best service Captain Windham can do is never to let me see his face again, or I may remember how angry I was with him when I found his letter and his guineas that night at Fassefern. Nor do I think he’ll want to see mine, for in his soul he was not best pleased, I’ll undertake, at being so lightly let off the other evening and shown down the very secret stair he could not find.—But now, mo chridhe, do not let us talk of the tiresome fellow any more. . . .”
And five minutes later, when Hector Grant in his French uniform appeared at the door, they had forgotten everything except that they were parting.
“Come, Ardroy, you’ll be left behind,” he called gaily. “Dry your tears, Alison, and let him go; we’ve eight good miles to cover.”
“I was not greeting, never think it,” said Alison as she was released. “But oh, I’m wishing sore I could come with you two!”
“Indeed, I wish you could,” said Hector. “For I doubt the English ladies cannot dance the reel.”
Alison looked from her brother to her lover and back again. She might not have been crying, but there was little gaiety in her. “There’ll be more than dancing over the Border, Hector!”
“There’ll be better than dancing, you mean, my lass,” said Hector Grant, and his left hand fell meaningly on his sword-hilt. “I suppose I may take a kiss of her, Ardroy?”
III
THE EBB
“Then all went to wreck.”
—The Lyon in Mourning.
CHAPTER I
There was a bitter wind sweeping across the Beauly Firth, and Inverness on the farther shore lay shivering under a leaden sky. The Kessock ferryman had to tug at his oars, although he carried but one passenger, a gaunt, broad-shouldered young man, fully armed, who sat looking across at the little town with rather harassed blue eyes.
Four months—four months and a week over—for to-day was the seventh of March—since, full of hope and determination, the Prince’s army had set out on the road to England. Of what avail those hopes? England had not risen for the Stuarts, had not stirred. And yet, just when it seemed that, if the invaders had put their fortunes to the touch and pushed on, they might have gained a kingdom, they found themselves turning their backs on their goal and trailing home again over the Border. Little more than forty days had been spent on the other side, and, save for the rear-guard action near Penrith, the sword had not left its sheath there. The invasion had been a failure.
Yet, in spite of weariness and heartburnings, the little army had at least recrossed Esk in safety—except those of it so mistakenly left to garrison Carlisle—and many were not sorry to be back on Scottish soil. But to have retreated once more after beating Hawley at Falkirk in January, even though the bad weather had hindered pursuit and prevented a more decisive victory, to have left Stirling, after failing to take it, in such haste and disorder that the withdrawal had been more like a rout, what name best befitted that strategy? For gradually all the Lowlands had been occupied in their rear, and there was a slow tide setting northwards after them which one day might be slow no longer.
The Prince, maddened at the decision to withdraw north, which was against his every instinct, had been told that the daily desertions were so great as to leave no choice, that the only course was to master the forts in the north, keep together a force until the spring, and then increase it to fighting strength. But had the desertions been so extensive? It was hard to judge, yet, from his own experience, Ardroy would not have said so. Still, there were other difficulties, other divisions; there was the preponderating influence of the Irish favourites, who always had the Prince’s ear because they always fell in with his opinions; there was the growing ill-feeling between him and his able but hot-tempered general-in-chief, so acute that Ewen had with his own ears heard Charles Edward charge Lord George Murray behind his back with treachery. Yet Lochiel had been for withdrawal, and whatever Lochiel did was right in Ewen’s eyes. He was wondering to-day whether the Chief were still of the same opinion; he had not seen him for over a fortnight.
The ferryman’s voice broke in on his passenger’s reflections. “ ’Tis all much changed in Inverness now, sir, and for the better.” Evidently, like most of the inhabitants, he was Jacobite at heart. “To think that only two weeks agone I ferried Lord Loudoun and the Lord President and the Chief of Macleod over in this very boat, and all their troops crossing helter-skelter too, to get away from the Prince. . . . You’ll be yourself, perhaps, from chasing after Lord Loudoun yonder?” he added tentatively.
“Yes,” answered Ewen, his eyes still fixed on Inverness, “I am from Lord Cromarty’s force.”
The reason why the Earl of Loudoun, commanding the district for the Government, had evacuated Inverness without a battle, was really due to the somewhat ludicrous failure of his attempt to seize the person of the Prince when, in mid-February, the latter was the guest of Lady Mackintosh at Moy Hall. Conceiving the idea of surprising him there, the Earl had set out secretly at night with a force of fifteen hundred men for that purpose. But timely warning having been sent from Inverness, the Prince slipped out of Moy Hall, and the whole of Lord Loudoun’s force was thrown into confusion, and a part of it into headlong flight, by the ruse of Donald Fraser, the Moy blacksmith, and four of Lady Mackintosh’s Highland servants, who, by firing off their pieces in the dark and calling to imaginary regiments to come up, re-enacted the comedy of High Bridge on an even more piquant scale. Not only was the Earl obliged to return ignominiously to Inverness, but the desertions from his Highland companies consequent upon this affair were so great that he thought it better to await Cumberland’s advance among the Whig clans of Ross and Cromarty, to which he and his force accordingly retired; and Prince Charles’s army had entered Inverness without a blow.
The water lapped the sides of the ferryboat impatiently. The sky looked full of snow, and nearly as dark as on the day of Falkirk, while the wind was even colder than Ewen remembered it as they had plodded over Shap Fell in the December retreat from England. In Cæsar’s time, as he used to read in his boyhood, armies went into winter quarters. But all their marching and fighting had been done in the severest season of the year, in autumn and winter; and who knew what awaited them in the not less cruel rigours of a Highland spring? For Cumberland, he knew, had been at Aberdeen since the end of February.
Ewen frowned, and his thoughts went back to the somewhat comic warfare from which he had just been recalled. For when Lord Cromarty had been sent with a Jacobite force over the Moray Firth after Lord Loudoun, the latter, retreating farther north into Sutherland, established himself at Dornoch on the other side of the deep-winding firth of that name, which Cromarty, having no boats, could not cross. But directly Cromarty attempted to go round by the head of the firth Lord Loudoun sent his men across by ferry to Tain, on the Ross-shire side, once more; and when Lord Cromarty returned to Ross, Lord Loudoun recalled his followers to Dornoch. And thus a vexatious and absurd game of catch as catch can had been going on, and might go on for ever unless the Prince could send another detachment to hold Tain. No, Ewen was not sorry that Lochiel had recalled him.
He pulled his bonnet with the draggled eagle’s feathers and the soiled cockade farther down on his brows, and wrapped his plaid round him, for they were now in the icy middle of the firth. The ferryman babbled on, telling
