except you from a very dangerous place, it is in part of course because I am not insensible to your honesty in coming here; in part because of Pilrig’s letter; but in part, and in chief part, because I regard in this matter my political duty first and my judicial duty only second. For the same reason—I repeat it to you in the same frank words—I do not want your testimony.’
‘I desire not to be thought to make a repartee, when I express only the plain sense of our position,’ said I. ‘But if your lordship has no need of my testimony, I believe the other side would be extremely blythe to get it.’
Prestongrange arose and began to pace to and fro in the room. ‘You are not so young,’ he said, ‘but what you must remember very clearly the year ’45 and the shock that went about the country. I read in Pilrig’s letter that you are sound in Kirk and State. Who saved them in that fatal year? I do not refer to His Royal Highness and his ramrods, which were extremely useful in their day; but the country had been saved and the field won before ever Cumberland came upon Drummossie. Who saved it? I repeat; who saved the Protestant religion and the whole frame of our civil institutions? The late Lord President Culloden, for one; he played a man’s part, and small thanks he got for it—even as I, whom you see before you, straining every nerve in the same service, look for no reward beyond the conscience of my duties done. After the President, who else? You know the answer as well as I do; ‘tis partly a scandal, and you glanced at it yourself, and I reproved you for it, when you first came in. It was the Duke and the great clan of Campbell. Now here is a Campbell foully murdered, and that in the King’s service. The Duke and I are Highlanders. But we are Highlanders civilised, and it is not so with the great mass of our clans and families. They have still savage virtues and defects. They are still barbarians, like these Stewarts; only the Campbells were barbarians on the right side, and the Stewarts were barbarians on the wrong. Now be you the judge. The Campbells expect vengeance. If they do not get it—if this man James escape—there will be trouble with the Campbells. That means disturbance in the Highlands, which are uneasy and very far from being disarmed: the disarming is a farce….’
‘I can bear you out in that,’ said I.
‘Disturbance in the Highlands makes the hour of our old watchful enemy,’ pursued his lordship, holding out a finger as he paced; ‘and I give you my word we may have a ’45 again with the Campbells on the other side. To protect the life of this man Stewart—which is forfeit already on half-a-dozen different counts if not on this—do you propose to plunge your country in war, to jeopardise the faith of your fathers, and to expose the lives and fortunes of how many thousand innocent persons? … These are considerations that weigh with me, and that I hope will weigh no less with yourself, Mr Balfour, as a lover of your country, good government, and religious truth.’
‘You deal with me very frankly, and I thank you for it,’ said Ι. ‘I will try on my side to be no less honest. I believe your policy to be sound. I believe these deep duties may lie upon your lordship; I believe you may have laid them on your conscience when you took the oaths of the high office which you hold. But for me, who am just a plain man—or scarce a man yet—the plain duties must suffice. I can think but of two things, of a poor soul in the immediate and unjust danger of a shameful death, and of the cries and tears of his wife that still tingle in my head. I cannot see beyond, my lord. It’s the way that I am made. If the country has to fall, it has to fall. And I pray God, if this be wilful blindness, that He may enlighten me before too late.’
He had heard me motionless, and stood so a while longer.
‘This is an unexpected obstacle,’ says he, aloud, but to himself.
‘And how is your lordship to dispose of me?’ I asked.
‘If I wished,’ said he, ‘you know that you might sleep in gaol?’
‘My lord,’ said Ι, ‘I have slept in worse places.’
‘Well; my boy,’ said he, ‘there is one thing appears very plainly from our interview, that I may rely on your pledged word. Give me your honour that you will be wholly secret, not only on what has passed to-night, but in the matter of the Appin case, and I let you go free.’
‘I will give it till to-morrow or any other near day that you may please to set,’ said Ι. ‘I would not be thought too wily; but if I gave the promise without qualification your lordship would have attained his end.’
‘I had no thought to entrap you,’ said he.
‘I am sure of that,’ said I.
‘Let me see,’ he continued. ‘To-morrow is the Sabbath. Come to me on Monday by eight in the morning, and give me your promise until then.’
‘Freely given, my lord,’ said I. ‘And with regard to what has fallen from yourself, I will give it for as long as it shall please God to spare your days.’
‘You will observe,’ he said next, ‘that I have made no employment of menaces.’
‘It was like your lordship’s nobility,’ said I. ‘Yet I am not altogether so dull but what I can perceive the nature of those you have not uttered.’
‘Well,’ said he, ‘good-night to you. May you sleep well, for I think it is more than I am like to do.’
With that he sighed, took up a candle, and gave me his conveyance as far as the street door.
THE NEXT DAY, Sabbath, August 27th, I had the occasion I had long looked forward to, to hear some of the famous Edinburgh preachers, all well known to me already by the report of Mr Campbell. Alas! and I might just as well have been at Essendean, and sitting under Mr Campbell’s worthy self! the turmoil of my thoughts, which dwelt continually on the interview with Prestongrange, inhibiting me from all attention. I was indeed much less impressed by the reasoning of the divines than by the spectacle of the thronged congregation in the churches, like what I imagined of a theatre or (in my then disposition) of an assize of trial; above all at the West Kirk, with its three tiers of galleries, where I went in the vain hope that I might see Miss Drummond.
On the Monday I betook me for the first time to a barber’s, and was very well pleased with the result. Thence to the Advocate’s, where the red coats of the soldiers showed again about his door, making a bright place in the close. I looked about for the young lady and her gillies: there was never a sign of them. But I was no sooner shown into the cabinet or antechamber where I had spent so wearyful a time upon the Saturday, than I was aware of the tall figure of James More in a corner. He seemed a prey to a painful uneasiness, reaching forth his feet and hands, and his eyes speeding here and there without rest about the walls of the small chamber, which recalled to me with a sense of pity the man’s wretched situation. I suppose it was partly this, and partly my strong continuing interest in his daughter, that moved me to accost him.
‘Give you a good-morning, sir,’ said I.
‘And a good-morning to you, sir,’ said he.
‘You bide tryst with Prestongrange?’ I asked.
‘I do, sir, and I pray your business with that gentleman be more agreeable than mine,’ was his reply.
‘I hope at least that yours will be brief, for I suppose you pass before me,’ said I.
‘All pass before me,’ he said, with a shrug and a gesture upward of the open hands. ‘It was not always so, sir, but times change. It was not so when the sword was in the scale, young gentleman, and the virtues of the soldier might sustain themselves.’
There came a kind of Highland snuffle out of the man that raised my dander strangely.
‘Well, Mr Macgregor,’ said Ι, ‘I understand the main thing for a soldier is to be