EPILOGUE
HARBOUR OF GRACE
EPILOGUE
HARBOUR OF GRACE
The fresh wind scouring the mouth of the Seine kept the fishing boats from Honfleur lying well over, and at the foot of the cliffs of Ste. Adresse the waves were shivering themselves in a joyful welter of foam. Long pennants of cloud streamed and vanished in the blue; all the shipping rocked at anchor, and Alison Cameron, crossing the market-place of Havre-de-Grâce with a basket on her arm, had to clutch at her black cloak lest it should be whirled off her shoulders.
She had reached the French port in time to see her father alive; in time, indeed, to give him nearly six weeks of the most devoted care. But in May he died peacefully, ignorant of the catastrophe which had torn for ever the webs that he had helped to weave. Since he was ill it had not been very difficult to keep from him the news of the downfall of Jacobite hopes and the fugitive state of the Prince, and to invent reasons for the absence of any news of Ewen Cameron. Of Hector’s capture he had known before leaving Scotland. It was the thought of Ewen, to whose care he knew Alison now definitely committed, which had made his last hours easy. “Your man will never let you want for aught, my lass,” he had said, near the end; and Alison had had the strength to keep from him the anxiety which racked her.
And so one morning she found herself left alone in the lodging where her father had lain ill, a little house belonging to a youthful married couple, kind and sympathetic enough, and glad that the Scottish lady should stay on there, waiting for the husband who, Madame Grévérend was privately sure, would never come now, having without doubt been slain in the deserts of l’Ecosse. And when, later on, a gossip would ask her why the young Scottish lady did not voyage back to those deserts to find her husband, or to procure news of him, or at least to have the solace of weeping on his tomb, Madame Grévérend would explain that the poor creature was so persuaded that her husband would in the end come to Havre-de-Grâce seeking her that she feared to miss him if she went away.
“But she will wait for ever, one fears,” Madame Grévérend would finish; “and she left without even a good-for-nothing like this to plague her!” And here she would snatch up her fat, curly-headed Philippe and kiss him. “Yes, she has lost everything, poor lady, and she only five months married.”
But one has never lost everything. Alison still had that possession which Madame Grévérend could not understand, the certitude which had come to her in the cabin of the brig at Inverness. Sooner or later Ewen would come for her.
Yet it was hard, sometimes, to cling to that belief when the weeks went by and there was not the slightest crumb of authentic news of him. All she had was negative; for there was in Havre-de-Grâce another Scots refugee, a Mr. Buchanan who had served in the Duke of Perth’s regiment, and he had convinced her, on evidence that seemed conclusive to a mind which only longed to believe it, that Ardroy had not been among the slain or massacred in the battle. Where, then, was he?
Her marketing finished, Alison took her way homewards through the bright windy weather, and came, down the little Rue des Vergers, to the small, sanded courtyard with the pear-tree where she dwelt above M. and Mme Grévérend. In that sunlit space there was at the moment only the grey cat curled in a corner, a pair of pigeons promenading, and Philippe, seated rosily upon his mother’s doorstep, deliberately pouring sand on to his curls, as if in penitence for some misdeed, by means of an old teacup.