out with a grim face.

"Ye are like your kind, Francie, you and your trokings wi' outlawed
Jaicobites. There was never a Birkenshaw afore took up wi' sic a bairnly
cause."

"I have heard bits o' the family history," said Francis, "but I never
heard that it was the wont of our folk to leave a man when his back was
at the wall or to refuse a woman aid."

"Ye may put it that way if ye like," said the man, "but ye canna deny
that it's unprofitable."

"Then I leave that branch of the family's work to you, my dear uncle. I
am content if I can keep a coat on my back. Has Markit paid well these
last years?"

"Off and on," grumbled the other. "The land's ower unsettled for
peaceable folk to dae guid business."

"Because I am about to ask the loan of a hundred guineas," said Francis,
boldly.

"A hundred guineas," cried Mr. Robert Birkenshaw. "A hundred golden
guineas! The man's mad! Heard ye ever the like o' sic a speiring! A
hundred guineas, quotha! Mair like a hundred pence!"

"But you will give it me?" said Francis, "seeing that a journey cannot
be decently finished without gold."

"But what's the need o' the journey, man? Gang back to Dysart to Gregor
Shillinglaw and clerk awa' among the writer lads like an honest man."

"You know fine you would never have me do that," said Francis. "Is our
auld house fallen so low as to neglect a plain duty for lack of gear?"

Mr. Robert Birkenshaw presented a lamentable sight, his face red with
emotion and twitching between love of his gold and the impulses of an
honest heart. "What can I dae?" he cried miserably. "I'm no mean and I
wad uphaud the family honour, but I'm dooms puir though folk ca' me
rich." Then with a splutter he took out a bag of gold from a flap-pocket
and flung it on the table. "Damn ye, Francie, tak' it," he cried. "Tak'
it and use it weel. I've nae bairns, and whae's to lend to the family if
it's no mysel'? Ye say ye are serving a leddy. Sit ye doon, and we'll
drink to her if she's bonny. What's her name?"

At the mention of it the old pagan cried aloud in glee: "I aince saw
her, and she was as bonny as Queen Mary. Francie, lad, it's a guid
errand ye're on, and I'll risk anither hundred if ye need it." And so
the lady's health was drunk and Francis sat on at the wine till late,
hearing old fragments of family tales. So when at last he sought the
inn, it was with some affection for his fellows and a more kindly
outlook on life.

It would be hard to follow that hurried journey after the style of an
itinerary, for it was monotonous and without interest save the casual
variation of weather. Among the Westmoreland hills the drought broke in
a chain of storms which set every hill-water roaring and made the fords
hard for a carriage to pass. It was weary work both for Francis without
on his horse, opposed to the buffeting of rain, and for Margaret and her
maid within, who had no outlook but the dull streaks of water against
the panes and a perpetual line of rough hill-land. Sometimes it cleared
towards evening, and then the lady would dismount and walk down the
yellowing mountain track where the pools glowed in links of pure fire.
In these hours she became cheerful, but in the long black showers she
was sad and absent-minded, dwelling always on the past and its
melancholy change. As for Francis, he was so old a wayfarer that he
endured all weathers with equanimity. Only, when soaked to the skin and
with no sight but blank hills, he would begin to think on the futility
of his errand and torment his brain with projects of vain endeavour.

But with the Lowlands came July days when the sun was hot in the sky
and the roads white underfoot. It was now that Margaret recovered her
spirits and found humour in every halting-place and something pleasant
to her curiosity in the vivid life of the road. Her cheeks got a touch
of colour, till she no longer formed such a sharp contrast to the gipsy
Francis. Yet the life had still all the hardships of a journey, for the
roads were broken in many places with recent passage of armies, the inns
were filled with an air of suspicion, and piteous sights were always at
hand to remind of war. This was in the North, but as they drew to the
Midlands they found a lush and settled country which seemed terribly
unfriendly to fugitives from a mourning land. For the first time they
felt their presence among a people of alien sentiments and blood, a
peaceable folk who dwelt among orderly hedgerows and neat, garden-like
fields. And with the thought the bright and bitter past grew more
irrevocable, and both alike were plagued with hapless memories.

For Francis each day meant much careful forethought and not seldom
high-handed intrusion. As it chanced, many of the inns were filled with
the stream of travellers between North and South, and to get comfort he
had to assume a high air of dignity and show a bluff self-confidence he
did not feel. Fortunately his purse was heavy, and in this easy land he
found money a passport to more things than in the flinty North. But his
mind was in a perpetual worry, for to haggle about the little things of
life had never been his task before, and he found it irksome. His
consolation lay in Margaret's entire immunity from such trivial cares;
if her life must be sorrowful and vain, it would at least be free from
the grossness of worry.

The road was uneventful though it was the morning after a war, and one
incident alone is worthy of record. In a little town on the Warwick
borders they halted for a night, and after dusk Francis went out as his
custom was to sober his thoughts with the night air. A year ago he had
been a boy; now he felt himself an aging broken man, driven in curb
along a stony path of virtue, a man passionate yet austere, with a cold,
scrupulous heart and a head the prey of every vagrom fancy. A man with
great capacities, truly, but scarcely a man to live pleasantly, at ease
with himself and the world.

Round the gate of the inn-yard there was the usual idle throng. As he
jostled his way through, one turned sharply round, recognition shining
in his eyes. He put his hand on Francis' shoulder and followed him to
the street. "Mr. Birkenshaw, my dear man," he cried, "do I trust my ain
een? What brings ye here o' a' places on earth? I have had hell's luck
since I left you at Leidburn, but you look stout and flourishing."

When Francis recognised in the tattered lad the great Starkie, his
former friend, his first feeling was of rage, fierce and unthinking.
What right had this tatterdemalion, this ghost from the past, to come
here and remind him of his folly, when he loathed it with his whole
heart and soul? It was a pitiable figure, unshaven, haggard, with blear
eyes and a shambling walk,--a thing all but over the verge of beggary.
And this had once claimed him as companion and now called him friend!

"Ye're the lad for me, Mr. Birkenshaw. Ye've the master mind. I see
ye've your braw leddy here that flyted on ye at Leidburn. Ye wad sune
mak' it up wi' her, for ye were a lad wi' weemen?" And he wandered into
obscenity.

Francis took him by the collar and held him firm. "See here, Mr. Stark,
if ye mention the lady's name again I will fling ye over the brig as I
once flung ye into a ditch. You and me quitted partnership lang syne. If
it's money ye want I will help ye to the best of my power, but let there
be no talk of friendship."

The boy whimpered. "What's ta'en ye at an auld freend?" he cried.

"We have taken different roads, you and me," said Francis.

"Ye may set yoursel' abune me if ye please. I am puir and ye are rich,
but I never took anither man's wife to traivel the high-roads wi' me."

Francis' fingers itched for his ears. "I am not a patient man, as ye
know, Mr. Stark."

"Patient or no, what do I care? But there's ae thing I can see wi' my
een, and that is that there's some o' His Majesty's sodgers wad be glad
to ken that ye were here and this leddy wi' ye." He shrieked out his
words while cunning twinkled in his little eyes.

"If ye say a word more, sir, or if ye dare but try what ye threaten, by
God I'll send ye to your Master or ever ye can cheep. Do ye think I'm
to be trifled wi' that ye try my hand here?" And he spoke so fiercely
and with such angry eyes that the wretched Starkie seemed to shrivel up
into apology.

"God, Francie!" he cried, "gie me siller and let me off, for I'm
starving."

Francis thrust some coins into his dirty palm and watched him turn with
scarcely a word of thanks and shuffle back to the inn. He was angry with
himself, angry and ashamed. He almost pitied the wretch, and yet he
loathed him and feared him and all the black past which he stood for.
All his little self-composure was sent broadcast on the winds. He knew
himself for the ragged, inconstant fool that he was, with but a thought
dividing his veneer of virtue from the stark blackguardism of the
vagrant. It was a stormy-souled man who tossed that night upon his bed,
and rose in the morning with something greyer and bleaker in his
determination.

As they passed out into the street a hollow-faced boy, still half-tipsy
from the night's debauch, cried good morning and a pleasant journey.

"Who is that man?" asked Margaret, carelessly.

"He was one of my former friends," said Francis, and rode forward.

       *       *       *       *       *

As they came near the city where the roads from the North converged into
one great highway, their journey was hindered with the constant passing
of military. Once more they were in the air of war, for a prisoner would
pass, or a forlorn and anxious band of his kinsfolk, or a great northern
lord or lady--all on their way to the great centre of fate. Francis felt
no fear of recognition, for his part, though played in the thick of
affairs, had been secret from the multitude. Once only, when a lady whom
he knew for Miss Cranstoun of Gair, looked curiously at the tall, brown,
sombre cavalier, did he turn away his face in doubt. But for the most
part he held his head carelessly amid the throng of wayfarers.

The last night's halting-place was in a little town on the edge of
Hertfordshire, a place among green meadows and rushy waters. At its one
inn they found no one but a groom rubbing down a horse in the courtyard,
and from the look of beast and man it seemed as if some person of
importance were using the hostel. In the one dining-room when both sat
down to supper a man was looking out of the window and drumming on the
pane. He turned round at their entrance, and in a second Francis had in
his mind the Highland inn and the carousing by the fire; for in the
stranger he saw the rosy face and heavy figure of Forbes of Culloden,
the Lord President.

He felt he was recognised, he felt too that this man was well aware who
was the lady who sat down with him. As it chanced Margaret, who had seen
the great lawyer scores of times, saw in him only a chance stranger; the
dusk was gathering, she was tired with the day's toil, and she had no
memory for faces. Forbes bowed to her curtly and without a word
withdrew.

Francis ate his meal in a fever of anxiety. This man held both in his
hands, and on the one former occasion of meeting he had insulted him,
using as a weapon the name of this very lady. He knew of the popular
report which made the Lord President's name a synonym for kindliness;
but would he forgive so arch an offender, would he believe in the
honesty of one who had so recently played a very different part? As soon
as he could he left the room on some pretext to go in search of him.

He found him on the threshold, smoking with great deliberation and
watching the glow of sunset over the fields. "So we meet again, Mr.
Birkenshaw?" he observed drily.

"It is on that point I have come to speak, my lord," said Francis. "You
favour the other side in politics, but folk say that you are not a man
that loves extremes. You see our wretched position, and I would ask your
forbearance."

"Ye are a Jacobite renegade," said the other, "and ye ask me to let ye
be. That I can understand. But what for does this lady go with you? Are
ye up to some new devilry, Mr. Birkenshaw? For if ye are, lad, and would
drag the bonniest woman in the land into the same bog, then by God I
will make you pay for it with every bone in your body." And his honest
old eyes twinkled with wrath.

Then Francis with a shamefast air had to set to and tell him the history
of the whole business, leaving out only such parts as concerned Lovat
and the Prince. The old man stopped him once and again, bidding him say
no more about this or that matter, as it might be best for him to hear
least. To the whole tale of Murray of Broughton he listened eagerly,
murmuring under his breath. Then he took Francis' hand, and stared hard
into his eyes till he was fain to shut them against that steely
glitter.

"I believe ye to be a true man, Mr. Birkenshaw, and I ask your pardon.
But this is a most lamentable tale ye have to tell me. Lord, man, I am
driven crazy wi' the cruelties that are being perpetrated in the North
on the puir people. I have run to and fro atween Stair and Tweeddale and
got satisfaction nowhere. Aye, I have even licked the boots o'
Cumberland, that haggis of a man, and suffered his clownish insults. I
have been fleein' here and there night and day on the business of that
fule Cromarty, and now I come up here to try once more and wring water
out of a stane. Heard ye o' the death o' the two lords, Balmerino and
Kilmarnock? God, there was a tale for history! And now there may be a
third, if a' ye say is true, seeing that my Lord Lovat is taken."

"Taken!" cried Francis; "when, how?"

"I kenna," said the other, shortly. "But a day syne a coach passed me
and a great guard o' dragoons. I asked at the captain whae was his
prisoner and he bade me look inside; and there, grinning like a
wull-cat, was the auld wizened face o' the Fraser."




CHAPTER XVIII

OF AN INTERVIEW IN AN UNLIKELY PLACE


Lady Manorwater greeted her cousin with a dignified kindliness. She was
a pale woman of middle age, with the faded blue eyes and yellow hair of
one type of Scotswoman. Fervently devout, as was the habit of her house,
she carried her devotion beyond the other Catholic ladies of her time,
and seemed ever posturing as a colourless saint. She thought of politics
and her kinsfolk only as things far away; for her the living reality of
life was found in the little chapel where at frequent hours she would
retire to a dim world of candles and paternosters. Her two sons were
boys in their early teens; and these with the servants made up the whole
household in Great Marlow Street. A perpetual air of peril hung over the
house, for men came there on short visits by day and night whose names
had been proclaimed at law, and under the cloak of her pious and
unworldly name treason had flourished and many a secret conclave had
met undisturbed. She welcomed her cousin with kindness, for she had ever
been fond of the beautiful girl; more, it pleased her that she should
flee to her of all her kin at this hour of danger. It seemed like a
recognition of that sanctity she believed to be hers.

Towards Francis she wore the stiffness which she used to all mankind. He
was beyond the circle of her thoughts, unrelated by blood and alien in
creed. The place was in no disorder; the life was as full of
punctiliousness as in a great house in times of peace. At first it
irritated Francis, for he who had come on solemn business had no
inclination for a farce of comfort. But soon he was glad, for it
distracted Margaret's thoughts and restored her to some portion of the
elegancies of life. For her there was no going in and out and sharing in
the gaieties of town. London was bitterly hostile to her cause; the
streets were full of a mob shouting coarse party cries; and every day
almost there was some fresh death for the populace to gape at. So the
women abode indoors, while Francis wandered fiercely about the city.

As soon as he might, he sought out the lodging of the Lord President in
the Haymarket. Forbes sat before a pile of papers, in a fine reek of
tobacco smoke, while two harassed clerks scribbled in a corner. At the
sight of the visitor he opened the door to a smaller sitting-room and
bade him follow.

"Well, Mr. Birkenshaw, how have ye been employing your time hereaways?"
he asked.

"As best I could," said Francis. "This much I know, that Murray lies in
the Tower with his honour still untarnished. Traitor or no, his
treachery has not yet been put to proof."

"True enough," said Forbes. "His examination begins next week. Have ye
any work on hand ye may desire my help in?"

"It is my wish to get speech of the Secretary."

Forbes hummed a little. "It is unconstitutional," he said, "but it might
be managed, though I see not what it will serve. Ye will be bearing him
messages from his wife and kin?"

"I will be striving to bring him to a better mind," said Francis. "You
know what I mean, my lord."

"Pardon me, sir, I ken nothing but what I choose to ken. Besides, when
so much is thrust down my throat there is no need for idle guesses;" and
he looked up with a twinkle of intelligence which served the other's
purpose.

There was silence for a little, while street cries floated up and a
catch of a song which the Lord President whistled. "I know the
desperation of my plans," said Francis; "but then it is no time for
little makeshifts."

"If ye kenned the circumstances o' the time better, sir, ye might think
them a little more desperate. Here are you, a lad without penetration,
with no knowledge of the world, and ye are for visiting a noted prisoner
of state and 'bringing him to a better mind;'" and the old man laughed
sarcastically.

"I fight for my own hand," said Francis, gloomily; "I can at least harm
no man but myself."

Forbes looked at him shrewdly for a second, and then drew his chair
closer with a serious face.

"Would ye wonder greatly if I were to give ye some hint of the way the
wind blows, Mr. Francis? Would it amaze ye to hear that those in power
are none so keen about this affair of the Secretary? His intention is
ower plain to mistake, and I can tell ye, sir, there are many on our
side forbye myself that do not like it. The rising is utterly broken,
and two great lords have already paid the penalty with their heads. It
is a civilised people making war within itself, and the best statesmen
have no craving for a glut of blood. Now mark ye what happens. The thing
appears to be near a natural end. Scores of the common folk have swung
for it, and there is hope that the worst is over. Then here comes the
arch-plotter and gives himself up of his own free-will. Any bairn can
make the inference. Mr. Murray has something to tell, and there is but
one person in our hands that such a tale can affect. This person, as it
chances, is of great fame and far stricken in years. Ye follow my words,
Mr. Birkenshaw?"

Francis nodded, seeing a gleam of light.

"It is true that all the bloodhounds of the courts and the common ruck
of the nation are never tired of butchery; but I speak of the great and
wise who have the real ordering of the land, and alone think truly of
its welfare. Do you not perceive that this has some bearing on your
case, sir?"

"Then I may hope--" began Francis, eagerly.

"Softly, sir," said the Lord President. "I have nothing to do with what
you hope. As an officer of law it is my business to see that you hope
nothing. I was declaring a point of pure theory. Supposing, sir,
supposing, I say, that the King's government woke up to-morrow and found
Mr. Murray no longer a resident in a certain place, the best and most
powerful would be the least sorry."

"But the thing you speak of is near impossible."

"Not so," said the other. "It would be possible--again I consider it in
theory--for a powerful minister even to use some influence to see that
the chance of the aforesaid gentleman's departure at least was there.
The guard might be selected with some discretion on that particular
night, Mr. Francis."

Francis was looking steadfastly at the floor, in a profound study.

"I think I have followed, my lord," he said, looking up. "I cannot tell
you my gratitude."

"There is a further matter to mention," said Forbes. "I presume that in
such a supposed event a certain gentleman would fall into the hands of
the law," and he looked with meaning.

"It seems the only way," said Francis.

"Then, of course, you have understood that the full rigour of the law's
vengeance would fall on such an one. Whatever the Government might think
in its private heart, it must show a severe front to the world. The lad
that sought to fill Mr. Secretary's place would swing from a tow ere the
week was out."

"I have considered it, my lord," said Francis, though with a whitening
face.

"Yet, supposing the lad to have a great spirit, he would deem his neck's
safety a small thing compared with the honour of his friends?"

"Doubtless he would," said Francis, between closed teeth.

At this the Lord President rose and gathered his papers together. "I
have to tell ye, sir," he said gravely, "that I honour ye for a very
gallant gentleman." Then, as he conducted him to the door of his
lodging, he spoke quietly in his ear, "I would recommend the third night
from this if any one thought of putting the supposititious theory into
practice."

Hitherto a certain gentleman has come but little into our tale; now he
must enter for an hour ere taking a long farewell. Times had changed
with John Murray of Broughton, and it was a careworn, peevish man who
sat in his prison chamber looking forth at the evening sky from a barred
slit in the massive stone. He still wore the stained clothes he had
travelled in, and what with the bare furnishing and the high, shadowy
vaulting the scene and the man looked dismally comfortless. Most of his
time he spent in pacing the length of his chamber, with knitted brow and
lips that muttered ceaselessly. The toil had soon worn him thin; he had
lost his old florid colour; and what with his past privations and his
present disquietude, it was a mere shade of his old self that sat
moodily in the dusk of the evening.

Suddenly the door was opened by a turnkey and a visitor was ushered in.
The warder left without locking the door, and the stranger advanced to
his side. He had risen and stood inquiringly regarding a tall man,
dressed plainly, and with a great horseman's jacket turned up about his
ears. Not till he had advanced some paces to the light did he see
clearly, and then he went forward to greet him with outstretched hands.
For it was a mark of the Secretary that no name or face which he once
heard or saw was ever forgotten.

"God bless you, Mr. Birkenshaw, and I am blithe to get a sight of an old
face. I am dying in these walls for some token that my friends have not
forgotten me. But how comes it that you are admitted? for they keep me
here as close as a mad tyke. I trust you have run into no grave personal
risk on account of my worthless self?"

"It matters little how I came in, sir, and be assured I am running no
risk. I have come to have some talk with you on a little private matter.
But I would inquire after your health. How do you bear the mournful
events of these latter days?" Francis spoke shortly but not uncivilly,
for indeed the man's old rank and present discomfort impelled him to
some politeness.

"Alas for a poor people!" cried the Secretary, sinking back in his
chair. "It is the way of all great causes, when brave hearts perish and
senseless force crushes out loyalty and honour. You saw the saddest day
in Scotland's history, unless there have been more awful crimes since I
last saw the open sky." He spoke in the style of Lovat, but to Francis,
knowing the man only too shrewdly, the words seemed void of meaning.

"Many honest fellows have been swinging on Hairibee," said he, "and two
great lords have met their doom on the Tower hill."

The Secretary shut his lips to hide the quivering. "Even so," he said,
"death is the end of all our desires. Did you bring any message from our
friends in the North?"

"None," said Francis, "for my errand was but a matter of personal
satisfaction. I came to ask if you fulfilled my request before the
unhappy day at Culloden?" And he looked hard at the other.

"Why, yes," said Murray, simply. "The letters have long perished. But
what makes you so eager to ken?"

"The Lord Lovat is now in his enemies' hands," said Francis, "and, as
there is like to be much brought against him, I wished to have no sad
reflections that remissness of mine had brought him to his undoing. I do
not hint anything of blame to you in the matter, but if perchance the
thing had been mislaid, it would be a formidable article in the
charge."

Murray ignored the slur and fastened on the mere statement, but it was
clear that the words moved him.

"Lovat is taken, you say?" he cried. "God, that is the end of the Cause
with a vengeance, for they have gotten the greatest intellect in all
Scotland or France. Have they brought him here?"

"It is some days since," said Francis.

"But what can they prove against him?" he asked excitedly. "He wasna out
with the rest no more than Traquair and the Macleods. They're safe
enough in their hidy-holes, and wherefore no Lovat? Ye say they will
have much matter to bring against him, but it beats me to tell where
they'll get a boddle's worth. I tell ye, sir, it will be a glorious
acquittal." And he looked on Francis with keen, sagacious little eyes.

To his hearer every word was offensive, so clearly did it argue a black
purpose. No doubt the man acted his part cunningly, but there was a trip
in his tongue, a falter in his readiness which belied him. Francis
stared on him with gathering brows.

"And how is it with yourself, Mr. Murray? Are you too to have a glorious
acquittal, or are ye deep in the black books of the Government, like
the honest gentlemen who are gone?"

The Secretary shook his head and passed his hand over his eyes.

"My days are numbered," he said, "numbered like the rest. I cannot look
for mercy, for I have been at my master's side in all his calamities,
and my name is near as well kenned as his own. Think you they will let
me go now they have got me?" and even in his fright his breast seemed to
swell with importance. "I could have wished to die in my own land by the
side of the brave Keppoch at Culloden or among the heather hills; but I
have screwed my courage to the cauld death which awaits me. After all,
it is but a short and easy passage to a better world."

Francis sat in silence, his eyes scanning him up and down so intently
that the voice quavered in the last words.

"It is of this chiefly that I came to speak," he said. "Your friends in
the North, me among the rest, and many others whom it would not be well
to name, have considered that you, as the Prince's best friend, would be
a sore loss to the Cause. So by perilous ways we have contrived a means
whereby you may escape and get safely over the water."

Murray lifted his head, and looked with wild eyes upon the speaker.

"It's a device of little subtilty, and it has been used before with some
success. You and I are much of a height. You have only to change clothes
with me, wrap this same riding-cloak about your ears, and take your
leave. I have purposely made the clothing somewhat kenspeckle, that the
men may notice it and pay less heed to the face. The warders are picked
men, and more than one are in the secret. At the last gate you will meet
one of our own countrymen, an Argyle Campbell, who will give you the
word, 'To which passage?' You have but to answer, 'To the Fords of
Tyne,' and he will follow you beyond the bounds, and see you safely to
the door of your wife's lodging. There all is ready for flight this very
evening, and ere morn you may be on the high seas. But you must hasten,
Mr. Murray, for the hours pass."

But the Secretary's face showed no joyful surprise, no eagerness, only
discomfort, timidity, and doubt. He rose stammering from his chair.

"I am grateful, Mr. Birkenshaw, grateful to you and all the good
friends. Be sure I am grateful;" and he walked hastily up and down.
"But, my lad, it canna be. You purpose to stay in my place. Do ye not
see that it means that your life will be forfeit, that you alone will be
left to bear the wrath of a tricked government? I may be soured and
ill-grained, but God knows I have not come to such a depth as to allow
such a cruel sacrifice. A young life," he repeated. "It canna be."

"But I am willing," cried Francis. "Think what the thing involves. I am
a landless, kinless man, and no one will mourn my end. Nay, it would be
a matter of highest satisfaction to myself that I could die so well. But
you have a wife, you are a member of a great house, above all, you are
one of the few props of a feeble cause." Even as he spoke the words
disgusted him. He saw treachery written so plainly on this man's face
that he would have been glad to catch him by the neck and drive him out
perforce. Something of his feelings must have been apparent, for Murray
asked suddenly,--

"Had Meg anything to do with this errand? It would be like one of her
daft games."

"Surely your wife has a hand in the matter," said Francis, "seeing that
even now she is waiting to carry you with her to France."

"I might have guessed it," he said. "But what sort of scheme is it? How
could you think it so easy to win aboard when the sea-shore is watched
by the King's dragoons like the Tower courtyard? It is mere madness, Mr.
Birkenshaw; I canna consent."

Now in these last words the true reason of all lay apparent. He had some
plan on hand which would bring him certain safety, and he had no mind to
change this security for the difficult chance of a midnight flight. He
was so stripped to the framework of his nature that Francis could all
but read his thoughts in his eye, and at the sight the young man's blood
ran hot with rage.

Then of his own accord Murray brought the farce to its close. He sat
down squarely in his chair, and looked guilelessly at the other. "You
have my best thanks, but the thing is beyond my power. I cannot hold my
safety, nay, even the safety of a great cause, dearer than my honour,
and if I consented to your plan my conscience would never give me
another moment's peace. I am no coward, sir, to fear death, and in
waiting here I but await the doom of many of my own kinsmen and kindest
friends."

He stopped abruptly, for Francis stood over him, a fury of hate. "My
God, sir," he cried, "if you value your soul, stop this canting talk. I
will tell you why you will not leave this place. You have some Judas
secret to tell to our enemies which you hope may save your own coward
neck and give you back your possessions. That is the hell's trick you
would play, and may the Lord in heaven have pity on you, you lying dog,
for I will have none."

For a second the Secretary's life hung in the balance. The "Birkenshaw
glower," once famed over Tweeddale, burned deep in the eyes of this
young avenging fury. His fingers twitched at his sword's handle. The
thought of slaying this man and so putting an end to all the difficulty,
had occurred to him once and again, and had always been put from him.
Now it rose uppermost in his mind. The thought of a woman's tears drove
him frantic, and Francis for one instant was on the verge of murder,
while Murray lay back gasping in his chair.

But the white, weak, unwholesome face deterred him. The man seemed worn
with toils, seemed spiritless, friendless, and feeble. He could not draw
upon him any more than upon a woman. With a cry of despair he turned
upon his heel and left the room.

At the last gate the Campbell hailed him. "To what passage?" he asked.

"To the Fords--" said Francis, mechanically, while the man made as if to
join him. Then, recollecting himself, "No, no, Heaven knows where," he
cried almost with tears, and hastened out into the darkness.

       *       *       *       *       *

As Margaret sat watching by the window in a pitiful state of anxiety,
Francis came roughly into the room. She ran swiftly forward and laid a
hand on his arm, for such little tendernesses had been common in her
ways of late.

"Why, you are back!" she cried, "and I had never thought to see you
again;" and with all her striving she could not keep a ring of
exultation from her words.

"It is all up, my dear lady," said Francis, hoarsely. "I was a useless
messenger. The Secretary has scruples about leaving his present
quarters, and I was unable to persuade him bye them." And with a
foolish smile he laid his horseman's cloak on the table.

Margaret stood looking with sad, drooped eyes. "Nevertheless you have
done your most, Francis."

But he was not listening. He had set himself down before the table, and
had leaned his head on both hands. "Oh," he cried, "I have no gift of
success. Whatever I take up miscarries. I am but a poor sort of
fushonless creature, meant to be guided by stronger men. All that I do
ends in moonshine. I can see no light in the whole black pit of this
life."

"Nay, Francis," said she, "surely there is some comfort, for though you
could not save others, you have brought yourself back unharmed."

It was a silly woman's argument, but he, lifting his eyes carelessly at
the words, saw something in the lady's face which made him redden and
stare hard out of the window.




CHAPTER XIX

THE LAST OF THE SECRETARY


Amid a crowd of notables and fashionables, where the wits of the
coffee-houses rubbed elbows with the beaus of the Mall, Francis pressed
to hear the last scene in the drama which had been played athwart his
own life. The Lord President had gained him admission, and so this
morning he stood in the great hushed Westminster chamber, watching the
lords in their robes, the frowning bench of judges, and at the bar the
huddled figure of the old lord with his two piercing eyes still mocking
at the world.

It was a farce even to his layman's eye,--a cruel, fantastic farce, with
death waiting to pull down the curtain. Lovat had no aid but his own
tongue, and for days he had toiled, cross-questioning witnesses on the
other side, putting the necessary inquiries to his own supporters, till
his face had grown ashen grey and he had swooned at the bar. His four
counsel were of the most ineffectual cast, and would have turned the
whole affair into an ugly mimicry by catching at points of form but for
the old man's restraining voice. At first he did his work well, even
jocularly, but as his weariness grew greater his questions lost all
their pith and he relapsed into dignity and silence. The bearing of the
old traitor struck Francis with admiration,--at once deferential and
free, defiant and courteous. He had his compliments for the Lords, his
tags of quotation, his excellent sentiments; but the certainty of death
seemed to give a nobility to what had seemed before a silly farrago.

But as Francis listened and waited, the finishing touch was added to the
picture; for into the witness-box came a shamefast figure, the very one
he had held at his mercy in that Tower chamber, and to which he had
shown a way of life it would have none of. Every eye in the assembly
turned to these square feet of wood where the witness stood meekly,
looking with conciliating eyes to the benches of Lords and nervously
fingering his cravat. Every face was eager with curiosity, some dark
with ill-concealed disgust, while among the few friends of the prisoner
there were twitching lips and hands hard at side.

Lovat had sunk in a stupor of weakness, and had not noticed the new
arrival. Murray answered questions glibly and precisely in a tone of
utmost cheerfulness. Then the clerk read the statement wherein he, John
Murray, umquhile of Broughton, with the deepest penitence for past
errors, with promise of amends and hope of his Majesty's infinite
clemency, told to his gracious captors the full tale of the late
lamentable events, more especially the part played by Simon Fraser,
called the Lord Lovat, certain documents being adduced in clear proof of
such statements. As the soft voice of the witness and then the hard
clerk-like tones fell on his ear the old lord roused himself to
interest. The shaggy head grew erect, and the eyes played with the
unhappy man as he shifted his balance from one foot to the other and
sought in all that place for a friendly glance. Ere the thing was
finished he had hazarded a look at the man he had ruined and then drawn
back in terror. He could not face the silent mockery of those eyes, the
eyes of the wisest head in Scotland. Much they had seen, those eyes, at
home and abroad, at the King's court and in the wild Stratherick. And
now, with no fear of man, they looked through the one who had lent the
chief hand to his overthrow.

The Lord High Steward asked if he would question the witness.

Lovat bowed politely. "Nay, my lord," he said, "I think Mr. Murray and I
already understand each other;" and the smile on his lips was caught by
the rest till Francis found himself all but laughing at the singular
comedy.

The clerk rose according to custom, to read the portion of the defence
which had been set in writing against Murray's charges. It was excellent
rhetoric, stinging words under which the unfortunate gentleman cowered
in some misery.

"Murray, the most abandoned of mankind," ran the paper, "who hath sought
like another Catiline to patch up a broken fortune upon the ruin and
distress of his native country; stealing into France to enter upon
engagements upon, your Lordships may believe, the most sacred oaths of
fidelity, and now appearing at your Lordships' bar to betray these very
secrets, which he confessed he had drawn from the person he called his
lord, his prince and master, under the greatest confidence." So the
clerk read, while the assembly grinned, and Lovat smacked his lips at
his own invective.

Francis had no heart for more, but as he turned to push his way back, he
caught a glimpse of the Lord President in the crowd. He also seemed
about to leave, and the two met in the great corridor.

"This is the work of your friends," said Francis, wildly.

"It is the wark of my friends, and I am bitter ashamed. The fules! To
set an auld man on a pinnacle to mock at till he gets him an appearance
of virtue he never could have worn elsewhere. I have been Sim Fraser's
neist neighbour all my days, and though I could not help but like the
man, I kenned him ower weel to trust him with a boddle. But I think
shame to see him worried like a rabbit in a dyke, and him wi' his grey
hairs. Be sure, Mr. Birkenshaw, the Fraser will come out of the game
with the maist credit."

"I want a further favour, my lord," said Francis, "and it is that I be
allowed to visit Lord Lovat before his end. There are some matters that
I would like to talk over, and certain passages between us want redding
up."

Forbes knit his brows. "It canna be till the trial's ower," he said.
"They keep him ower close. But after--it is possible. Maybe you might
win to him the last night."

Francis thanked him and hurried out to the cheerful life of the street.
The place was full of cries and the rattle of vehicles, the shouts of
chairmen, and the hum of voices. It was a fresh, breathing world, and
above was the infinite unchangeable blue of sky. For a second the
cobwebs of miserable intrigue were cleared from his brain. He saw the
littleness of man's schemes, the ease of death, the cataclysm of hopes
and fears, as in a sharp moment of time. But again he was back at his
sad memories. Here in this alien place the last blow was being struck at
a cause he had stood for. Tush! It was little he cared about the Cause,
it was the people he had served and loved, the old memories and
sentiments of the few against the many, which were being swallowed up in
this callous present.

For days he wandered fiercely in the streets, picking up fragments of
news and cursing his powerlessness. He heard of the verdict, and then of
the sentence of death received with a cheerful composure, even with a
joke. At the hearing his old admiration revived for the indomitable man
who could wait on the last enemy with a gibe. He counted the hours till
the day of meeting. This, after all, was the fortunate warrior, who
could go out of life with a twitch of his cloak and a word of scorn to
his tormentors. The grossness, the cunning, the malice were all
forgotten; he remembered only Lovat of the many generous sentiments, the
great chief of Fraser, and the wisest brain in the North.

In the chill of the last Wednesday evening he was admitted at the gate
of the Tower and led to the prisoner's chamber. As they went down the
passage there were sounds of riotous mirth coming from the melancholy
place. The warder looked hopelessly bewildered. "This is the way those
wild Scots prepare for death," he cried. "I have had twenty-three honest
gentlemen in my hands before they took their last walk, and all spent
their last evening in meditation and prayer." When the door was opened
the room seemed filled with tobacco reek and the fumes of punch. Through
the smoke Francis saw some few of Lovat's near kin, making as merry as
if it were an alehouse in Inverness. General Williamson, the
Lieutenant-colonel of the Tower, sat opposite the prisoner, apparently
in some discomfort. The old lord himself was reading from a paper, with
a pair of enormous spectacles stuck on his nose and a handkerchief in
his hand. A fire burned in the grate, but the prisoner's blood seemed
chilly, for he wore enormous hose turned up over his knees and a pair of
buckled slippers. His face had lost its pallor and shone with the heat
and the wine.

"I am touched," cried he, looking at the paper. "Here's this
body--Paynter they call him, a noble-hearted fellow for certain--writes
to Mr. Secretary Pelham, and I hear he has petitioned his Majesty
likewise. And what do ye think the purport is? He wants the honour of
being beheaded in the Lord Lovat's stead. See the creature fair fleeches
and begs! 'I pray you, sir, intercede with the King that the Lord Lovat
may be pardoned.' These are his words." And he took off his spectacles,
wiped them carefully, and then surveyed the company. "I thank God that
there are still good men in the world. 'Greater love than this hath no
man, that a man lay down his life for a friend.' What think ye o' that,
gentlemen?"

The Lieutenant said something about the man's being crazed.

"And indeed I am of your opinion," said Lovat. "Clearly the creature
must be daft. For see what he calls me--'a vile traitor, an ungrateful
wretch.' Weel, weel, I doubt the poor gentleman is weary of living in
this wicked world."

Then, catching sight of Francis, "Eh, here's a welcome face!" he cried,
"my ancient friend Francie come to bid the auld man guid e'en. Here's a
seat by my side, lad," and he pointed to a chair near the fireplace.
"Now, sir, this is a merry meeting, and, as we cannot reasonably drink
to many mair, we will even drink to it as it stands." And the Frasers
filled up their glasses with due solemnity.

"Ye did weel, sir," he said, speaking in Francis' ear. "I have heard
from Duncan Forbes of your efforts, and be sure I do not forget them.
But, lad, I couldna jouk my fate, and I must e'en submit. I thought I
got a glisk o' ye in the Hall some days syne. Did ye hear my defence
that I had the clerk set to read? Was it no bonny, and was it no dine to
see yon scunnering creature, Murray, shift about as I told the world
what I kenned of him?"

Then he fell into a long strain of moralising after his fashion, but
the near approach of death gave a flavour to his words which exalted
them almost to wisdom. "See, Mr. Birkenshaw," he said simply, "ye are a
young man and may take a word of counsel. I have maybe made a hash of my
life, for I was ower wild and headstrong, and maybe ower given to the
sins of the flesh. But after all I have had my sport out o' life. I have
had my fingers in every pie that's been making, and, faith, I have
created some sort of a steer in the world. And that would ever be my
counsel to young blood--to gang forrit, set the world in a bleeze if ye
can, and if ye get your hair singit as I've got mine, ye need never care
for the sake o' the graund spectacle."

He took out his watch and considered. "Twelve hours more in this
middenstead of a world," he said, speaking loud to all. "Now mind ye,
Shamus Fraser," and he turned to one of his friends, "ye hear the last
injunctions of your chief. Ye will have my body buried in the kirk of
Kirkhill, for there lie all the generations of Lovat, and I've put a
note in my will by which I leave bountith to all the pipers frae John o'
Groats to Edinburgh to play before my body. Lord, it will be a braw
music, and I wish I could be there to hear it. But it's like that the
Government will not allow it," he said sadly. "King Geordie is no sae
mensefu' as King Jamie, and he has nae sense o' humour." He looked at
the embers for a little and then turned round more cheerfully. "At any
rate all the old women in my own country will cry the coronach, and it
will be a wonderful crying, for I am the greatest chief in all the
Highlands. And I will never see the heather hills more, nor the rigs o'
Corryarrick;" and for a second his mocking face relaxed into plain
sorrow.

"I drink a good journey to you, Mac Shimei," and a tall Fraser rose with
a trembling glass.

"Amen," said Lovat, tossing off a cup, and then emptying his pipe ashes
on the hearth. "See, gentlemen, the end of human life is like this snuff
o' tobacco. A moment we are bleezing finely, and then we go out and
nothing is left but grey ashes." And he sighed and sat for a little with
his head on his breast.

He turned to the Lieutenant and asked to see his little daughter.
"Where's the wee bairn that used to come in and play hunt-the-gowk wi'
me? She'll no be in bed yet, and I would like to bid farewell to her.
She was a fine little lass."

"I fear, my lord, you cannot see her," said the man, huskily. "She has
done nothing but weep for two days since ever she heard of your fate.
She is a little traitor at heart, for she abuses the King and his judges
most roundly. I heard her only yesterday designing an escape for you
from prison such as was given to the Apostles at Philippi. She will miss
her play-fellow most bitterly."

"Will she indeed?" said the old lord. "God bless the dear child, and
make her eternally happy, for she is a good, kind-hearted lass."

Shortly after this he desired that all should leave him save Francis and
the Lieutenant. When they were alone he asked the latter to fetch Mr.
Baker, the chaplain of the Sardinian ambassador, to give him the last
comforts of the Church. "But I had thought you a Presbyterian, my lord,"
said the Lieutenant. "You passed for such through most of your career."

"Policy often makes havoc wi' a man's creed," said Lovat, smiling
wickedly, "but I have ever abode in the faith of the only true Kirk. I
adhere to the rock on which Christ built his gospel. I ground my faith
upon St. Peter and the succession of pastors from him down to the
present, and I reject and renounce all sects and communities that are
rejected by the Kirk. That is my confession of faith, and if you think
it of sufficient importance to the world, sir, I will put it down in
writing."

"I did not know you were a theologian," said the other, in some wonder.

"The world little kens what I am," said Lovat, and it was hard to tell
whether the whole thing was jest or earnest. "Some day mayhap the world
will do me justice, and the little children of the clan will be proud to
think of their chief. But I've been like the Almighty, hiding my ways in
the sea and my paths in the great waters, and it will take a wise man
and a cunning to find them out. Francis, you have seen much of me, and I
might have looked to you for a proper understanding of me, if ye hadna
been so thick in the heid and dour in your ain conceit."

"I have one question, my lord," said Francis. "I have bungled the trust
you laid on me, but I have striven to keep my word. Do you absolve me
from any blame in your death? It would let me lie down with an easier
heart."

"Absolve ye, lad? Freely; and mair, I have to thank ye kindly. I bid ye
good-bye, for there'll be little time the morn. Gang back to your ain
land, lad, and take my blessing with ye. And now I must ask ye to leave
me to myself for a little, that I may prepare for the putting away of
mortality."

"But, my lord," cried the Lieutenant, "I have heard that there are
differences even within your creed. The Sardinian chaplain has the name
of a rank Jesuit. Are you too of that persuasion?"

"A Jesuit?" said Lovat, with a twinkling eye and a gesture of doubt.
"Faith, no, when I think upon it, I am a Jansenist. But anything in the
shape o' a priest will serve my turn. Good-night to ye, gentlemen." And
with this last piece of mystification he bade them farewell.




CHAPTER XX

THE DEATH OF THE LORD LOVAT


The morning was mist and rain with a wind blowing from the east up the
packed streets. It was like a fte-day in the town with people in Sunday
clothes hastening Tower-wards. When Francis came down to the
dining-room, a maid was scrubbing the hearth, the windows were open, and
in the raw early chill there came a babble as of a city in expectation.
He had slept scarcely a wink, being full of thought and a kind of bitter
excitement. He knew the whole evil of Lovat's life, but this sounding
fate seemed to elevate him into the heroic. For Francis the world at the
moment held but one event and one man, and at the thought rage,
compassion, and regret made a medley of his feelings.

Margaret came down wrapped up in a thick cloak against the rawness of
the morning. She wore the heavy veil she had thought needful for the
open streets, and all her garments were of the sombrest black.

"I could not go dressed otherwise," she said. "I could not put on a fine
gown to witness the death of a friend. My cousin tells me to stay at
home, for I shall only break my heart to no purpose; but when so few of
his countrywomen will be near, I should think shame to be absent."

Tales of Lovat's deeds and last dying confession had been printed in
flying sheets, and were hawked up and down the causeways. The crush was
already setting eastward, and one man was telling to another his version
of this great affair. The name of this terrible outlawed monster had
been long in the people's ears, and now they were to have a sight of him
in all the pomp and contumely of a traitor's death. From the hanging
windows crowds of fine ladies had dared the morning air to look down
upon the throng; some even had risen early and in their coaches sought a
stand upon Tower hill.

The cheerful holiday crowd brought tears to Margaret's eyes, as Francis
with his great shoulders clove a way through, his dark, uncommon face
bringing him a certain respect.

"We are strangers in a strange place," she said sadly. "What do these
folk care for our broken King and people? And yet they say he had many
well-wishers in this place."

At Temple Bar the shrivelled heads of the Lords Balmerino and Kilmarnock
grimaced at the crowd. At the sight Margaret clung closer to his arm.
The rousing tale of Balmerino's conduct on the scaffold had stirred even
the most Whiggish blood, and she looked at the poor dumb mouth, her face
blanched with excitement, as in the old days when she had sat on
horseback watching the entrance of the Camerons.

"But he was young and strong," she cried, "and he might well face death
courageously. But my Lord Lovat is old and feeble, and he cannot stand
squarely against his foes." Then with a catching of the breath she would
have stopped. "Oh, it is horrible! And this is the issue of great
expectations!"

The whole hill was black with folk, and on stands were many more of the
better sort, all agape for the spectacle. The two halted yards off at
the verge of the dense throng, where some carriages stood waiting. Afar
like a toy building stood the scaffold with its bare timbers and the
black-draped block and the guarded alley leading thither from the Tower
gate. The thought of this one man alone or all but alone in this vast
hostile sea of faces stirred Francis wildly, and he could scarcely bide
still. The same thought was in Margaret's mind, for she looked with
piteous eyes at the thick wall of men. "Oh, that we could get near him,"
she cried, "that he might have kind faces to look upon at the end!"

As Francis looked round he saw in a coach among the others the Lord
President. At once he made his way to his side. "May I beg you, my
lord," he cried, "to watch over this lady and take her home when all is
over? I would fain get near Lovat to-day."

Forbes glanced at the slim, beautiful figure which he knew so well.
"With all my heart, Mr. Birkenshaw," he said, while he held out a hand
to Margaret. "The lady will see the last of our poor friend as well here
as elsewhere. I wish you God-speed on your errand."

"I shall win to him, though the crowd were ten times greater. It is
better to leave you than to stay." And in a second he was lost in the
thick of men.

For many minutes he struggled as only the desperate can, elbowing
fiercely, being struck again and again, gripping his opponents and
half-suffocating them, till he had forced his way past. Now and then he
would come to a knuckle of rising ground whence he saw the scaffold, and
always he noted gladly that it was empty. Weaker men were fainting all
about him, but his supple vigour had its effect, and soon he was
half-way through, and then only a quarter of the space was left. He was
breathless, hatless, his coat torn in many places, and his face sorely
scratched. Then, as he saw the wooden planks almost within reach, he
heard a great sigh of expectation go through the multitude, and the
tramp of men above the other din told him that Lovat was coming.

As he stood panting in the dense throng below, Lovat stood above him and
cast a curious glance round the assembly. It happened on Francis, and
his eager eyes told their tale. "I pray you, sir," he asked the
Sergeant, "to allow this young gentleman to come up beside me. He is a
dear friend, and has but newly arrived." The Sergeant, willing to
pleasure the old man, gave an order, the crowd was opened by soldiers,
and Francis found the way clear for him to ascend the platform. In a
moment he was by Lovat's side, a new spectator of the last act in the
play.

Around--apparently for miles--was a dim circle of faces, and a hum rose
from them, silent though they were, like the breathing of a great wild
beast. Now and again a woman's or a boy's scream would break the air,
only to be hushed again in the pitiless mass. It was as if one stood on
a pinnacle, watched by a million hungry eyes which bit into the soul.
Lovat cowered for a second, for no feeling is more awful for a moment
than to be one against a host; then his spirit came back to him, and he
turned to Francis, smiling.

"The last time I stood before men under the sky was at my ain Castle
Dounie," he said, "when I heartened my folk to die for the Prince. I am
like to need all the heartening myself now." Then a twinge took him, and
he all but fell into Francis' arms, while his clansman, Shamus Fraser,
ran forward to help him. Supported thus, he limped across the platform,
making a strange clatter in the quiet.

Suddenly in the midst of the crowd something horrible happened; for the
scaffolding of a stand gave way, and the erection with its inmates fell
on the packed array of heads. In a moment there was a wild panic, to
which soldiers fought their way with difficulty. For a little it seemed
as if a great catastrophe impended, for several men were taken up dead
and mangled, and the crowd was all but hysterical. Then slowly the
tumult subsided, the dead were borne out, and eyes turned again to the
scaffold.

Lovat had watched the scene with delight. "There's some o' them killed,"
he whispered breathlessly. "Weel, weel, so be it. The mair mischief the
better sport." Francis looked at him in amazement. A second ago he had
been ready to venerate this man as a hero; now, behold, it was the old
Lovat back again, a very malicious, jeering hero, laughing cruelly in
the article of death.

"The sport's bye," he said, as expectant silence reigned again, "and now
it's my turn to divert my friends. It's as weel, Francis, that it's an
easy job, demanding small exertion on my part, for I am a done auld
man."

His whole humour seemed to change, as if he felt that men expected
something high and heroical in his final bearing. He gave one last
glance at the crowd. "God save us," he cried, "why should there be such
a bustle about taking off an auld grey head that canna get up two steps
without two men to support it? Francie, your airm, my son!"

He limped up to the block, nodded cheerfully to the executioner, and
begged to see the axe. "It might be sharper," he said, "but it hasna far
to gang, and will maybe do." Then taking his gold-headed cane, he cried
to a young lad who stood weeping behind him, "Alistair, my dear lad,
take my staff and keep it weel for my sake. Ye've been a kind callant,
and I wish I had a better gift." The poor boy took it, crying very
bitterly, and turned away his face.

Then taking off his coat and cravat with Francis' aid, he laid them down
carefully, bidding the executioner keep them if he cared. Beside the
block stood his coffin, and stooping down he read the inscription.
"_Simon Dominus Fraser de Lovat_," he read, "_decollat tat. su 80_."
For some seconds he continued gazing, and then turned away with a sigh.
"Happily my fame does not rest on this short line, Francis," he said.
"But, indeed, what am I thinking of?" and he declaimed:--

    "'Nam genus et proavos, et qu non fecimus ipsi,
    Vix ea nostra voco.'"

He turned to Shamus Fraser, and taking both hands bade him farewell. "My
dear Shamus," he cried, "I am going to heaven, but you must continue to
crawl a little longer in this evil world." And then he spoke to him
shortly of his dying bequests, and his messages to his kinsfolk. The man
was white and speechless, his dark face working with suppressed tears.

Meantime Francis was in no better plight. He had been with this man in
fair and foul, he knew his innumerable vices, his treachery, his
selfishness, and yet in this last moment he could look on him only as a
heroic gentleman. On this scaffold in the midst of the waiting crowd he
lived again the days in the hot weather, the fury of the lost battle,
and the whole tale of his undoing; and always for a centre was the
figure of this man with whom all his toils had been shared. It was a
quivering hand that took Lovat's wrinkled palm, and his lips were drawn
to a thin line.

"And you, Francie," said the old lord, "what shall I say to you? You
have been more than a son to me, and, O lad, I wish you had been Master
o' Lovat, and we two would have set a different face upon the business.
You have the blessing of an auld man, my dear lad, and may you live long
and die happy and be kindly treated as you have been kind to me."

And then with great deliberation he turned to the block, and looking
over the throng uttered the wellworn line, the last in the mouth of the
hopeless,--

    "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."

The next moment he had kneeled down, and ere Francis could look clearly
the axe had fallen, and the head lay in the basket.

As, with brain in a ferment and eyes hot with unshed tears, he staggered
from the platform, he heard in the hushed silence the voice of the
headsman crying, "This is the head of a traitor!"

       *       *       *       *       *

With head lowered like a mad animal, Francis pushed his way through the
choking streets. Some turned to stare at him, but his speed was so great
that he left no time for more than a glance. A great impulse was on him
to run to the ends of the earth till the madness of his physical
strength and burning heart should be quelled. He comprehended the joys
of battle; he would have gloried in that hour to stand with his back to
the wall against a multitude. One insulted citizen gripped him by the
arm as if to demand some apology for jostling; but before he knew the
man was sitting in the gutter and Francis was many yards down the
street. And all the while there was the cold of rain about him and a
wind which blew grateful on his forehead. He was going out into the cold
earth, kinless, purposeless; yet a man who had once lived and dared.

When he came to his lodging, he found Margaret sunk motionless in a
chair in her outdoor clothes, her eyes fixed vacantly on the leaping
fire. She rose quickly with burning cheeks at his entrance.

"Oh, tell me all! I saw nothing save the horrid deed. How did my lord
bear himself to the end?"

Then Francis told her the whole tale, marvelling the while at his
excitement. His voice rose high ere he had done, and with unconscious
art he pictured the old lion in the midst of the crowd dying with a
brave word on his lips. He told of the last greetings and the message to
his kinsfolk. And all the while Margaret stood twining her hands, tears
shining in her eyes.

"It was great, it was the death of a hero. Oh, God send we all show as
brave a face to death. My heart has been bursting with rage all day,
Francis, and yet I am half crazy with joy. We have not failed, though
the Cause is lost and the Prince an exile, for we have shown a
poor-spirited people how gentlemen may die. I shall pray ever for the
soul of the Lord Lovat and the true men who have fallen. _Dona ternam
quietem, Domine_," and as the soft Latin fell from her lips, her wearied
nerves failed her, and she fled sobbing like a child.




CHAPTER XXI

THE TEMPTATION OF MR. FRANCIS


That night there was little sleep for Francis. The figures and deeds of
the day formed a long procession through his brain. He felt again in all
their acuteness the emotions which had branded his soul. The truth is
that the man was tired to death, what with physical labour and the more
wearing toil of spirit. He was no more the sober, passionless man who
had carried the message to Lovat in the North, but a tempest-tossed,
sorely-battered creature who had been strung to a pitch of high
excitement, and was now sinking to a dull recoil.

But when he got some quiet from such vain dreaming, he set himself to
shape out the future. It stretched grey and level before him,
featureless, even now irrevocable. There was but one thing for him to
do. For the last year he had been striving desperately to virtue. Now he
must return to the writer's office and his old evil reputation. He must
go back to Dysart and settle there as the sober man of law, and try to
work out for himself a position of respect. There must be no more
quixotry, no thought of mad capers in wars over sea. He must shape out
his salvation in the place he had been called to, and settle to a life
of loneliness cut off for ever from the past.

The thought was bleak, but he never wavered, for the man had true steel
and fire in his soul, and had the daring to face an age of melancholy
and routine, and he too in years but at the threshold of life. There
seemed even something grimly humourous in it all. That he who had been a
firebrand, all but an outlaw, should go back to the common task, was an
irony for the gods to laugh at.

But this outlook of his own was but a little matter; there remained the
graver question of the woman whose path fate had joined with his. He had
seen how day by day her eyes sought his with a growing confusion; even
in his blindness he had felt that this lady had come to regard all
things as less than a word of his mouth. He stood to her as a hero, girt
with the purple and fine gold of her fancy; he was the embodied Cause
for which she had striven; and now at the turning of the ways there
must come a day of reckoning. Her love was his for the accepting,--she
the great lady, with that delicate beauty and that marvellous spirit;
and for a second his heart beat exultantly. But the thought was
banished, scarcely even with regret. For this man had outgrown
temptation, and now this subtlest of all failed to touch him. He had but
to join his life with hers, to go abroad and push his fortunes aided by
her abundant wealth; it was a dazzling career which gleamed in the
avenues of the future. Yet the renunciation cost him little, for with
all his fire his nature was cold to the commoner human affections. He
was returning to the vulgarity of home; and always in his mind would
remain the image of the woman he had once toiled for. But to be with her
always, to bring her into the glare of common day and the pettiness of
household life,--he had no heart for such degradation. In his soul he
knew that each was better apart, living for the other's memory, fighting
the hard battle with the other's name on the lips. But for aught else he
was cold and careless; for his nature was capable of all the heroical
virtues, but unfit for the little moralities. He was ever in revolt from
the domestic, the eternal wanderer in the ways of the world. He had no
care for ease or settled delights, he must be ever up and following the
old hopeless, goalless path, even though it led through grey and dreary
years.

Lady Manorwater alone came to breakfast the next morning. He had always
been a little in fear of this austere virginal woman who carried
devotion writ on her face. She had an air of the monastic which seemed
strange to the prosaic Francis. But now she talked gravely and kindlily.

"It is now time for my cousin Margaret to make up her mind, Mr.
Birkenshaw. I have tried to induce her to bide with me, but she cannot
bear the thought of this land longer and declares she must go abroad.
She is of my religion, but I have never tried to influence her plans.
But she declares for a convent now. She would devote her life to God
after the many sorrows she has faced in this world; and I have not tried
to persuade her otherwise, for it would give her the days of rest which
only He can give to the weary."

"Where would she go?" he asked.

"I have already thought of that. I once knew the Abbess well at the
little convent of St. Thrse by Arras. For my sake she would gladly
receive the poor lass and tend her like a mother. It will vex me sorely
to part with Margaret, but I cannot grudge her to God. And she will be
happy if they can be happy who dwell in quiet and purity."

"And I too must be going," said Francis.

"And where?" said Lady Manorwater.

"I go North again, back to my own people."

"But why?" she said. "You are young and stirring. Is there not a better
field for you than that sad and bloodstained land? A word, and I can get
you service abroad, and then you would find a chance for a man's work."

"It cannot be," said Francis, resolutely. "I thank your ladyship, but I
have some faults to amend and some restitution to make before I can be
at peace with myself. Forbye I am but a pedestrian nature after all, and
cannot easily get old things out of my mind. I must bide in my own land,
for I cannot flee from myself, and to go to the foreign wars would be to
try to forget a sore heart in the hurry of battle."

Later in the forenoon a servant brought him word that her mistress
wished to speak with him. He found her in the library, where above the
fireplace the three lions' heads of Manorwater were cut deep in the
oak. She was standing by the window, and her face seemed pale above her
dark gown.

"Good morning, Francis," she said. "I was so weary with yesterday that I
was late of rising this morning. Our work is over now, my friend, so we
can take a rest."

"I have heard of your plans," he said. "Your cousin has told me that you
go to France to a convent. And I too am about to go, so it is time for
good-byes."

She bit her lips at the words, and her voice had a quaver. "These months
have tired me so that I longed for quiet to think and remember. Now that
my work is done and all that I have lived for made hopeless, you cannot
wonder that I wish for peace."

Francis listened with bowed head. "You can do no wrong, Margaret," he
said.

"And you?" she said suddenly; "what will you do?"

"I go back to where I came from."

"Oh, never," she cried. "It cannot be, it is too hideous and cruel. You
might hew your way to fortune wherever you pleased. There is always need
of a strong man all over the earth, and you are strong and sure."

He did not speak, but the words were bitter to him,--the very
quintessence of gall in his parting.

Then she turned round till she looked full in his eyes.

"You cannot mean it?" she said. "Ah, mercy! we have shared too many
hopes together, we cannot part thus and go each our way into the bleak
unknown. I was never fit for a life of piety, and you are too strong for
a narrow fate. Oh, take me, Francis, and let us go away together. I am
too noble a woman for God, it is a sacrifice which the Blessed Virgin
herself could not bear to look upon. I know that I am speaking of sin,
but what matters sin if we both can share it? Why, we might yet change
the woful fate of this land if we worked together."

In a deep-set mirror on the wall she caught a glimpse of her face.

"See, dear," she said, "I am near as tall as you," and she smiled
tremulously. "We are a handsome pair, and we will yet make great men bow
to us." And she laid her cheek on his shoulder.

"You are not angry with me?" she cried. "I know I am wicked, but I
cannot help it. I cannot part from you, and what are old foolish ties
to a woman's love? O my love, take me and let us face fortune hand in
hand."

Francis held her wrists very gently and looked into the deeps of her
marvellous eyes. His heart never wavered, but in his soul he felt a
great tenderness towards this beautiful, loving woman.

"Nay, dear," he said, "you know better than I that this cannot be. Long
ago you gave me a hand to raise me out of the mire, and I cannot have
you be false to yourself. Be sure that I shall ever have you in my mind
as the best and bravest woman God ever made. But we have each our own
ways to take, and one cannot fight the battle better by beginning it
with a foolish step. Marriage and love are for the peaceable settled
folk, but you and I are not of their order. For good or ill we are on
the open road of life, and we cannot turn back or aside."

Margaret covered her face with her hands when he let her go, and her
bosom heaved with sobbing. Then she lay back in a deep chair with closed
eyelids.

"I am so weary," she said, "and, oh, I am so foolish. You are right,
Francis, and God forgive me for my weakness. But we cannot forget each
other, and there in that foreign place my thoughts will always be of you
and the lost days. It is near the time for farewells, dear. Kiss me,
that I may have something to remember, for I am sure that no other
woman's lips will ever touch you."

With bursting heart he leaned over her, and for an instant the long
white arms were about his neck. Then she let him go, and he stumbled
from the room, a mere plaything of emotions.

       *       *       *       *       *

That evening the house was unwontedly gay, for some few Jacobite
gentlemen had been bidden to supper, and the friends of the Manorwaters
had come to bid good-byes before the journey into France. After the
fashion of the broken party they allowed no sign of melancholy to
appear, and the scene was as gay as if the time had been happy alike for
all. Francis was in no mood for any meeting with others, but he could
not in grace refuse to appear. In a little he was glad, for it comforted
him to see how the end of the drama was played with spirit. As he
watched the brave sight he felt how little a thing is failure in act if
the heart be unbroken.

But the vision of Margaret fairly surprised him. She had dressed herself
in her gayest gown, putting on her old jewels which had lain untouched
for months. Like a girl at the dawning of life she moved among the
guests, cheerful, witty, incomparably fresh and lovely. Once again she
was the _grande dame_ who had guided the Prince's councils and the
honest gentlemen who stood for his Cause. For a second, he felt an
overpowering, jealous craving for this woman, a repugnance to the
greyness of his lot. And then it passed, and he could look on her and be
thankful for this final spirit. It was the last brave flickering of life
before the ageless quiet of her destiny.




CHAPTER XXII

A LONG LEAVE-TAKING


The way lay over grassy ridges of hill and then at intervals among the
bracken and gnarled boles of a great wood. The mist of the morning lay
in all the far distances, and one might guess that behind the veil lay a
wild and tangled land, that the slope did not stop a little beyond the
edge of the haze but rose sheer into precipitous crags. It might have
been Scotland, and as the coach rumbled down the highway Margaret when
she looked to right and left saw a glimpse of a landscape now for ever
lost to her.

To Francis, who rode as before at her side, the same sentiment kept
recurring. It was the air and look of a northern glen, here in this soft
English south country. He noted Margaret's abstraction.

"I am looking my last at a sight I love dearly," she said. "Oh, is not
that cold, misty place like the kind country I have left? I can almost
smell the heather and the old fragrance of the fir-wood at Broughton.
You are happy, Francis, in your lot, for you will always be at home, and
sleep at the end among kindly folk."

Slowly the land changed till by the afternoon they were on the seaward
slopes and caught afar the long sweep of waters. In front rose the
spires of the little fishing town whence they were to sail, and on the
red roofs the evening light fell in a burning haze.

Amid the bustle of departure on the quay Margaret was left unnoticed.
She stood apart, under the weather-worn sea-wall, looking wistfully to
the maze of waters.

"There is a text from the Scriptures running in my head," she said.
"Some one of the prophets wrote it. It is, 'Weep not for the dead
neither bemoan her; but weep sore for her that goeth away, for she shall
return no more nor see her native country.' My life is ended, Francis,
for all my joy has perished."

"Nay, my dear lady," he said, with something rising in his throat, "you
will have many happy days, and you will forget old sorrows. These last
years have been but a little confusion of moorland wars, fought in the
wind and rain by a poor people. You will soon cease to think of them
and wonder at your present grief."

"Do you think so?" she said sadly. "I fear it will be very different
with me. It is not the way of our exiles to forget easily. Nay, rather
they fight all their battles with the old words in their heart, and at
the last, why, as my song says, they 'fall, and dying have mind of sweet
Argos.'"

Then she turned abruptly.

"How long will you take to be back in the North?"

"A matter of weeks," he said, "for it will be done on foot. I am a poor
man once more, and shall sell my horse before I start."

"And what will you do then?"

"Seek a place in Mr. Shillinglaw's office and give my mind to my work."

"And after that?"

"Why, I shall grow old, like all men, and wander about the doors. Then
death will come with a kindly face and I shall bid good-bye to the
world--perchance to find a better."

She smiled as if at the moment she saw the whole comic littleness of
life.

"Our ways are not so different. After the colours the sober grey, for
you as well as for me, Francis."

Lady Manorwater was already aboard, and Margaret followed. The cables
were slipped, and soon with a creaking of cordage and a flapping of
canvas the vessel stood out from the quay. Slowly the faces grew less,
till a mere blur of white marked where Margaret stood by the ship's
side. A kerchief fluttered for a moment and he answered, and then only a
speck remained in the circle of sea.

He stood at the far end of the quay, one foot on a broken stone,
watching the sails melt into the evening. The salt fresh smell of the
air was growing rawer with the advent of night; the once shimmering
waters were sobbing below the piles; and afar to east and west a leaden
dulness crept over the waves. But to the south there was still a track
of light, and suddenly, clear and sharp, rose the vessel's outline
against the rising dusk. In a second it was no more, and over the whole
sky was rolled the curtain of evening.

But the man sat still till the last light had gone and the mist came up
from the sea.




CHAPTER XXIII

IN THE NATURE OF A POSTSCRIPT


The patient scribe who has chronicled this tale has employed his leisure
in seeking for further news of the two who figure chiefly. Nor has his
zeal been unrewarded. Among the Manorwater family-papers he had access
to the letters of that Countess of Manorwater who when left a young
widow married the Duke of Sanctamund, and cut something of a figure in
the Regency days. Her ladyship was famous for her wit and her odd
prettiness. She was of the school of Sensibility, and, it is recorded,
made pilgrimages to the grave of Rousseau. She was famed too in polite
circles in Paris in the early days after the Terror, and through her
kinship to the De Noailles claimed all the virtues of the old rgime.
But in the midst of her gossipy epistles there is one little letter in
which she tells her dear friend, Emily Norton, of a visit to Arras and
an hour spent in the graveyard of the convent of St. Thrse.

       *       *       *       *       *

". . . Yesterday, ma chre, was a heavenly day, blue with white clouds
sailing above, and all the place was green with the tender spring of
this climate. I found the graveyard, which is hidden away among
cloistral grey walls, but kept trim by the piety of the Sisters. After
much searching I came on a little stone, much grown about with white
roses, and on it the simple letter M, and the words, '_Pro sua patria_.'
It was indeed the tomb of my unfortunate kinswoman. I confess, my dear
Emily, that I could not look on it without a tear. Here in this green
place lay my brave Margaret--_la Marguerite des Marguerites_--whose name
as a little girl I used to worship. People say she went far from the
paths of virtue, that she used her beauty and her talents unscrupulously
for a foolish cause, but I cannot believe it. Here the memory of her
gentleness and goodness is still fresh, and the old sisters have much to
tell of _la belle cossaise_. Well-a-day, we cannot judge; at any rate
she has got peace; and I confess I wept to think that even in her death
she remembered her own land and asked that the white Jacobite rose might
be set above her grave.... I fear I can write no more at present.
The emotions of the day have discomposed me, and I go to bed. In three
days we return to England, and till then with eternal love believe me
your ever-affectionate

"VICTORIA MANORWATER."

       *       *       *       *       *

On the other hand the writer has searched the excellent series of
monographs on the Fife burghs for traces of Mr. Francis. There he was
unsuccessful, but in a series of papers contributed by a former provost
of Dysart to that most enterprising sheet, "The Fife Journal and Herald
of the Kingdom," and composed from the town papers, he has found
something of interest.

       *       *       *       *       *

". . . In our list of talented townsmen of a former time, none should be
more highly esteemed than Francis Birkenshaw, who succeeded John
Henryson as Provost of the burgh. He was a writer, having succeeded to
the business of Gregor Shillinglaw (for whom see last number). There
were always queer stories in the town anent him, for he was a wild lad
in his youth and disappeared unaccountably during the Rebellion,
returning much graver and wiser, which gave colour to a belief that he
had seen service with one or the other side. Nevertheless, he soon
acquired a responsible position in the place, and as head of a
flourishing business, was elected Provost in the year 1765. He
introduced many reforms, particularly a system of town pumps where the
burgesses could get clear water, their former source having been invaded
by the sea. His portrait hangs in the Town-house, and shows a
grey-haired, hard-faced man, with cold, unfriendly-looking eyes. This
indeed seems to have been his character, for he rarely graced the social
board, but lived unmarried and utterly by himself, finding all his
interest in his work and the town-affairs. He died at the early age of
fifty-two, leaving the business to his head-clerk, and his
fortune--which was considerable--to the burgh."

       *       *       *       *       *

    PRINTED FOR JOHN LANE AT THE UNIVERSITY
    PRESS CAMBRIDGE U.S.A.

       *       *       *       *       *


JOHN BURNET OF BARNS

BY JOHN BUCHAN

Crown 8vo, 6s.


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       *       *       *       *       *

SCHOLAR GIPSIES

BY JOHN BUCHAN

With 7 Full-page Etchings by D. Y. CAMERON

Crown 8vo, 5s. net. Second Edition


Times.--"His descriptions of nature in her various moods are full of a
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Pall Mall Gazette.--"'The Night in the Heather' is a poem in itself, and
'On Cademuir Hill' almost ghostly in its realistic power; but it is ill
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       *       *       *       *       *

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[End of A Lost Lady of Old Years, by John Buchan]
