Part 33

She turned her face and golden head against her father’s great snowy coat as he once more futilely ejaculated, “The bairn’s cauld! it’s gey cauld weather! and she disna ken what she is sayin’!”

But Captain Howard, after an eager consultation aside with several officers of the garrison, summoned by the unusual commotion, and a survey of the conditions of the raging storm, returned to the questioning of Lilias.

“And at what time did this happen, mistress? What hour was it when you saw fit to turn the king’s prisoner loose upon the country?”

“Five minutes scant after you gave me leave to speak wi’ the callant; an’ after he was gone I stude the cauld as lang as I could, thinking to gie him a fair start, an’ then I drapped aff in a wee bit nap. It’s ower cauld comfort ye gie to your puir prisoners, Captain Howard.”

“And what direction did he take?” the officer asked eagerly.

“Ah-h!” she cried, her red lips showing her white teeth, her nodding head setting her golden hair to glimmering beneath the brown otter fur, her eyes shining with triumph, “it’s _him_ that didna say! He is the sodger-man to keep his plans in the sole o’ his boot.”

Her father pressed her head smotheringly against the folds of his great coat. “Whist, hinny, whist!” he exclaimed vacuously; “I surrender, Captain! I surrender! The bairn’s but a bairn when a’ is said! She kens na what she is sayin’; an’ I mak nae doubt, too, she is tellin’ lees.”

“I make no doubt that _you_ are telling lies!” said the captain in despair.

For with full ten hours’ start, the escaped prisoner, himself a military man of much experience, of tried courage, of crafty resource, and moreover singularly well acquainted with the conditions of the country, could set at defiance any pursuer who should enter upon the chase in darkness, in intense cold, in a furious snowstorm, and in absolute ignorance of the direction which the fugitive had taken. The passage of the night with the late wintry dawn would add some seven hours to the fair start she had contrived for him. The commandant was nettled by the consciousness that this advantage might have been somewhat abridged by a trifle more precaution; for although no supper was served the prisoner, he being expected to reserve such portion as he desired from his dinner for that purpose, as was the habit, for which an allowance was duly made, the cell had been visited by the officer of the day when making his rounds. The girl was still soundly sleeping, and doubtless did not hear the opening of the door as the officer of the day unlocked it and glanced in. It was already dark, and by the faint glimmerings of the lantern held outside for him by the corporal accompanying him upon his rounds, he saw the bare walls and floor, and in the single chair a muffled figure leaning upon the table, presumably asleep or plunged in deep dejection, the head bowed upon the arms. It never occurred to him that this shadowy presence in the bleak gloom could be other than the exhausted and travel-worn prisoner, whom he did not wish to rouse unnecessarily. The officer’s duties were many and pressing at this hour and called him elsewhere. Therefore, closing the door and turning the key, he thought no more of the captive till he saw the golden head of the changeling when the mystery was revealed.

Captain Howard, who had given the girl access to the cell, could ill accuse the subaltern of neglect of duty, and the commandant himself could hardly have been expected to guard against masterly strategy in the quarter whence it had emanated.

Messengers were presently ready to start out with the first intimation of a lull in the storm or the peep of day to warn all the Cherokee towns of reprisal should they dare to harbor the fugitive, for that Laroche would return to the friendly Cherokee strongholds hardly admitted of a doubt in the mind of Captain Howard. He had not sufficient troops at command to awe the Indians into surrendering the fugitive, but he hoped that the passive force of the treaty and its advantages, otherwise annulled, might avail.

Captain Howard was a man of magnanimity. Even with the cup of well-earned success dashed from his lips he had the good feeling to pity the father,--his own daughters were far away in England,--as Jock Lesly continually ejaculated, “_I_ surrender, Captain! The wean’s no responsible! _I_ surrender!”

“Jock,” he said, “you need not forswear yourself. We all know that you would not have jeopardized the fair interests of the Indian trade for all the Johnny Crapauds who ever passed the tongue of a buckle through a sword-belt,--not even if instead of your salt he had eaten your whole station! Miss Lilias Lesly here, for reasons seeming to herself good and fitting”--he cast upon her an acrid glance--“set the man free,--for which she is under arrest, and”--intercepting a wild bleat of paternal protest--“will remain so in your ain ha’ house under your watch and ward; and we have no doubt she will be produced when summoned, and you will give your faithful recognizance to that effect.”

He was reflecting that it would answer every purpose to detain the girl thus, for while her punishment might result should the matter continue of importance, it would otherwise hardly be contemplated by the colonial authorities in view of the unpopularity of such a step.

Jock Lesly was in such haste to sign and seal a paper betokening this clemency that he could hardly hold the sputtering quill; and during this solemn ceremony the irrepressible Lilias broke out laughing with hysterical glee, and requested Captain Howard to put into a wee corner o’ that paper the promise he had given her that she “suld hae a’ thae blankets that were ne’er brought to the fort, afore the sodgers suld steal them a’.”

“Thae bit duds were unco gude duds,” she remarked fleeringly of these immaterial comforts.

XXII

CALLUM MACILVESTY had been soon at Jock Lesly’s side to afford him such succor and countenance as was possible under the circumstances. He asked for leave to aid him in transporting Lilias, so stiff with the cold was she, back to the cave house, where she sat on the buffalo rug before the flaring fire, her glittering hair all tumbling about her shoulders, her eyes shining with triumph, and laughing with gay outbursts of flattered joy to learn how wretched they had all been because of her absence, and how wrong and wicked they esteemed her sudden arbitrary release of the prisoner.

“_I_ amna sorry,” she protested, “except for that the callant hae on my gude red rokelay, an’ my best puce-colored serge gownd, an’ my gude murrey screen, wi’ only ae wee tear in the weft o’ it,--an’ I’se warrant I’ll no see a’ that braw gear again!”

It was Callum who sought to impress her with the magnitude of the offense that she had committed, for Jock Lesly cared for naught else on earth save that she was safe and sat once more on the rug before the blazing fire of the ha’ house.

“An’ what care I how far ye went an’ how hard ye fared to tak him, Callum!” she cried indignantly. “Gin I hadna tauld you the callant was French, you wad ne’er hae kenned it. An’ ye tauld yon Captain Howard--that bluidy-minded chiel! I wuss he was in his ain cauld tolbooth to freeze stiff like my nainsell!”

“Whist, whist, hinny!” remonstrated Jock Lesly. “Callum wadna hae tauld the lad was French had he kenned you wad wuss to keep it secret; wad ye, Callum?”

With this direct appeal the Highland soldier, sitting in his armchair opposite Jock Lesly at the fire, with Lilias between them on the rug, gazed steadily into the glowing coals. He could not evade the question.

“Yes,” he answered, “I wad! I wad ha’ tauld e’en if Lilias had bid me keep a quiet sough aboot it!”

“Na, Callum! surely na!” exclaimed Jock Lesly irritably. “Ye wadna vex the bairn!” For Lilias had lifted her head with its wealth of flaring hair, and was gazing at Callum with intent, questioning, speculative eyes. “Ye care too muckle for Lilias for that!” Jock Lesly prompted him.

“I care more for my oath, for my duty, than for any lassie alive!” protested the blunt soldier.

There was a moment’s silence, while the fire roared and the smoke rushed up the chimney into the wild wintry storm without, of which they here heard naught. Jock Lesly, with a knitted brow, filled his pipe and said no more. Callum, his glass poised upon his knee, gazed steadfastly into the flames, and Lilias, with dewy, gleaming eyes fixed upon him, suddenly exclaimed, as if in delighted reminiscence, “Ou, ay, that was what Tam Wilson said! His oath, his honor aboon a’! No woman’s wile, no woman’s smile could win him awa’! Ah, the leal heart he had! That is what Tam Wilson aye said!”

“I care na for Tam Wilson, nor for what he said!” declared the dour Callum glumly.

“Not the ane you kenned!” cried Lilias. “_This_ Tam Wilson ye never saw!”

The Highland soldier thought the cold and excitement and anxiety had shaken her balance a trifle.

“But Callum,” she persisted, “suppose it wad gar me like you better if you had hid that the puir lad is French?”

“I wadna hae dune it! I wadna hae hid it!” He shook his head sadly, and her father stared at him in amazement. Inch by inch he teemed renouncing his chance for the girl’s good graces.

“A-weel, a-weel,” she said slowly. “But since a’s come an’ gane, an’ the march was for naething, an’ the prisoner is flitted, an’ I was frozen wi’ cauld an’ misery, an’ am like to be sent to Charlestoun to answer for my crimes, ye can say now, lad, that ye are verra sorry that ye disclosed my gossip to your officer, an’ ye wadna do it again if it were to be done anew! Ye will say that?” She looked at him with keen expectant eyes.

“I wad do it all the same,” he protested deliberately. Then, “Lilias, why wad ye torment me wi’ a’ these questions? They tear out my heart!”

“I sall ne’er forget it!” she cried. “Ye did it against my wull. An’ now ye say that if ye had the chance anew ye wad e’en do it agen, though I suld _hate_ ye for it!”

“It’s my oath, Lilias! My duty! I canna look to you instead o’ thae great obligations. I suld do it again an’ again, whate’er ye might say or feel, an’ keep my oath till death!”

She suddenly broke out laughing afresh, in shrill sweet ecstatic joy. “That Tam Wilson! Wha wad think! That Tam Wilson at last!”

She seemed enigmatic to them both, but they hardly had space to read the riddle, for Callum, recognising the passage of time, sprang up to return to the fort before his limited leave expired. He ran briskly up the ladder with Jock Lesly clambering after him to take down the barricade to let him out, and to secure the bars subsequent to his exit. There was still fire upon the hearth of the great trading-house, and a dull red glow suffused its dusky brown spaces. It was only as Lesly turned to close the door of the counter that he noticed that Lilias, agile enough despite the congealed condition she so graphically described, had followed also, and after the soldier had sprung down the front steps and strode off through the snow the two, father and daughter, stood for a moment gazing into the vast dark stormy wilderness, permeated by the sense of silent unseen motion in the whirling flakes, of which only the nearest were visible in the red glow of the dying fire from within.

“Hegh, come, bairnie, we’se e’en steek the door,” Lesly said.

The lantern in his hand showed her face to be all sweetly smiling. She was looking into the blank voids of the snowy gloom and carrying first one hand and then the other to her lips with an engaging free curve and tossing each toward the wilderness.

“And what now?” he demanded, staring owlishly down at her in amaze.

“Just throwing a wheen kisses to Tam Wilson,--oh puir Tam Wilson! Wha wad hae thought he wad e’er win hame agen!”

“Wow!” said her father glumly. “Tam Wilson!--drat Tam Wilson, I say! We hae had an unco pother ower Tam Wilson, now!”

But she ran in ahead of him laughing in great glee, and he overheard her in her little chamber while she disrobed for bed talking about Tam Wilson and Tam Wilson to Luckie Meg, who answered acquiescently to whatever she said, “Ou,--ay! I’se warrant!” and apparently gave scant heed, even if she heard at all.

For some weeks Callum MacIlvesty felt anew that he was admitted into a sort of Paradise in frequenting the ha’ house, albeit his heart was sore. The rescue that she had planned and achieved for the prisoner at such risk and suffering to herself argued much for the strength of her attachment to Laroche, and this forbade hope even when hope seemed most possible. She herself was so gay, so whimsically cheery, so blithe about the hearth, where the Highlander loved to sit as of yore with her father. She noted Callum’s depressed mien, and ascribing it to the fruitless result of the long laborious march and triumphant capture, argued that he had done all that he could and more than any other man would, his whole duty, and the sequence was the affair of Captain Howard,--and then remarked most pertinently that if she were that officer and had no better a tassel to a nightcap than that frayed thing he sported in public at the guard-house, she would resign from the army!

In order to prove that Captain Howard had himself sustained no damage in the loss of his notable prisoner, she cited the fact that the war with France was now over, cessation of hostilities had been announced on the 21st of January, and since the treaty had been signed in February, it had become known that the French forts, Toulouse, Tombecbé, Condé, were to be surrendered as early as English officers could be detailed to receive the transfer. All prisoners were to be released,--among those specially demanded she had seen in the Gazette the name of Lieutenant de Laroche,--already escaped though he was!

But all this, though so prettily urged, did not suffice to lift the gloom that weighed on Callum’s mind. He was soon to say farewell, to rejoin the Forty-Second, to go he knew not whither, nor when to return!

It was one day when he was thus a-mope, as Lilias was wont to describe his state of mind, that Callum discovered her secret, if so candid an emotion can be so called. The ha’ house had fallen into its ancient habitudes cannily enough, as if sorrows had never menaced it, and Lilias in her brilliant blue gown with roses scattered adown its white stripes sat at her wheel spinning as heedfully and dexterously as if she had never fashioned toils of more significance. Callum on the settle, his arms folded, his head a little bent, gazed into the red coals. All that he had once hoped, nay expected, was annulled by the sentiments implied in her release of Laroche, and the resentment she had expressed toward himself for revealing aught that she had told him, albeit she had not bespoken secrecy. Therefore he experienced a revulsion of feeling so complete, so acute, as almost to resemble pain in its breathless keenness. He had suddenly lifted his eyes and caught hers fixed upon him with an expression he had never seen in them before, wistful, smiling, yet serious, and deeply tender. His heart gave a great plunge and every nerve was tense. He rose, and still looking at her, as if he feared she might vanish like some lovely dream, advanced across the hearth. He sat down beside her in her father’s chair, still seeking to read--the dullard!--the obvious mystery of the sapphire light in her eyes.

“Lilias,” he said clumsily and all tremulous, “have you something to tell me?”

“I trow not!” she exclaimed, her face roseate with smiles and blushes, but giving a lofty nod of her golden head. “I was thinking, man, you may hae something to tell to me!”

“Ah, Lilias, I hae tauld it sae often!” he cried bewildered.

“An’ sae you are tired o’ telling it?” she retorted. “Eh, sirs, to be tired sae early!”

“I can never be tired of telling it, Lilias, if only you will listen to it,--how I love you more and more day by day!”

“It’s just as weel, then,”--she cast a radiant smile upon him as she bent anew to her wheel,--“for I expect to listen to it--that is--whiles--at orra times--when I hae naething better to do--as lang as I live.”

It was not in Callum’s scheme of love-making to suggest the suddenness of this acceptability of a suit so long urged. Luckie Meg herself could not have assented more acquiescently than he in every detail that Lilias chose to propound. It was only once, in the course of those long sunless afternoons in the cavern, with the red glow of the fire about them and the impenetrable walls to fend off the alien world so far away from their consciousness, when all their talk was of their mutual experience of the sentiment that swayed them, what each had felt and thought, that Callum showed symptoms of rebellion--being informed that she looked upon him and he might consider himself as “Tam Wilson.”

“But I will not!” cried Callum, ready to put the question to the torture at once. Jealousy is not so easily vanquished. Indeed it hardly dies even under the heel of victory!

“Not the ane that you knew,” she stipulated. “Just ane auld love o’ my ain! He wad put his oath before all. An’ he loved a woman well, but honor mair! an’ he had no deceit nor guile in his heart (though I hinna forgot about your report to Captain Howard, neither, an’ I’ll sort ye weel for it some day), an’ he had no false nations nor false tongues (he had mickle ado to speak his ain), an’ no false names (‘Tam Wilson’ bein’ laid to him because he was sae like ‘Tam Wilson’). An’ I suld hae kenned ye earlier for him,--though your hair hae aye got a place that is streakit wi’ brown an’ lighter brown an’ I think it wadna show gin it were brushed backward,--but I aye loved the look o’ ye, only I never saw ye put to the test, and sae I thought ye were just plain ‘Callum McIlvesty.’ But now I ken ye are Tam Wilson!”

And smiling at him with lips so joyous, so red and sweet, Callum yielded the point and assumed in this wise the sobriquet which personified her girlish ideal.

Still it nettled him grievously. She might have called her ideal “Callum.”

“Whist, lad, whist,” said her father to him one day, “an’ I’se tell ye something ye will ne’er find out frae her.”

Then with much solemnity, with circumspection, he pulled out a paper from his wallet, to which he could not have paid more respectful and close attention if it had been a schedule of prices current. It was a letter from Laroche, dated on the French man-of-war L’Aigle, and was addressed jointly to Jock Lesly and his daughter. It was an offer of marriage to Lilias, and begged that they would fix a date to meet him in Charlestown, where the ceremony might be performed by both Catholic and Protestant clergy. It set forth his rank, means, and expectations, which were very considerable, and gave references which were both accessible and unimpeachable.

“An’, lad,” said Jock Lesly, looking owlishly at Callum while leaning over the counter at the trading-house where he had driven so many bargains, “seeing that she is my only child, and that ensigncy of yours is gey far to seek, and this man is a sure enough lieutenant, not o’ red Injuns but of the French army, and is a chevalier or a sieur,--there’s no rebate on that,--and has lands an’ a château and some income, and the lassie seemed fond o’ him on the Tennessee, and here she set him free when they had him by the heels at the fort,--why I downa say, but I advised her--weel, to marry the fallow, when we go down this spring, an’ gae to live in France. It’s far awa’, is France, but they hae gude glimmerings o’ sense about their weaving there. I hae seen some gude camlets frae France, an’ ye ken there’s no place like Lyons for silk--though that’s na for my trade neither.”

Callum’s heart sank for the mere consciousness that his happiness had trembled in such jeopardy. “And what did she say?”

“Lilias?--why, she said ae sentence, ‘He isna Tam Wilson!’ Sae, lad, if ye will be advised by me, ye’ll be Tam Wilson as near as ye can find out how!”

About this time an ensigncy was secured for Callum through his family’s influence, and when he returned shortly to Charlestown he met there Everard, who was in a state of exuberant and facetious triumph in the manner of the escape of Captain Howard’s prisoner, having earlier eluded him also, and who was the first to congratulate the young Highlander upon the attainment of his commission and the near approach of his wedding day. For in the early summer Callum and Lilias were married in Charlestown and sailed away, leaving auld Jock still deeply immersed in the problems of the Indian trade. These problems became much simplified by the withdrawal of the French from the country, and soon the Cherokees began to present those curious symptoms of degeneracy which seem the inevitable incident of the first stages of civilization, an interregnum, so to speak, which ensues upon the last vestiges of the ancient status. Thereafter they were only formidable locally and in small predatory bands, and represented no more a definitely organized menace to the British provinces. In the course of some years a great happiness and source of pride fell to the lot of Jock Lesly. The reversal of the attainder had restored the chief of the ancient house of MacIlvesty to his pristine position with others of his kinsmen of minor rank. By reason of several deaths Callum MacIlvesty succeeded to a baronetcy, and Jock Lesly, despite his quondam bluff expressions of scorn of a title, found its taste exceedingly sweet as applied to his daughter; he was proud too of Callum’s rise in the army through successive promotions for gallant conduct in the field.

“He smacks his lips ower ‘Captain Sir Callum an’ Leddy MacIlvesty’ as if the words were fitten to eat,” Dougal commented dourly, “an’ somehow he says ’em fifty times a day!”