“Only till I can see her,” replied his friend, in a voice low with sadness and tenderness. A brief silence fell between the two young men, till Roughwood added, “One last meeting! And then to part,—for how long, God knows!”
“Oh, you may come back to England safely in two or three years. When the government has made examples enough, there will be a general pardon; or at worst a Jacobite may slink back and his presence be winked at. So much if our cause be never revived; if it be revived, we may be able to come back openly enough.”
Roughwood shook his head. “’Twill never be revived to any purpose. We can never rally a larger force than we had this time; yet one can see plainly now how vain our hopes were from the first. No, ’twas a dream, a dream. The house of Hanover is firmly established in these kingdoms: the star of the Stuarts is set. If a general pardon is ever granted us, it will be for that reason,—because we can do no harm. But, meanwhile, ’tis the day of punishment, and we must look to our necks. After I have seen her, we have only to find Budge, and lie hid till he happens to be sailing.”
The arrival of a maid with their dinner put a stop for the time to this kind of conversation, in which they but reviewed their situation as they had done a score of times within the past few days. They had ordered frugally, out of respect to the state of their common purse, which they counted upon to carry them to the place near which lived both Roughwood’s affianced wife—with whom it was his hope to exchange assurances of faith and devotion ere he fled his native country—and the master of a certain vessel, upon whom he relied for their conveyance across the channel. Roughwood had relations at this place, but, as they sympathized not with his Jacobitism, which he had acquired through his Scottish kin, he considered it imprudent to seek a further supply of money from them. Once in France, however, he could communicate in safety with his sources of maintenance. As for Everell, the modest but sufficient fortune he inherited from his Jacobite father had long been placed in France, and would be at his command as soon as he reached Paris. The young men were now travelling upon the remainder of the gold with which both had fortunately been supplied a few days before the battle of Culloden. They had not had occasion to spend money during the months of concealment immediately following upon the total defeat of their cause at that contest, their hiding-place—first a “bothy” and afterwards a cave—having been on the estate of a Highland gentleman who shared in their seclusion, and by whose adherents he and they were fed.
To this comrade in defeat they owed also the clothes they now wore, as they had considered it better advised to appear as ordinary gentlemen in their journey through England, than to use a disguise which it would require some acting to carry off. Having lived a part of his time in the great world, this Highland laird was possessed of a considerable wardrobe besides that limited to the national dress, and in order to furnish out his two friends he had risked with them a secret visit by night to his own mansion, which was under the intermittent watch of government troops. The gentleman was of a build rather lighter than Roughwood and stouter than Everell, so that his loosest set of garments was not impossible of wear to the former, and his tightest did not hang too limply on the body of the latter. Discarding entirely their battle-worn and earth-soiled clothes for these, and otherwise altering and augmenting their equipment at their friend’s expense, the two fugitives had, by travelling at night and making a carefully planned dash at the most critical point, put themselves outside of the region surrounded by the Duke of Cumberland’s forces. Thereafter they had dared to move by day, hiring horses; and either Everell’s boldness or Roughwood’s caution, or both, had carried them so far without other adverse chance than the meeting with the man who remembered Everell from their encounter at Culloden. Being without passports, they had avoided every place where troops were said to be stationed, and in crossing the border they had kept to the moors instead of the roads: for their eccentric manner of travelling, their invention was equal to such pretexts as the curiosity of horse-boys and others might require.
When the servant left them to their dinner, they reverted to their former subject, talking as they ate.
“’Tis all plain sailing, to my sight,” said Everell, cheerfully, “until we entrust our precious bodies to the care of your friend the smuggler.”
“I’ll warrant Budge to be true stuff,” replied Roughwood, confidently. “He would risk his cutter to save my neck. We used to play with his children on the cliffs, he and I.—And now I shall be looking on those cliffs for the last time, perhaps,—and on England! Well, ’tis the fate of losers in the game of rebellion.” He made no attempt to restrain the sigh this melancholy reflection evoked.
“Tut, tut, lad!” protested Everell, with unfeigned lightness of heart; “take my word for it, a man can live out of England. What is it Shakespeare says, that my father used to quote when our fellow-countrymen visiting us would commiserate our exile? ‘There’s livers out of Britain.’ And that speech of Coriolanus, too: ‘I turned my back upon my native city and found a world elsewhere.’ ’Twould surprise some Englishmen to be convinced of it, I know, but indeed there is a world elsewhere. ’Tis a lovely country, Britain, I grant you, and would be my choice for living in, when all’s said and done, but—there’s livers out of it.”
“You talk as if ’twere only the leaving England,” said the other, with a sorrowful smile.