About sundown Creagh joined us, Macdonald having stayed on Skye to keep watch on any suspicious activity of the clan militia or the dragoons. Raasay’s clansmen, ostensibly engaged in fishing, dotted the shore of the little island to give warning of the approach of any boats. To make our leader’s safety more certain, the two proscribed brothers took turns with Creagh and me in doing sentinel duty at the end of the path leading to the sheep hut.
At the desire of the Prince—and how much more at mine!—we ventured up to the great house that night to meet the ladies, extraordinary precautions having been taken by Raasay to prevent the possibility of any surprise. Indeed, so long as the Prince was in their care, Raasay and his brothers were as anxious as the proverbial hen with the one chick. Doubtless they felt that should he be captured while on the island the reputation of the house would be forever blasted. And this is the most remarkable fact of Charles Edward Stuart’s romantic history; that in all the months of his wandering, reposing confidence as he was forced to do in hundreds of different persons, many of them mere gillies and some of them little better than freebooters, it never seems to have occurred to one of these shag-headed Gaels to earn an immense fortune by giving him up.
My heart beat a tattoo against my ribs as I followed the Prince and Raasay to the drawing-room where his sister and Miss Macdonald awaited us. Eight months had passed since last I had seen my love; eight months of battle, of hairbreadth escapes, and of hardships scarce to be conceived. She too had endured much in that time. Scarce a house in Raasay but had been razed by the enemy because her brothers and their following had been “out” with us. I was to discover whether her liking for me had outlived the turmoils of “the ’45,” or had been but a girlish fancy.
My glance flashed past Miss Flora Macdonald and found Aileen on the instant. For a hundredth part of a second our eyes met before she fell to making her devoirs to the Young Chevalier, and after that I did not need to be told that my little friend was still staunch and leal. I could afford to wait my turn with composure, content to watch with long-starved eyes the delicacy and beauty of this sweet wild rose I coveted. Sure, hers was a charm that custom staled not nor longer acquaintance made less alluring. Every mood had its own characteristic fascination, and are not the humours of a woman numberless? She had always a charming note of unconventional freshness, a childlike naiveté of immaturity and unsophistication at times, even a certain girlish shy austerity that had for me a touch of saintliness. But there— Why expatiate? A lover’s midsummer madness, you will say!
My turn at last! The little brown hand pressed mine firmly for an instant, the warm blue eyes met mine full and true, the pulse in the soft-throated neck beat to a recognition of my presence. I found time to again admire the light poise of the little head carried with such fine spirit, the music of the broken English speech in this vibrant Highland voice.
“Welcome— Welcome to Raasay, my friend!” Then her eyes falling on the satin cockade so faded and so torn, there came a tremulous little catch to her voice, a fine light to her eyes. “It iss the good tale that my brothers have been telling me of Kenneth Montagu’s brave devotion to hiss friends, but I wass not needing to hear the story from them. I will be thinking that I knew it all already,” she said, a little timidly.
I bowed low over her hand and kissed it. “My friends make much of nothing. Their fine courage reads their own spirit reflected in the eyes of others.”
“Oh, then I will have heard the story wrong. It would be Donald who went back to Drummossie Moor after you when you were wounded?”
“Could a friend do less?”
“Or more?”
“He would have done as much for me. My plain duty!” I said, shrugging, anxious to be done with the subject.
She looked at me with sparkling eyes, laughing at my discomposure, in a half impatience of my stolid English phlegm.
“Oh, you men! You go to your death for a friend, and if by a miracle you escape: ‘Pooh! ’Twas nothing whatever. Gin it rain to-morrow, I think ’twill be foul,’ you say, and expect to turn it off so.”
I took the opening like a fox.
“Faith, I hope it will not rain to-morrow,” I said. “I have to keep watch outside. Does the sun never shine in Raasay, Aileen?”
“Whiles,” she answered, laughing. “And are all Englishmen so shy of their virtues?”
Tony Creagh coming up at that moment, she referred the question to him.
“Sure, I can’t say,” he answered unsmilingly. “’Fraid I’m out of court. Never knew an Englishman to have any.”
“Can’t you spare them one at the least?” Aileen implored, gaily.
He looked at her, then at me, a twinkle in his merry Irish eyes.
“Ecod then, I concede them one! They’re good sportsmen. They follow the game until they’ve bagged it.”
We two flushed in concert, but the point of her wit touched Creagh on the riposte.
“The men of the nation being disposed of in such cavalier fashion, what shall we say of the ladies, sir?” she asked demurely.
“That they are second only to the incomparable maidens of the North,” he answered, kissing her hand in his extravagant Celtic way.
“But I will not be fubbed off with your Irish blarney. The English ladies, Mr. Creagh?” she merrily demanded.
“Come, Tony, you renegade! Have I not heard you toast a score of times the beauties of London?” said I, coming up with the heavy artillery.
“Never, I vow. Sure I always thought Edinburgh a finer city—not so dirty and, pink me, a vast deal more interesting. Now London is built——”
“On the Thames. So it is,” I interrupted dryly. “And—to get back to the subject under discussion—the pink and white beauties of London are built to take the eye and ensnare the heart of roving Irishmen. Confess!”
“Or be forever shamed as recreant knight,” cried Aileen, her blue eyes bubbling with laughter.
Tony unbuckled his sword and offered it her. “If I yield ’tis not to numbers but to beauty. Is my confession to be in the general or the particular, Miss Macleod?”
“Oh, in the particular! ’Twill be the mair interesting.”
“Faith then, though it be high treason to say so of one lady before another, Tony Creagh’s scalp dangles at the belt of the most bewitching little charmer in Christendom.”
“Her name?”
“Mistress Antoinette Westerleigh, London’s reigning toast.”
Aileen clapped her hands in approving glee.
“And did you ever tell her?”
“A score of times. Faith, ’twas my rule to propose every second time I saw her and once in between.”
“And she——?”
“Laughed at me; played shill-I-shall-I with my devotion; vowed she would not marry me till I had been killed in the wars to prove I was a hero; smiled on me one minute and scorned me the next.”
“And
