The Dew of Their Youth

by S. R. Crockett

“He entertained us hospitably enough in a suite of rooms very high up in the Castle of Dinant above the Meuse river, and came to see us every day. He was waiting till he should make his peace with the English. Then he would do away with my brother and——”

She paused, and a kind of shuddering whiteness came across the girl’s face. It was like the flashing of lightning from the east to the west that my grandmother reads about in her Bible—a sort of shining of hatred and determination like a footstep set on wet sand. “But no,” she added, “he would not have married me, even if he had kept me shut up for ever in his Castle of Dinant on the Meuse!”

Then all at once I began very mightily to hate this Lalor Maitland, Governor of the Castle of Dinant. I resolved to charge “King George” to the very muzzle, wait till he was within half-a-dozen paces, and—let him have it. For I made no doubt that it was he who was coming in person to carry off Miss Irma and Sir Louis back again to his dungeons. For though Irma had not called them that, I felt sure that she had been shamefully used. And though I did not proclaim the fact, I knew the name and address of a willing deliverer. I grew so anxious about the matter that Agnes Anne three times bade me put down “King George” or I should be sure to shoot some of them, or, most likely of all, little Louis in his cot-bed up-stairs.

“However, at last we escaped” (Miss Irma went on), “and I will tell you how—what I have not told to any here—not even to your good grandmother or the clergyman. It was through our nurse, a Kirkbean woman and her name Kate Maxwell, called Mickle Kate o’ the Shore. Her father and all her folk were smugglers, as, I understand, are the most of the farmers along the Solway side. Some of these she could doubtless have married, but Kate herself had always looked higher. The son of a farmer over the hill, from a place called the Boreland of Colvend, had wintered sheep on her father’s lands. Many a sore cold morning (so she said) had they gone out together to clear the snow from the feeding troughs. I suppose that was how it began, but in addition the lad had ambition. He learned well and readily, and after a while he went into a lawyer’s office in Dumfries, while Kate o’ the Shore went abroad with the family of a Leith merchant, to serve at Rotterdam. She wanted to save money for the house she was going to set up with the lawyer’s clerk. So, rather than come back at the year’s end, she took the place which the Governor of Dinant Castle offered her, and he was no other than our cousin Lalor.

“In a little while Kate of the Shore had grown to hate our cousin. Why, I cannot tell, for he always bowed to her as to a lady, and indeed showed her far more kindness than ever he used to us. When we wanted a little play on the terrace or a sweetcake from the town, we tried at first to get Kate to ask for us. But afterwards she would not. And she grew determined to leave the Castle of Dinant as soon as might be, making her escape and taking us with her. Her Boreland lad, Tam Hislop, had told her all about the estates and the great house standing empty. So nothing would do but that Kate o’ the Shore would come to this house with us, where we would take possession, and hold it against all comers.

“‘It is very difficult,’ said Kate’s friend, the Dumfries clerk, ‘to put any one out of his own house.’ Indeed he did not think that even the very Court of Session could do it.”

“So during the governor’s absence we brought little Louis from Dinant to Antwerp, where we hid him with some friends of Kate’s who are Free Traders, and ran cargoes to the Isle of Man and the Solway shore. Kind they were, stout bold men and appeared to hold their lives cheap enough—also, for that matter, the lives of those who withstood them.

“Many of them were Kirkbean men, near kinsfolk of Kate o’ the Shore, and others from Colvend—Hislops, Hendersons and McKerrows, long rooted in the place. But when we were in mid-passage, we were chased and almost taken by a schooner that fired cannon and bade us heave to, but the Kirkbean men, who had Kate o’ the Shore with them, bade our boat carry on, and engaged the pursuer. We could see the flash of their guns a long distance, and cries came to us mixed with the thunderclap of the schooner’s guns. The Colvend men would have turned back to help, but they had received strict orders to put us on shore, whatever might happen, the which they did at Killantringan.

“After that” (Miss Irma still went on) “I had so much ado to look after my brother, being fearful to let him out of my hands lest he should be taken from me, that I only heard the names of a place or two spoken among them—particularly the Brandy Knowe, a dark hole in a narrow ravine, under the roots of a great tree, with a burn across which we had to be carried. I remember the rushing sound of the water in the blackness of the night, and Louis’s voice calling out, as the men trampled the pebbles, ‘Are you there, sister Irma?’

“But long before it was day they had finished stowing their cargo. We were again on the march and the men took good care of us, leaving us here according to their orders with plenty of provisions for a week—also money, all good unclipped silver pieces and English gold. They bade us not to leave the house on any account, and in case of any sudden danger to light the fire on the tower head!