Foes Part 27

I stand in a hot, bright light where they are vindicated. If fate sets you free again, yet I do not set you free! I shall be after you. I entered this place to tell you that."

"Do as you will!" answered Ian. Scorn mounted in his voice. "I shall withstand the shock of you!"

The net of name and form hardened, grew more iron and closer meshed.

Each _I_ contracted, made its carapace thicker. Each _I_ bestrode, like Apollyon, the path of the other.

"Why should I undertake to defend myself?" said Ian. "I do not undertake to do so! So at least I shall escape the hypocrite! It is in the nature of man to put down other kings and be king himself!"

"Aye so? The prime difficulty in that is that the others, too, are immortal." Glenfernie rising, his great frame seemed to fill the little room. "Sooner may the Kelpie's Pool sink into the earth than I forego to give again to you what you have given! What is now all my wish? It is to seem to you, here and hereafter, the avenger of blood and fraud! Remember me so!"

He stood looking at the sometime friend with a dark and working face.

Then, abruptly turning, he went away. The door of the small room closed behind him. Ian heard the bolt driven.

The night went leadenly by. At last he slept, and was waked by trumpets blowing. He saw through the window that it was at faintest dawn. Much later the door opened and a man brought him a poor breakfast. Rullock questioned him, but could gain nothing beyond the statement that to-day at latest the "rebels" would be wiped from the face of the earth. When he was gone Ian climbed to the small window that, even were it open and unguarded, was yet too small for his body to pa.s.s. But, working with care, he managed to loosen and draw inward without noise one of the round panes. Outside lay a trampled farm-yard. A few soldiers, apparently invalided, lounged about, but there was no such throng such as he had pa.s.sed through when they brought him here. He supposed that the attack upon the force at Shap might be in progress. If the Duke of c.u.mberland's whole power was at hand the main column might be set upon. All around him the hills, the farm inclosure, and these petty walls cut off the outer world. The hours, the day, limped somehow by. He walked to keep himself warm.

Back and forth and to and fro. December--December--December! How cold was the Kelpie's Pool? Poisoned love--poisoned friendship--ambition in ruin--bells ringing for executions! To and fro--to and fro. He had always felt life as sensuous, rich, and warm, with garlands and colors. It had been large and aglow, with a profusion of arabesques of imagination and emotion. Thought had not lacked, but thought, too, bore a personal, pa.s.sional cast, and was much interested in a golden world of sense. Just this December day the world seemed the ocean-bed of life, where dull creatures moved slowly in cold, thick ooze, and annihilation was much to be desired.... The day went by. The same man brought him supper. There seemed to be triumph in his face. "They'll be bringing in more prisoners--unless we don't make prisoners!"

Nothing more could be gained from that quarter. In the night it began to rain. He listened to its dash against the window. Black Hill came into mind, and the rain against his windows there. He was cold, and he tried, with the regressive sense, to feel himself in that old, warm nest. His Black Hill room rose about him, firelit. The fire lighted that Italian painting of a city of refuge and a fleeing man, behind whom ran the avenger of blood.... Then it was July, and he was in the glen with Elspeth Barrow. He fought away from the recollection of that, for it involved a sickness of the soul.... Italy! Think of Italy. Venice, and a month that he had spent there alone--Old Steadfast being elsewhere. It had been a warm season, warm and rich, sun-kissed and languorous, like the fruit, like the Italian women....

Leave out the women, but try to feel again the sun of Venice!

He tried, but the cold of his prison fought with the sun. Then suddenly sprang clamor without. The uproar increased. He rose, he heard the bolts open, the door open. In came light and voices.

"Captain Rullock! We beat them at Clifton! We learned that you were here! Lord George sent us back for you...."

Three days later Scotch earth was again beneath their feet. They marched to Glasgow; they marched to Stirling; they fought the battle of Falkirk and again there was Jacobite victory. And now there was an army of eight thousand.... And then began a time of poor policy, mistaken moves. And in April befell the battle of Culloden and far-resounding ruin.

CHAPTER XXI

The green May rolled around and below the Highland shelter where Ian lay, fugitive, like thousands of others, after Culloden. The Prince had stayed to give an order to his broken army. _Sauve qui peut!_ Then he, too, became a fugitive, pa.s.sing from one fastness to another of these glens and the mountains that overtowered them. The Stewart hope was sunk in the sea of dead hopes. c.u.mberland, with for the time and place a great force and with an ugly fury, hunted all who had been in arms against King George.

Ian Rullock couched high upon a mountain-side, in a shelter of stone and felled tree built in an angle of crag, screened by a growth of birch and oak, made long ago against emergencies. A path, devious and hidden, connected it first with a hut far below, and then, at several miles' distance, with the house of a chieftain, now a house of terror, with the chieftain in prison and his sons in hiding, and the women watching with hard-beating hearts. Ian, a kinsman of the house, had been given, _faute de mieux_, this old, secret hold, far up, where at least he could see danger if it approached. Food had been stored for him here and sheepskins given for bedding. He was so masked by splintered and fallen pieces of rock that he might, with great precautions, kindle a fire. A spring like a fairy cup gave him water.

More than one rude comfort had been provided. He had even a book or two, caught up from his kinsman's small collection. He had been here fourteen days.

At first they were days and nights of vastly needed rest. Bitter had been the fatigue, privation, wandering, immediately after Culloden!

Now he was rested.

He was by nature sanguine. When the sun had irretrievably blackened and gone out he might be expected at least to attempt to gather materials and ignite another. He was capable of whistling down the wind those long hopes of fame and fortune that had hung around the Stewart star. And now he was willing to let go the old half-acknowledged boyish romance and sentiment, the glamour of the imagination that had dressed the cause in hues not its own. Two years of actual contact with the present incarnations of that cause had worn the sentiment threadbare.

Seated or lying upon the brown earth by the splintered crag, alone save for the wheeling birds and the sound of wind and water and the sailing clouds, he had time at last for the rise into mind, definitely shaped and visible, of much that had been slowly brewing and forming.

He was conscious of a beginning of a readjustment of ideas. For a long time now he had been pledged to personal daring, to thought forced to become supple and concentrated, to hard, practical planning, physical hardship and danger. In the midst of this had begun to grow up a criticism of all the enterprises upon which he was engaged. Scope--in many respects the Jacobite character, generally taken, was amiable and brave, but its prime exhibit was not scope! Somewhat narrow, somewhat obsolete; Ian's mind now saw Jacobitism in that light. As he sat without his rock fortress, in the shadow of birch-trees, with lower hills and glens at his feet, he had a pale vision of Europe, of the world. Countries and times showed themselves contiguous. "Causes,"

dynastic wars, political life, life in other molds and hues, appeared in chords and sequences and strokes of the eye, rather than in the old way of innumerable, vivid, but faintly connected points. "I begin to see," thought Ian, "how things travel together, like with like!" His body was rested, recovered, his mind invigorated. He had had with him for long days the very elixir of solitude. Relations and a.s.sociations that before had been banked in ignorance came forth and looked at him.

"You surely have known us before, though you had forgotten that you knew us!" He found that he was taking delight in these expansions of meaning. He thought, "If I can get abroad out of this danger, out of old circles, I'll roam and study and go to school to wider plans!" He suddenly thought, "This kind of thing is what Old Steadfast meant when he used to say that I did not see widely enough." He moved sharply. A hot and bitter flood seemed to well up within him. "He himself is seeing narrowly now--Alexander Jardine!"

He left the crag and went for a scrambling and somewhat dangerous walk along the mountain-side. There was peril in leaving that one rock-curtained place. Two days before he had seen what he thought to be signs of red-coated soldiers in the glen far below. But he must walk--he must exercise his body, note old things, not give too much time to new perceptions! He breathed the keen, sweet mountain air; with a knife that he had he fell to making a staff from a young oak; he watched the pa.s.s below and the shadows of the clouds; he climbed fairly to the mountain-top and had a great view; he sang an old song, not aloud, but under his breath; and at last he must come back with solitude to his fastness. And here was brooding thought again!

Two more days pa.s.sed. The man from the hut below in the pa.s.s came at dusk with food carefully sent from the chieftain's hall. Redcoats had gone indeed through the glen, but they could never find the path to this place! They might return or they might not; they were like the devil who rose by your side when you were most peaceful! Angus went down the mountain-side. The sound of his footstep died away. Ian had again Solitude herself.

Another day and night pa.s.sed. He watched the sun climb toward noon, and as the day grew warm he heard a step upon the hidden path. With a pistol in either hand he moved, as stealthily, as silently as might be, to a platform of rock that overhung the way of the intruder. In another moment the latter was in sight--one man climbing steadily the path to the old robber fastness. He saw that it was Glenfernie. No one followed him. He came on alone.

Rullock put by his pistols and, moving to a chair of rock, sat there.

The other's great frame rose level with him, stepped upon the rocky floor. Ian had been growing to feel an anger at solitude. When he saw Alexander he had not been able to check an inner movement of welcome.

He felt an old--he even felt a new--affection for the being upon whom, certainly, he had leaned. There flowed in, in an impatient wave, the consideration that he must hate....

But Glenfernie hated. Ian rose to face him.

"So you've found your way to my castle? It is a climb! You had best sit and rest yourself. I have my sword now, and I will give you satisfaction."

Glenfernie nodded. He sat upon a piece of fallen rock. "Yes, I will rest first, thank you! I have searched since dawn, and the mountain is steep. Besides, I want to talk to you."

Ian brought from his cupboard oat-cake and a flask of brandy. The other shook his head.

"I had food at sunrise, and I drank from a spring below."

"Very good!"

The laird of Glenfernie sat looking down the mountain-sides and over to far hills and moving clouds, much as he used to sit in the crook of the old pine outside the broken wall at Glenfernie. There was a trick of posture when he was at certain levels within himself. Ian knew it well.

"Perhaps I should tell you," said Alexander, "that I came alone through the pa.s.s and that I have been alone for some days. If there are soldiers near I do not know of them."

"It is not necessary," answered Ian. While he spoke he saw in a flash both that his confidence was profound that it was not necessary, and that that incapacity to betray that might be predicated of Old Steadfast was confined to but one of the two upon this rock. The enlightenment stung, then immediately brought out a reaction. "To each some specialty in error! I no more than he am monstrous!" There arose a desire to defend himself, to show Old Steadfast certain things. He spoke. "We are going to fight presently--"

"Yes."

"That's understood. Now listen to me a little! For long years we were together, friends near and warm! You knew that I saw differently from you in regard to many things--in regard, for instance, to women. I remember old discussions.... Well, you differed, and sometimes you were angry. But for all that, friendship never went out with violence!

You knew the ancient current that I swam in--that it was narrower, more mixed with earth, than your own! But you were tolerant. You took me as I was.... What has developed was essentially there then, and you knew it. The difference is that at last it touched what you held to be your own. Then, and not till then, the sinner became _anathema!_"

"In some part you say truth. But my load of inconsistency does not lighten yours of guilt."

"Perhaps not. We were friends. Five-sixths of me made a fair enough friend and comrade. We interlocked. You had gifts and possessions I had not. I liked the oak-feeling of you--the great ship in sail! In turn, I had the key, perhaps, to a few lands of bloom and flavor that you lacked. We interchanged and thought that we were each the richer.

Five-sixths.... Say, then, that the other sixth might be defined as no-friend, or as false friend! Say that it was wilful, impatient of superiorities, proud, vain, willing to hurt, betray, and play the demon generally! Say that once it gave itself swing it darkened some of the other sixths.... Well, it is done! Yet there was gold. Perhaps, laird of Glenfernie, there is still gold in the mine!"

"You are mistaken in your proportions. Gold! You are to me the specter of the Kelpie's Pool!"

Silence held for a minute or two. The clouds, pa.s.sing between earth and sun, made against the mountain slopes impalpable, dark, fantastic shapes. An eagle wheeled above its nest at the mountain-top. Ian spoke again. His tone had altered.

"If I do not decline remorse, I at least decline the leaden cope of it you would have me wear! There is such a thing as fair play to oneself!

Two years ago come August Elspeth Barrow and I agreed to part--"

"Oh, 'agreed'--"

"Have it so! I said that we must part. She acquiesced--and that without the appeals that the stage and literature show us. Oh, doubtless I might have seen a pierced spirit, and did not, and was brute beast there! But one thing you have got to believe, and that is that neither of us knew what was to happen. Even with that, she was aware of how a letter might be sent, with good hope of reaching me.

She was not a weak, ignorant girl.... I went away, and within a fortnight was deep in that long attempt that ends here. I became actively an agent for the Prince and his father. A hundred names and their fates were in my hands. You can fill in the mult.i.tude of activities, each seeming small in itself, but the whole preoccupying every field.... If Elspeth Barrow wrote I never received her letter.

When my thought turned in that direction, it saw her well and not necessarily unhappy. Time pa.s.sed. For reasons, I ceased to write home, and again for reasons I obliterated paths by which I might be reached.

For months I heard nothing, as I said nothing. I was on the very eve of quitting Paris, under careful disguise, to go into Scotland. Came suddenly your challenge--and still, though I knew that to you at least our relations must have been discovered, I knew no more than that! I did not know that she was dead.... I could not stay to fight you then.

I left you to brand me as you pleased in your mind."

"I had already branded you."