The Dark Mile by D. K. Broster

Author:D. K. Broster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15—ON THE VERGE

Aug. 28th (continued)

Rain—fine, driving, soaking rain. David Maitland was glad of it; it was clean...a kind of lustration.

But no. No rain, no water in the world could wash him clean again—less now than ever, after that hour with Glenshian. For two years there had been blood on his hands, those delicate, scholarly-looking hands which had tied a noose about a man’s neck as surely as the English hangman; this fact he had known, had faced, had kept at bay every hour of those two years. The only weapon which he had against it was the knowledge of his complete innocence of such an intention, for he had very truly told Finlay MacPhair that he never dreamed he was sending Archibald Cameron to death. He had thought that in informing the Government of his whereabouts he was merely condemning him to imprisonment, removing thereby the menace of a recurrence of that terrible and useless waste of life of the Forty-five, in which he himself, as a Jacobite, had played his part. Should another such hopeless attempt be made, fostered by the endeavours of Doctor Cameron, he knew that his own young son would be sacrificed in it, and many another like him. But, through a chance meeting on a March day of 1753, an angel had put it in his power to prevent such a calamity by checkmating the conspirator who was working to bring it about. Racked with scruples, yet arguing that he must not let them stand in the way of the good of hundreds of his countrymen, Maitland had posted off to Edinburgh, written a brief, unsigned message to the Lord Justice-Clerk, found a casual messenger to deliver it...and had soon learnt that there are two kinds of angel...

And now to the blood upon him was added mud. He seemed to have stepped into some festering bog of infamy. He himself had played the informer it was true, yet—ironical though it appeared in view of the consequences to his victim—he had played it with the best intentions. But behind him in the house which he had left was a young Jacobite of high standing, the head of a great Highland clan of like traditions, who had apparently been in the pay of the English Government for God knew how long, who regretted that he could not show to them his fellow-Jacobite’s blood upon his hands in order to get paid for the stain, and who, to that end, had planned how best to simulate the appearance of it there! It was so nearly incredible that once or twice, as David Maitland stumbled away in the wet dark from the House of Invershian, he began to wonder whether the whole thing could be a delusion. But there came over him again the shuddering remembrance of the words, the looks, the innuendoes—of the final half-involuntary disclosure and the assumption of a common bond of turpitude. ‘Now that we know the worst of one another.’ Yes, that was

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