The Greatest Adventure Books - MacLeod Raine Edition. William MacLeod Raine
and my sister Cloe. Our father had died of apoplexy without a will, and a large part of his personal property had come to me with the entailed estate. The provision for the other two had been of the slightest, and now by this one wild night of play I had put it out of my power to take care of them. I had better clap a pistol to my head and be done with it.
Even while the thought was in my mind a hand out of the night fell on my shoulder from behind. I turned with a start, and found myself face to face with the Scotchman Balmerino.
“Whither away, Kenneth?” he asked.
I laughed bitterly. “What does it matter? A broken gambler—a ruined dicer— What is there left for him?”
The Scotch Lord linked an arm through mine. I had liefer have been alone, but I could scarce tell him so. He had been a friend of my father and had done his best to save me from my folly.
“There is much left. All is not lost. I have a word to say to your father’s son.”
“What use!” I cried rudely. “You would lock the stable after the horse is stolen.”
“Say rather that I would put you in the way of getting another horse,” he answered gravely.
So gravely that I looked at him twice before I answered:
“And I would be blithe to find a way, for split me! as things look now I must either pistol myself or take to the road and pistol others,” I told him gloomily.
“There are worse things than to lose one’s wealth——”
“I hear you say it, but begad! I do not know them,” I answered with a touch of anger at his calmness.
“——When the way is open to regain all one has lost and more,” he finished, unheeding my interruption.
“Well, this way you speak of,” I cried impatiently. “Where is it?”
He looked at me searchingly, as one who would know the inmost secrets of my soul. Under a guttering street light he stopped me and read my face line by line. I dare swear he found there a recklessness to match his own and perhaps some trace of the loyalty for which he looked. Presently he said, as the paving stones echoed to our tread:—
“You have your father’s face, Kenn. I mind him a lad just like you when we went out together in the ’15 for the King. Those were great days—great days. I wonder——”
His unfinished sentence tailed out into a meditative silence. His voice and eyes told of a mind reminiscent of the past and perhaps dreamful of the future. Yet awhile, and he snatched himself back into the present.
“Six hours ago I should not have proposed this desperate remedy for your ills. You had a stake in the country then, but now you are as poor in this world’s gear as Arthur Elphinstone himself. When one has naught but life at stake he will take greater risks. I have a man’s game to play. Are you for it, lad?”
I hesitated, a prophetic divination in my mind that I stood in a mist at the parting of life’s ways.
“You have thrown all to-night—and lost. I offer you another cut at Fortune’s cards. You might even turn a king.”
He said it with a quiet steadfastness in which I seemed to detect an undercurrent of strenuous meaning. I stopped, and in my turn looked long at him. What did he mean? Volney’s words came to my mind. I began to piece together rumours I had heard but never credited. I knew that even now men dreamed of a Stuart restoration. If Arthur Elphinstone of Balmerino were one of these I knew him to be of a reckless daring mad enough to attempt it.
“My Lord, you say I might turn a king,” I repeated slowly. “’Tis more like that I would play the knave. You speak in riddles. I am no guesser of them. You must be plain.”
Still he hung back from a direct answer. “You are dull to-night, Kenn. I have known you more gleg at the uptake, but if you will call on me to-morrow night I shall make all plain to you.”
We were arrived at the door of his lodgings, a mean house in a shabby neighbourhood, for my Lord was as poor as a church mouse despite his title. I left him here, and the last words I called over my shoulder to him were,
“Remember, I promise nothing.”
It may be surmised that as I turned my steps back toward my rooms in Arlington Street I found much matter for thought. I cursed the folly that had led me to offer myself a dupe to these hawks of the gaming table. I raged in a stress of heady passion against that fair false friend Sir Robert Volney. And always in the end my mind jumped back to dally with Balmerino’s temptation to recoup my fallen fortunes with one desperate throw.
“Fraoch! Dh ’aindeoin co theireadh e!” (The Heath! Gainsay who dare!)
The slogan echoed and reechoed through the silent streets, and snatched me in an instant out of the abstraction into which I had fallen. Hard upon the cry there came to me the sound of steel ringing upon steel. I legged it through the empty road, flung myself round a corner, and came plump upon the combatants. The defendant was a lusty young fellow apparently about my own age, of extraordinary agility and no mean skill with the sword. He was giving a good account of himself against the four assailants who hemmed him against the wall, his point flashing here and there with swift irregularity to daunt their valiancy. At the moment when I appeared to create a diversion one of the four had flung himself down and forward to cling about the knees of their victim with intent to knife him at close quarters. The young man dared not shorten his sword length to meet this new danger. He tried to shake off the man, caught at his white throat and attempted to force him back, what time his sword still opposed the rest of the villains.
Then I played my small part in the entertainment. One of the rascals screamed out an oath at sight of me and turned to run. I pinked him in the shoulder, and at the same time the young swordsman fleshed another of them. The man with the knife scrambled to his feet, a ludicrous picture of ghastly terror. To make short, in another minute there was nothing to be seen of the cutpurses but flying feet scampering through the night.
The young gentleman turned to me with a bow that was never invented out of France. I saw now that he was something older than myself, tall, well-made, and with a fine stride to him that set off the easy grace of his splendid shoulders. His light steady blue eyes and his dark ruddy hair proclaimed him the Highlander. His face was not what would be called handsome: the chin was over-square and a white scar zigzagged across his cheek, but I liked the look of him none the less for that. His frank manly countenance wore the self-reliance of one who has lived among the hills and slept among the heather under countless stars. For dress he wore the English costume with the extra splash of colour that betokened the vanity of his race. “’Fore God, sir, you came none too soon,” he cried in his impetuous Gaelic way. “This riff-raff of your London town had knifed me in another gliff. I will be thinking that it would have gone ill with me but for your opportune arrival. I am much beholden to you, and if ever I can pay the debt do not fail to call on Don—er—James Brown.”
At the last words he fell to earth most precipitately, all the fervent ring dropping out of his voice. Now James Brown is a common name enough, but he happened to be the first of the name I had ever heard crying a Highland slogan in the streets of London, and I looked at him with something more than curiosity. I am a Scotchman myself on the mother’s side, so that I did not need to have a name put to his nationality.
There was the touch of a smile on my face when I asked him if he were hurt. He gave me the benefit of his full seventy three inches and told me no, that he would think shame of himself if he could not keep his head with his hands from a streetful of such scum. And might he know the name of the unknown friend who had come running out of the night to lend him an arm?
“Kenneth Montagu,” I told him, laughing at his enthusiasm.
“Well then, Mr. Kenneth Montagu, it’s the good friend you’ve been to me this night, and I’ll not be forgetting it.”
“When I find myself attacked by footpads I’ll just look up Mr. James Brown,” I told him dryly with intent to plague.