cloaked figure slipped quickly past him into the porch.
“Est-il permis d’entrer, mon cher?” it asked, low and half laughing. “Down, Luath—it’s a friend, good dog!”
“Who is it?” had been surprised out of Ewen in the same moment, as he turned.
“Sure, you know that!” said the voice. “But shut your door, Ardroy!”
The intruder was in the parlour now, in the lamplight, and as Ewen hastened after him he flung his hat upon the table, and advanced with both hands outstretched, a dark, slender, clear-featured young man of about five and twenty, wearing powder and a long green roquelaure.
“Hector, by all the powers!” exclaimed his involuntary host. “What——”
“What brings me here? I’ll tell you in a moment. How does Alison, and yourself, and the bairns? Faith, I’ll hardly be knowing those last again, I expect.”
“Alison is very well,” replied Ewen to Alison’s only brother. “We are all well, thank God. And Alison will be vastly pleased to see you, as I am. But why this unannounced visit, my dear Hector—and why, if I may ask, this mysterious entrance by night? ’Tis mere chance that I am not abed like the rest of the house.”
“I had my reasons,” said Hector Grant cheerfully. “Nay, I’m no deserter” (he was an officer in French service) “but I thought it wiser to slip in unnoticed if I could. I’ll tell you why anon, when I am less—you’ll pardon me for mentioning it?—less sharp-set.”
“My sorrow!” exclaimed his host. “Forgive me—I’ll have food before you in a moment. Sit down, Eachainn, and I will tell Alison of your arrival.”
Hector caught at him. “Don’t rouse her now. The morn will be time enough, and I’m wanting a few words with you first.” He threw off his roquelaure. “May I not come and forage with you, as we did—where was it . . . at Manchester, I think—in the ’45.”
“Come on then,” said his brother-in-law, a hand on his shoulder, and they each lit a candle and went, rather like schoolboys, to rifle the larder. And presently Ardroy was sitting at the table watching his midnight visitor give a very good account of a venison pie. This slim, vivacious, distinctly attractive young man might almost have passed for a Frenchman, and indeed his long residence in France had given him not a few Gallic tricks of gesture and expression. For Hector Grant had lived abroad since he entered French service at the age of sixteen—and before that too; only during the fateful year of the Rising had he spent any length of time in Britain. It was, indeed, his French commission which had saved him from the scaffold, for he had been one of the ill-fated garrison of Carlisle.
“Venison—ah, good to be back where one can have a shot at a deer again!” he presently observed with his mouth full. “I envy you, mon frère.”
“You need not,” answered Ewen. “You forget that I cannot have a shot at one; I have no means of doing it—no firearms, no, not the smallest fowling-piece. We have to snare our deer or use dogs.”
“C’est vrai; I had forgotten. But I cannot think how you submit to such a deprivation.”
“Submit?” asked Ardroy rather bitterly. “There is no choice: every Highland gentleman of our party has to submit to it, unless he has ‘qualified’ to the English Government.”
“And you still have not done that?”
Ewen flushed. “My dear Hector, how should I take an oath of fidelity to the Elector of Hanover? Do you think I’m become a Whig?”
“Faith, no—unless you’ve mightily changed since we marched into England together, seven years ago come Hallowmas. But, Eoghain, besides the arms which you have been forced to give up, there’ll surely be some which you have contrived to keep back, as has always been done in the past when these distasteful measures were imposed upon us?”
Ewen’s face darkened. “The English were cleverer this time. After the Act of ’25 no one was made to call down a curse upon himself, his kin and all his undertakings, to invoke the death of a coward and burial without a prayer in a strange land if he broke his oath that he had not, and never would have in his possession, any sword or pistol or arm whatsoever, nor would use any part of the Highland garb.”
Hector whistled. “Ma foi, you subscribed to that!”
“I had to,” answered Ewen shortly.
“I never realised that when I was here two years ago, but then my visit was so short. I did indeed know that the wearing of the tartan in any form was forbidden.”
“That,” observed Ardroy, “bears harder in a way upon the poor folk than upon us gentry. I had other clothes, if not, I could buy some; but the crofters, what else had they but their homespun plaids and philabegs and gowns? Is it any wonder that they resorted at first to all sorts of shifts and evasions of the law, and do still, wearing a piece of plain cloth merely wrapped round the waist, sewing up the kilt in the hope that it may pass for breeches, and the like?”
“But that is not the only side to it,” said the young Franco-Scot rather impatiently. “You are eloquent on the money hardship inflicted on the country folk, but surely you do not yourself relish being deprived by an enemy of the garb which has always marked us as a race?”
He was young, impetuous, not remarkable for tact, and his brother-in-law had turned his head away without reply, so that Hector Grant could not see the gleam which had come into those very blue eyes of his, nor guess the passionate resentment which was always smouldering in Ardroy’s heart over a measure which, in common with the poorest Highlander, he loathed with every fibre of his being, and which he would long ago have disobeyed but for the suffering which the consequences to him would have brought upon his wife and children.
“I should have thought——” young Grant was going on, when Ewen broke in, turning round and reaching for the claret, “Have some more wine, Hector. Now, am I really not to wake Alison to tell her that you are here?”
Hector finished his glass. “No, let her sleep, the darling! I’ll have plenty of time to talk with her—that is, if you will keep me a few days, Ardroy?”
“My dear brother, why ask? My house is yours,” said Ewen warmly.
Hector made a little gesture of thanks. “I’ll engage not to wear the tartan,” he said smiling, “nor my uniform, in case the English redcoats should mislike it.”
“That is kind of you. And, as I guess, you could not, having neither with you” (“A moi,” said Hector to this, like a fencer acknowledging a hit). “I’ll see about a bed for you now. There is one always ready for a guest, I believe.”
Again the young officer stayed him. “ ’Tis not much past midnight yet. And I want a word with you, Ewen, a serious word. I’d liefer indeed say it before I sleep under your roof, I think . . . more especially since (for your family’s sake) you have become . . . prudent.”
Ardroy’s face clouded a little. He hated the very name of ‘prudence’, and the thing too; but it was true that he had to exercise it. “Say on,” he responded rather briefly.
“Eh bien,” began Hector, his eyes on the empty wine-glass which he was twirling in his fingers, “although it is quite true that I am come hither to see my sister and her children, there is someone
