Chapter Nineteen.

Free at last!

Sir Alexander and his guests remained on the island only a few days; but during that time the President gave Lady Carse many hours of his society. Full as his mind was of public and private affairs—charged as he was with the defence of Scotland against the treason of the Pretender and his followers—grieved as he was by the heart-sorrows which attend civil war—and now a fugitive, destitute of means, and in peril of his life—he still had cheerfulness and patience to minister to Lady Carse. From his deliberate and courteous entrance, his air of leisure, his quiet humour in conversation, and his clear remembrance of small incidents relating to the lady’s family and acquaintance, anyone would have supposed that he had not a care in the world. For the hour, Lady Carse almost felt as if she had none. She declared herself getting quite well; and she did strive, by a self-command and prudence such as astonished even Annie, to gain such ground as should enable her to leave the island when the President did—that is, as she and others supposed, when the spring should favour the sending an English army to contest the empire once more with the still successful Pretender.

But, in four days, there was a sudden break up. A faithful boatman of Sir Alexander’s came over from Skye to give warning of danger. There were no three men in Scotland so hated by the rebels as the three gentlemen now on the island; and no expense or pains were to be spared in capturing them. They must not remain, from any mere hope of secrecy, in a place which contained only women and children. They must go where they could not only hide, but be guarded by fighting men. It was decided to be off that very moment. The President desired one half-hour, that he might see Lady Carse, and assure her of his care and protection, and of relief, as soon as he could command the means. He entered as deliberately as usual, and merely looked at his watch and said that he had ten minutes, and no more.

“You must not go,” said she. “We cannot spare you. Oh, you need not fear any danger! We have admirable hiding-places in our rock, where, to my knowledge, you can have good fires, and a soft bed of warm sand. You are better here. You must not go.”

Of course the President said he must, and civilly stopped the remonstrance. Then she declared, with a forced quietness, “If you will go, I must go with you. Do not say a word against it. I have your promise, and I will hold you to it. Oh, yes, I am fit to go—fitter than to stay. If I stay, I shall die this night. If I go, I shall live to keep a certain promise of mine—to go and see my Lord Lovat’s head fall. I will not detain you; we have five minutes of your ten yet I will be across the threshold before your ten minutes are up. Helsa! Helsa, come with me.”

“What is to be done?” asked the President of Annie. “You know her best. What if I compel her to stay? Would there be danger?”

“I think she would probably die to-night, as she says. If she could convince herself of her weakness, that would be best. She cannot walk to the shore. She cannot sit in an open boat in winter weather.”

“You are right. I will let her try. She may endure conviction by such means.”

“I will go with you to help her home.”

“That is well; but you are feeble yourself.”

“I am, sir; but I must try what I can do.” Lady Carse was over the threshold within the ten minutes, followed by Helsa with a bundle of clothes. She cast a glance of fiery triumph back at the dwelling, and round the whole desolate scene. For a few steps she walked firmly, then she silently accepted the President’s arm. Further on, she was glad to have Helsa’s on the other side.

“Let me advise you to return,” said the President, pausing when the descent became steeper. “By recruiting here till the spring, you—”

“I will recruit elsewhere, thank you. When I once get into the boat I shall do very well. It is only this steep descent, and the treacherous footing.”

She could not speak further. All her strength was required to keep herself from falling between her two supporters. “You will not do better in the boat. You mistake your condition,” said the President. “Plainly, my conviction is, that if you proceed you will die.”

“I shall not. I will not. If I stay, I shall not see another day. If I go, I may live to seventy. You do not know me, my lord. You are not entitled to speak of the power of my will.”

The President and the widow exchanged glances, and no further opposition was offered.

“We may as well spare your strength, however,” said the President. “The boatmen shall carry you. I will call them. Oh! I see. You are afraid I should give you the slip. But you may release my skirts. Your servants will do us the favour to go forward and send us help.”

The boatmen looked gloomy about conveying two women—one of them evidently very ill; and Sir Alexander would have refused in any other case whatever. But he had vowed to interfere no more in Lady Carse’s affairs, but to consider her wholly the President’s charge.

“I see your opinion in your face,” said the President to him, “and I entirely agree with you. But she is just about to die, at all events; and if it is an indulgence to her to die in the exercise of a freedom from which she has been debarred so long, I am not disposed to deny it to her. I assume the responsibility.”

“My doubt is about the men,” observed Sir Alexander; “but I will do what I can.”

He did what he could by showing an interest in the embarkation of the lady. He laid the cloaks and plaids for her in the bottom of the boat, and spoke cheerfully to her—almost jokingly—of the uncertainty of their destination. He lifted her in himself, and placed Helsa beside her; and then his men dared not show further unwillingness but by silence.

Lady Carse raised herself and beckoned to Annie. Annie leaned over to her, and said, “Dear Lady Carse, you look very pale. It is not too late to say you will come home with me.”

Lady Carse tried to laugh; but it was no laugh, but a convulsion. She struggled to say, “I shall do very well presently, when I feel I am free. It is only the last prison airs that poison me. If we never meet again—”

“We shall not meet in life, Lady Carse. I shall pray for you.”

“I know you will. And I—I wished to say—but I cannot—”

“I know what you would say. Lie down and rest. God be with you!”

All appeared calm and right on board the boat, as long as Annie could watch its course in the harbour. When it disappeared behind a headland, she returned home to look

for it again. She saw it soon, and for some time, for it coasted the island to the northernmost point for the chance of being unseen to the last possible moment. It was evidently proceeding steadily on its course, and Annie hoped that the sense of freedom might be acting as a restorative for the hour to the dying woman. Those on board hoped the same; for the lady, when she had covered her face with a handkerchief, lay very still.

“She looks comfortable,” whispered the President to Sir Alexander. “Can you suggest anything more that we can do?”

“Better let her sleep while she can, my lord. She appears comfortable at present.”

Three more hours passed without anything being observable in Lady Carse, but such slight movements now and then as showed that she was not asleep. She then drew the handkerchief from her face and looked up at Helsa, who exclaimed at the change in the countenance. The President bent over her, and caught her words—

“It is not your fault—but I am dying. But I am sure I should have died on land, and before this. And I have escaped! Tell my husband so.”

“I will. Shall I raise you?”

“No; take no notice. I cannot bear to be pitied. I will not be pitied; as this was my own act. But it is hard—”

“It is hard: but you have only to pass one other threshold courageously, and then you are free indeed. Man cannot harm you there.”

“But, to-day, of all seasons—”

“It is hard: but you have done with captivity. No more captivity! My dear Lady Carse, what remains! What is it you would have? You would not wish for vengeance! No! it is pain!—you are in pain. Shall I raise you?”

“No, no: never mind the pain! But I did hope to see my husband again.”

“To forgive him. You mean, to forgive him?”

“No: I meant—”

“But you mean it now? He had something to pardon in you.”

“True. But I cannot— Do not ask me.”

“Then you hope that God will. I may tell him that you hope that God will forgive him.”

“That is not my affair. Kiss my Janet for me.”

“I will; and all your children— What? ‘Is it growing dark?’ Yes, it is, to us as well as to you. What is that she says?” he inquired of Helsa, who had a younger and quicker ear.

“She says the widow is about lighting her lamp. Yes, my lady; but we are too far off to see it.”

“Is she wandering?” asked the President.

“No, sir: quite sensible, I think. Did you speak, my lady?”

“My love!”

“To Annie, my lady? I will not forget.”

She spoke no more. Sir Alexander contrived to keep from the knowledge of the boatmen for some hours that there was a corpse on board. When they could conceal it no longer, they forgot their fatigue in their superstition, and rowed, as for their lives, to the nearest point of land. This happened, fortunately, to be within the territories of Sir Alexander Macdonald.

In the early dawn the boat touched at Vaternish Point, and there landed the body, which, with Helsa for its attendant, was committed by Sir Alexander to a clansman who was to summon a distant minister, and see the remains interred in the church at Trunban, where they now lie.

When the President returned to his estate at Culloden; in the ensuing spring, on the final overthrow of the Jacobite cause, his first use of the re-established post was to write to Lord Carse, in London, tidings of his wife’s death, promising all particulars if he found that his letter reached its destination in safety. The reply he received was this:—

“I most heartily thank you, my dear friend, for the notice you have given me of the death of that person. It would be a ridiculous untruth to pretend grief for it; but as it brings to my mind a train of various things for many years back, it gives me concern. Her retaining wit and facetiousness to the last surprises me. These qualities none found in her, no more than common sense or good nature, before she went to those parts; and of the reverse of all which if she had not been irrecoverably possessed, in an extraordinary and insufferable degree, after many years’ fruitless endeavours to reclaim her, she had never seen those parts. I long for the particulars of her death, which, you are pleased to tell me, I am to have by next post.”

“Hers was a singular death, at last,” observed Lord Carse, when he put the President’s second letter into the hands of his sister. “I almost wonder that they did not slip the body overboard, rather than expose themselves to danger for the sake of giving Christian burial to such a person.”

“Dust to dust,” said Lady Rachel, thoughtfully. “Those were the words said over her. I am glad it was so, rather than that one more was added to the tossing billows. For what was she but a billow, driven by the winds and tossed?”

When, some few years after, the steward approached the island on an autumn night, in honour of Rollo’s invitation to attend the funeral of the Widow Fleming, his eye unconsciously sought the guiding light on the hill-side.

“Ah!” said he, recollecting himself, “it is gone, and we shall see it no more. Rollo will live on the main, and this side of the island will be deserted. Her light gone! We should almost as soon thought of losing a star. And she herself gone! We shall miss her, as if one of our lofty old rocks had crumbled down into the sea. She was truly, though one would not have dared to tell her so, an anchorage to people feebler than herself. She had a faith which made her spirit, tender as it was, as firm as any rock.”

The End.