Keith sighed heavily. “Yes, I have brought you nothing but harm. I would give my right hand to save you—and I can do nothing!”
Ewen twisted round on his stool. “How can you say that? Who knows what the want of your evidence at Carlisle may mean to me? For there is always a chance that the witnesses at Fort William may have left or died.”
“You have just said that once you reached Fort William there was no chance of escaping Carlisle. I am not a child, Ardroy!” retorted Keith, glowering at him in his own pain.
“Neither am I,” replied Ewen with a sudden smile. “Do not, therefore, talk about wishing in vain to give your right hand for my sake, for I strongly suspect that you have already given what means as much or more to you.”
Keith got up, that the speaker might not see in his face how near this guess went to the truth. “Even in my refusal to witness against you,” he said gloomily, “I begin to think that I acted like a fool. For, as I told His Royal Highness, if he sent me to Carlisle by force, as he threatened to do, nothing should have prevented my testifying also to your granting me my life in Lochaber and my liberty in Edinburgh. I have thought since that, on that score, it might have been better to agree to go. . . . But no, I could not have done it!” he added.
Ewen smiled up at him with a look that was almost affection, and laid his manacled hand on his cuff. “I almost wish that you had consented, so that we might meet again. For, if old Angus is right, this is our last meeting—I have counted them many times. And, indeed, I do not see how it could be otherwise. So”—his voice was very gentle—“we cannot bring each other misfortune any more.”
The words knocked sharply at Keith’s heart. And how young the speaker looked, for all his half-starved air; a boy going to extinction, while he, only four years his senior, felt as if he were middle-aged. (But no, at their last meeting, when he had trembled before him, Ewen had not been a boy.)
“Is there nothing I can do for you?” he asked painfully. “Do your kindred know of your situation; I suppose so?”
“I am not sure if my aunt knows. If she does, she has no doubt tried to communicate with my wife in France, but——”
“Your wife! Then you——”