Alison enveloped him in a warm, sweet smile, and slid the hands round his neck. “All? No; there’s a corner you have kept for someone else, and in it you have set up a little shrine, as the Papists do, for your saint—for Lochiel. But I am not jealous,” she added very softly. “I understand.”
Ewen gave her a look, put his own hands over those clasped round his neck, and dropped his head on to her knee in silence. After a while she put her cheek against the thick, warm waves of his hair. Joy and apprehension had so clasped hands about Alison Cameron this day that it was hard to know which was the stronger.
But in the night she knew. The icy fingers of foreboding seemed gripped about her heart. Not even Ewen’s quiet, unhurried breathing beside her, not even the touch of his hand, over which her fingers stole in search of comfort, could reassure her; his nearness but made the pain the sharper. Oh, to have him hers only to lose him so soon! But her father—alone, dying, over the seas! She reached out and lit a candle, that she might look once more at the husband she was leaving for her father’s sake, for God knew whether she should ever see him asleep beside her again. It was not the seas alone which were about to sunder them. . . .
Ewen was sleeping so soundly, too, so quietly; and he looked as young and untroubled as the boy she had known five years ago in Paris. There was no sign on his face, in its rather austere repose, of the trouble which had forced its way through his unconscious lips last night. Alison had not told him by the fire, that on their bridal night he had uttered protests, bewildered questionings, against that double retreat in which he had shared. ‘Must we go back, Lochiel—must we go back?’
She gazed at him a long time, until for tears she could see him no longer, and, blowing out the light, lay and sobbed under her breath. She thought she should die of her unhappiness; she almost wished that she might; yet she sobbed quietly lest she should wake Ewen to unhappiness also. But quite suddenly, though he had not stirred, she heard his voice in the darkness; and then she was in his arms, and he was comforting her in their own Highland tongue, with all its soft endearments and little words of love. And there at last she fell asleep.
But Ewen stayed awake until the grudging March daylight crept into the little room where he lay wide-eyed, with Alison’s dark curls on his heart, and within it a chilly sword that turned and turned. He would never hold her thus again; he was sure of it.
The morning was very cold, and when he took Alison to the French brig a little snow was falling; the gang-plank was slippery too with rime. He carried her bodily over it, and down to the cabin which she would share with Jean Wishart.
There under the low beams Alison’s courage broke at last. Clinging to him convulsively she said, in a voice that was not hers, that he must come with her; that she could not go without him—she could not! He must come too, and then he would be safe . . .
Ewen turned even paler than she. “My darling, my heart’s darling, you don’t mean that!”