“I could not but be interested in what you said,” continued the other. “You did not tell us whether you had been at St. Germain yourself.”
“Never!” replied Archie. “I was sent to Scotland at eight years old, and I have been here ever since.”
He had taken the plunge now, for he had been backwards and forwards to France several times in the last few years, since he had begun to work for King George, employed in watching the movements of suspicious persons between one country and the other.
He looked down on the ground.
The more he hesitated to speak, the more he knew that he would impress James. He understood the delicacy of his companion’s feeling by instinct. It was not only dissimulation which bade him act thus, it was the real embarrassment and discomfort which were creeping on him under the eyes of the honourable soldier; all the same, he hoped that his reluctant silence would save him.
“You think me impertinent,” said Logie, “but do not be afraid that I mean to pry. I know how hard life can be and how anxious, nowadays. There is so much loss and trouble—God knows what may happen to this tormented country! But trouble does not seem natural when a man is young and light-hearted, as you are.”
Archie was collecting materials wherewith to screen himself from his companion’s sympathy. It would be easy to tell him some rigmarole of early suffering, of want endured for the cause which had lain dormant, yet living, since the unsuccessful rising of the ’15, of the devotion to it of the parents he had scarcely known, of the bitterness of their exile, but somehow he could not force himself to do it. He remembered those parents principally as vague people who were ceaselessly playing cards, and whose quarrels had terrified him when he was small. His real interest in life had begun when he arrived at Ardguys and made the acquaintance of his grandmother, whose fascination he had felt, in common with most other male creatures. He had had a joyous youth, and he knew it. He had run the pastures, climbed the trees, fished the Kilpie burn, and known every country pleasure dear to boyhood. If he had been solitary, he had yet been perfectly happy. He had gone to Edinburgh at seventeen, at his own ardent wish, to learn painting, not as a profession, but as a pastime. His prospects were comfortable, for Madam Flemington had made him her heir, and she had relations settled in England who were always ready to bid him welcome when he crossed the border. Life had been consistently pleasant, and had grown exciting since the beginning of his work for Government. He wished to Heaven he had not met James this morning.
But to Logie, Archie was merely a youth of undoubted good breeding struggling bravely for his bread in an almost menial profession, and he honoured him for what he deemed his courage. There was no need to seek a reason for his poverty after hearing his words last night. His voice, when he spoke of his father’s death in exile, had implied all that was necessary to establish a claim on James’s generous and rather bigoted heart. For him, there were only two kinds of men, those who were for the Stuarts and those who were not. People were very reticent about their political feelings in those days; some from pure caution and some because these lay so deep under mountains of personal loss and misfortune.
“I dare not look back,” said Archie, at last, “I have to live by my trade and fight the world with my brush. You live by sticking your sword into its entrails and I by painting its face a better colour than Nature chose for it, and I think yours is the pleasanter calling of the two. But I am grateful to mine, all the same, and now it has procured me the acquaintance of his lordship and the pleasure of being where I am. I need not tell you that I find myself in clover.”
“I am heartily glad of it,” said James.